How to hire a team of killers

This guide teaches you by far the most important aspect of company building: recruiting. It's also the majority of what a VC assess you on in your early days.

We don’t know a single unicorn founder who didn’t learn within 24 months of starting their startup that it’s existentially necessary to hire killer team members—and to not just hire within arm’s reach. Hiring within arm's reach—meaning whoever you already happen to know that happens to be interested in joining you—is the sign of a weak founder if done repeatedly.

Instead, you generally want to run a process to find the best of the best, then be unbelievably convincing that they should leave whatever they’re doing and join you.

Not only is the best talent existential to overcoming early technical milestones, the bar for the talent you bring along cascades as the company grows: 

• A talent hires A talent. 
• B talent doesn’t have taste for what A talent looks like, and will mostly hire B or C talent as your company scales. This leads to a degradation in the quality of your employees, which has negatively reinforcing effects. 

Here is how to run that bulletproof hiring process. The exact process I used to build the team at Julian.capital, our deeptech seed fund.

Hiring principle #1: Hire for baseline expertise and slope. 

Whatever the role may be, two qualities matter: relevant experience and slope. 

Relevant experience is the obvious one: In a role with more ownership and ambiguity than a non-startup role, does your candidate have the experience to take ownership over their work for the company. Have they completed projects of comparable enough scope, such that you have confidence they can execute on their core responsibilities. 

Slope is the interesting one: Does the candidate have the willingness and desire to grow into what the role is to become over time? This could mean an individual contributor working their way up to managing teams, or an engineer who needs to get involved in your supply chain process. This desire to grow and track record of picking up new skills on the fly is a paramount quality of a strong early hire at a startup. 

A few interpersonal qualities that boost the latter are curiosity, ownership, and resilience.

You can uncover these qualities by asking questions about their past experience and motivations. In assessing curiosity, for example: 

• In your current job, what have you done to further your skills? Either at work or in your free time? (I'm looking for proactive work.)
• What are the interesting tools you've been playing with to make your job easier? (Curious people are constantly tinkering and learning.)
• What are the work-related skills you want to learn but haven't yet?
• What do you do to stay on top of updates in your industry?

A more comprehensive set of qualities we prioritize include:

• They’re curious.
• They learn quickly.
• They’re resourceful and resilient.
• They’re ethical and trustworthy.
• Their actions are intentional and strategic. They feel personal ownership over their work. 
• They play well with others. Even better, they inspire others.

Finding people with all these qualities is hard. That's why many $1B+ startup founders spend most of their time on recruiting. 

Hiring principle #2: Make the job description a pitch

Treat your job description (JD) like a pitch deck that you’d use for fundraising. Do not just write plain JDs requiring “5 years of SQL experience” and “a self-motivated contributor” and expect A+ talent to find your job more interesting than the millions of others available. Here are some ideas:

• Pitch the business like you would pitch customers on your homepage.
• Show pictures of the awesome team they'll get to work with. Map out the organization and provide transparency into how things run. Embed videos of what it’s like to work at the company.
• Embed videos of what it's like to use the product.
• Detail the autonomy and experimentation employees get to explore.

Hiring principle #3: To hire the best, go outbound

Most great talent is still employed, not searching, and is unlikely to come to you. This means you must go outbound.‍

The biggest recruiting mistake I see even great founders make: hiring from too small of a sample size—typically the people they already know. This works in some cases and often with co-founders, but it’s suboptimal when scaling and leaves you with a team of all B-players.

Always run an exhaustive recruiting process to find the global maximum hire. When hiring researchers for our fund, I had to talk to 500 applicants to find 1 who was a killer that would increase the bar for the team. That ratio held true until our final, 2000th application.

Therefore, had I only looked through <500 applications, I likely would have never found a killer.

Sanity check: How many candidates did you interview for each role you hired? For many roles, if it’s not at least 50:1, that’s probably a bad sign.

I search for great candidates in two ways:

1. Identify other companies that are exceptional at the skill you’re hiring for (e.g. engineering, product, sales, partnerships, design, and so on). Then find the person at that company responsible for that company’s success in that skill. Offer them a huge amount of money to join you. And show them the memo on why your company is amazing.
2. LinkedIn: I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find candidates with precisely the background I’m looking for, e.g. senior paid acquisition at a CPG company. Then I reach out via LinkedIn InMail.

Let’s dive into this process step-by-step.

1. Candidate pitching

I source candidates via LinkedIn Sales Navigator (to find people with the appropriate background) or I search my enriched customer base.

