Book a call
Book a call

Startup Recruiting Masterclass - Watch for FREE

 

Transcript from this 43 min video:

1. Introduction and Speaker Background

Hello and welcome to our masterclass. Today I'll just give folks another moment just to join. While we're waiting, I'll give a quick intro to myself and then we'll dive into some great tips and tricks for startups and hiring. My name is Ray Gibson, I'm the founder and chairman at Funded.club based just outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and we work all over the world, across Americas, across Europe, APAC, Australia, New Zealand.

Personally, I've been in recruiting for about 25 years, including 10 years working with startups, so in HR techscale-ups all over the world with tech hires, also non-tech sales, marketing, and operations. So we have some lessons hopefully that are very valuable to share and some great tips and tricks for anyone joining this live stream live. Then you can put questions in the chat, and I'll do my best to cover those as we go along.

I have a good view here on Streamyard, so I can see the slides. I can see chat comments coming through as well. For anyone watching this as a replay, welcome! And if you have questions, if something's not clear, or if you have feedback, then please get in touch on LinkedIn as a direct message or reach out to us at Funded.club, and we would be happy to help.

2. The Importance of Hiring in Startups

So let's dive in. We are working on a lot of roles here, so for anyone joining now, could you write in the chat so that we can orient our conversation? If you have actually live jobs at the moment, what the job titles are and the locations—for example, Full Stack Developer New York or Account Manager London, whatever it might be—that will help me make some of our stories and examples really relevant. So just write those in the chat, and that would be super handy, and I'll look out for those.

Obviously, hiring is important for startup success. You hear these kinds of quotes all of the time. You hear investors say, “We invest in great teams.” You also hear this kind of quote: “Founders should spend 35-40% of their time on hiring.” My answer to that is often, “Well, when? Between midnight and four in the morning, when everything else is quiet?” Because juggling products, managing customers, and fundraising is a really time-consuming set of tasks, so it's not easy to carve out that time. But it is important to do hiring well. It's most important to do it efficiently.

3. Challenges of Startup Hiring

But it's tough out there. If you've been hiring, especially as a startup, you'll find that:

  • Job advertising tends to bring a lot of noise.
  • There's not much time in a day for networking and headhunting.
  • It's often very early to hire an internal recruiter.

And as soon as you advertise a job, of course, you'll get hit by a lot of recruitment agencies. Typical traditional recruitment agencies charge 20%, 25%, maybe even 30% of annual salary. My comment here is that most of them suck. They are expensive. Many of them don't really care much about your business or getting the right person that's going to stay. So that can be tricky. Most people we speak with have had a poor experience working with traditional recruitment agencies. They're not all bad, but many of them are, unfortunately.

Thank you, Peter. Yeah, you're looking for a virtual assistant, customer service, or sales, and that's great. Thanks for sharing that.

4. Building a Candidate Pitch

Startup hiring is very tough. Just to underscore why it's important to get right: hiring poorly is the second biggest mistake that startups make. The first biggest mistake is building something nobody wants—when there's no product validation. But then hiring poorly is the next biggest mistake. Hiring the wrong person in a role can cost you a lot of money but also cost you a lot of time. And then you miss your goals, maybe burn through your runway, and maybe that's the end of your startup.

So there are lots of ways that we can get ready for hiring well. I like to ask, especially in the live room, who has a killer investor pitch? Usually, because we're talking to founders and founding teams and startups, you get lots of people raising their hands, “Oh yeah, my investor pitch is amazing. I've been practicing it for weeks. I've got it down to three minutes. I've got my slides, my visuals. I know exactly where I am at any point in the pitch, and I'm ready for questions.”

Startups spend a lot of time preparing for investor pitches because they're often raising millions of dollars, euros, or pounds. But then I ask a follow-up question: who has a killer candidate pitch? And people are often quieter. But it's obvious you do need a candidate pitch as well.

When you compare, an investor is going to invest a lot of money, and a candidate is going to invest a lot of time and, therefore, a big portion of their life in your vision, your dream, your ambitions. So you also need to have a great candidate pitch. This is part of your employer branding.