Then I message each candidate as the CEO (not a recruiter). The message looks like this:

1. I surprise them with a salary that’s at least 25% above market. Visit Pave and Levels for market salary data. (No, this doesn’t preferentially attract job-hoppers who just want more money. I’ve done this many times and it’s simply needed to get candidates to pay attention and overcome their fear of leaving their current employer.)
2. The next sentence explains why it's fun and rewarding to work at my startup. This generally comes down to autonomy and experimentation. Those qualities let them explore their curiosity.
3. I then point out what their LinkedIn resumé has in common with our company or with me personally. This shows them my message isn’t copy-and-paste outreach spam.
4. I keep the message to 5-6 sentences. I’ll only go longer if I have a lot more to say that’s authentically specific to their resumé.

When I receive a response, I proceed to the next step.

2. Call screening

1. I use my first phone call with a candidate to get them excited—not to grill them. They’re often employed, so they hold the cards and I’m the one who needs to sell. When doing so, I’ll get a feel for their personality and whether they’re someone I’d want to work with: Do they provide short, uninspired responses or do they play ball and ask good questions?
2. If we both like the interaction, I’ll ask them to sleep on the opportunity for a couple nights before emailing me their answers to these two questions:
3. What has to be true for joining our company to be a no-brainer? (This helps me pitch them more effectively on subsequent calls.)
4. If you were to leave six months after joining us, what do you think are the most likely reasons why? (This gives me a roadmap for ensuring they’re a fit and for retaining them.)

This exercise is necessary to give them peace of mind—because if they’re leaving an employer for you, they're facing financial and career risk.

1. When they respond with their concerns, address those truthfully via email.
2. Do a second call where you ask all your vetting questions. As a reminder, I generally look for people who are curious, intentional, ethical, and resourceful. I also use this second call to see if I can dissuade them from joining by pointing out the sucky things about the role and business. I make sure they understand the tradeoffs so they don’t prematurely quit.

If they pass the calls, I proceed to vetting their talent.

3. Candidate vetting

Never hire someone without having them complete a sample project (or at minimum, thought exercise) within their interview process. Even people with great resumés might not be a fit for the unique challenges of working at a startup. And the wrong hire can set you back badly enough that the competition beats you.

‍Resumés just help you filter who to talk to; they don’t predict company fit. Once hired, fire quickly if they turn out to be a poor fit—especially for any role whose performance is directly and quickly measurable, such as marketing and sales.

Do not assign senior-most titles until you’re sure someone isn’t going to be fired. By assigning one hierarchy lower (e.g. Director of Marketing instead of CMO), you avoid prematurely cementing the org’s hierarchy, which is tricky to do in an early-stage startup with evolving org structures that reflect a wildly evolving product. Retain your ability to ruthlessly prune even your senior-most talent.

Finally, I do reference checks. I try to talk to at least one person who worked above them, beside them, and below them. I ask references to compare the candidate to other folks they’ve worked with in the same position: Is this candidate in the top 10%, 35%, or 50% of folks they’ve worked with?

Most references don't fully divulge negative things about a candidate, so I look for what percentage of references go out of their way to say something amazing about the candidate. That’s a good signal.

After you've hired killers

Once you've hired the best, make use of them. Specifically, remember that the course-corrections that you need in order to guarantee the success of your business are often trapped in the heads of coworkers who won’t proactively tell you about them.

Why? Because it’s uncomfortable for them to correct you or because they aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing.

What you must do: Find everyone relevant who you respect and periodically schedule meetings where you compel them to point out what you’re doing wrong. Unless you create time for people to tell you what’s wrong, they won’t tell you. When Elon Musk walks into an engineering discussion, the first thing he requests is that everyone divulges what’s going wrong, and likeliest reason they’ll fail. Nothing else matters.

You might be thinking: “But I’m gracious when receiving feedback, and my team is comfortable approaching me.” That doesn’t matter. They still won’t do it enough because once they proactively give you criticism, they wait a long time before they do it again so as to not seem combative.

With these principles in mind, hiring will become your best form of leverage in ensuring your company succeeds, and makes you an ever more attractive investment opportunity at each stage. 

If you’ve joined forces with a killer cofounder and are going out to raise, please do share your deck  with us at Julian Capital, and we promise to look at it within a few days. Three of us spend our entire weeks taking calls based on the decks that come in. We invest $750K or more into hardware companies, and we move fast. When we invest, we help build your customer acquisition pipeline and branding, and we are unparalleled in our ability to help you raise future rounds thanks to the Deep Checks network we run.

—Julian, Jacob, and John from the Julian Capital team