5. Employer Branding Essentials

You have to think, how does the rest of the world see you as a startup? Something we see startups doing is often getting their heads down, building products for many months in a row, and then, okay, we're going to market, we've got our MVP, now we need a salesperson or now we need more developers.

They pop up and then suddenly they're in hiring mode. But they've wasted the past few months when they could have been:

  • Posting to LinkedIn every week.
  • Keeping the world up to date on what they're doing.
  • Updating their Crunchbase profiles.
  • Ensuring all of their team members are present on LinkedIn.
  • Making sure GitHub looks good to potential developer hires.

These are the basics for employer branding. Savvy candidates will check you out online, and they want to see that there's a continuation of your story that's credible and real. It's not very time-consuming stuff, and there are great benefits:

  • Reduces turnover by about 20%.
  • Reduces cost-per-hire by about 50%.
  • More qualified applications and reduced time-to-hire.

 

6. Defining and Shaping Team Culture

Employer branding is not just something for big companies; it’s something that startups can do very cheaply and easily. Also, if you get an applicant tracking system—there are lots out there that are very low cost—you can use that to help you create a really good careers page.

Get that set up as part of your website. So when you are hiring, there's a specific place on your page that tells the story of your team and which roles you have open. It’s great for communicating your mission and purpose so that that’s really clear to people coming in as well.

7. Building a Candidate Pitch From Scratch

So that’s employer branding. That’s going to form part of your candidate pitch. Here’s how to build your candidate pitch from scratch:

  1. Start with your investor pitch.
    Your investor pitch is probably three or four minutes long. A friend of mine has this company called Best3Minutes.com—David Beckett. He’s a great pitch coach, and he’s developed a pitch canvas. You can use that as a guide for your investor pitch, but you can also use it as a guide for your candidate pitch, too.

  2. Add details onto your investor pitch.
    Pad out why you started or joined this business. Make it more colorful. Talk about traction with customers and why this is a great situation to join today.

    Candidates are looking for interesting work and some level of security. They know they’re joining a startup, but they need to hear that there are customers or funding so they know they have a job for at least a year. They want to feel they can make an impact and that the rug won’t be pulled from under their feet in just a few weeks.

  3. Explain what you expect from the specific hire.
    This becomes a great intro paragraph for your job ads and becomes your pitch when you meet people on video or in person.

  4. Practice your pitch until it’s perfect.
    Just like an investor pitch, practice your candidate pitch so well that you could do it backward, hungover after celebrating a great win, or even when sick. Your preparation will pay off so that your average level of delivery is always amazing.

When you have a great pitch at the beginning, candidates will be wowed when they meet you, and they’ll want to fight to get into your business. Their answers to your questions will also be better and more detailed if you start with a strong pitch.

8. The Impact of Culture on Early Teams

The next thing to talk about is team culture. Your next 10 hires will shape your culture for years to come.

In the beginning, you're probably working around a team table. Information flows very easily from one person to another. Jeff Bezos famously said you should be able to feed your team with two pizzas at a certain stage. Think of it that way—it’s quite easy.

At that point, the culture is kind of natural; it’s the sum of the personalities around the table. And probably those folks already knew each other when they got into business together, so that’s quite easy.

But then you hire your next 10 people, and you have to think about culture because that’s going to become a minimal viable team. You’ll add more salespeople, more developers, and you want to design a culture that those people are going to adopt. Otherwise, the culture of that minimal viable team (up to 50 people) will be the sum of the personalities there—it won’t be something you designed or influenced. It’ll just kind of happen.

And you may get lucky. That may become a culture you enjoy being a part of, but you stand a much better chance of that happening if you design it and take a proactive approach.

That minimal viable team will influence your multiple locations and the larger scale of the organization as it grows beyond 50 people. So here’s how you can design culture proactively:

  1. Get your core team together today.
    Do a post-it note session for about 30 to 60 minutes. Talk about your core values and how you are going to show your culture to people who join the team.

  2. Define specific cultural traits.
    Build a culture of transparency, innovation, and risk-taking. Think about how you will actually implement that through your employer branding, storytelling, team updates, and meeting structures.

  3. Focus on diversity.
    Diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform others in their industry. They are also 36% more likely to achieve strong financial results.

9. Attracting Diverse Candidates

If you’re building something that’s going to change the world and you really want to make a massive impact, but you look up from your laptop and everybody in your team looks and sounds a lot like you, you may have a problem.

If you don’t even have representation of your audience in your team, then how can you understand the needs of many of your customers?

Plan communication strategies:

  1. Plan out your remote and hybrid working strategies.
  2. Nearly all new employees expect some form of hybrid or remote work these days.

10. Identifying Startup DNA in Candidates

Next, let’s think about what qualities help someone thrive in a startup environment. What is startup DNA?

Core traits to look for in candidates:

  • Initiative and self-starting behavior.
  • Collaboration and teamwork.
  • Adaptability and resilience.
  • Entrepreneurial mindset: creative problem-solving, a proactive attitude, and a willingness to take risks.
  • Agility—not just in software development, but mental agility.
  • Passion and alignment with the team and company goals.

You should build your interview plan to test for these traits. Ask questions about situations in candidates’ experiences, studies, or working lives that demonstrate these qualities.

11. Creative Approaches to Hiring

When growing a business, team members may approach you with hiring requests: “We need a marketing expert,” “We need a comms person,” or “We need an Android developer.” While it’s easy to ask for resources, founders should challenge these assumptions.

Key considerations for hiring requests:

  1. Clarify the skills needed.
    Don’t always group tasks under a single job title. Identify what specifically needs to be done.

  2. Validate the need for the role.
    Some requests might stem from unproven situations, like an unvalidated MVP or untested features.

  3. Explore alternatives to full-time hires:

    • Use part-time or fractional resources.
    • Partner with agencies or outsource for short-term needs.
    • Leverage cost-effective locations for remote work.

Recommended resources:

  • The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss for tips on efficiency.
  • Exponential Organizations for insights on leveraging core and peripheral resources.

12. The Danger of Delegating Product-Market Fit

One critical warning: startups often fail due to lack of product-market fit. This responsibility lies with the founding team—not salespeople.

Mistake to avoid:
Hiring a salesperson to validate a product is often disastrous. Validation must come from the founding team through a feedback loop with launching customers. Salespeople require a validated product and an ideal customer profile to succeed.

Recommended reading:

  • Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet for step-by-step guidance on building a business, including product-market fit.

13. Writing Job Descriptions vs. Job Ads

Key difference:
A job description is an internal document outlining all tasks and requirements, often lengthy. A job ad, however, must be concise, scannable, and mobile-friendly.

Best practices for job ads:

  1. Start with a compelling company pitch.
  2. Summarize the role in a few sentences.
  3. Focus on 3–5 must-have skills.
  4. Highlight “what we offer.”

Tip:
Use tools like ChatGPT to turn long job descriptions into punchy, bullet-pointed job ads.

14. Sourcing Passive Candidates

Advertising jobs is passive. To actively source candidates:

  • Ask for referrals.
  • Engage with potential candidates’ content on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, and Stack Overflow.
  • Join industry groups and participate in conversations.
  • Host events to showcase your product and attract talent.

Pro tip:
Use personalized email sequences with follow-ups to engage passive candidates, who make up 70% of the talent pool.

15. Preparing for Interviews

Never “wing it” during interviews. Structured interviews ensure consistency and better comparisons between candidates.

Prepare by:

  1. Mixing behavioral, situational, and case-based questions.
  2. Using scorecards to evaluate candidates against must-have skills and traits.
  3. Training all interviewers to follow a consistent approach.

Examples:

  • For sales roles, ask about deal cycles and quota management.
  • For developers, explore lifecycle improvements in projects they’ve worked on.

16. Making Offers and Onboarding

Salary research:

  • Use PayScale, Glassdoor, and Indeed to benchmark salaries.
  • For stock options, reference guides like SeedLegals.

Onboarding best practices:
Create a detailed onboarding plan to ensure a seamless first day and week. New hires should:

  • Have access to all tools and systems.
  • Know their schedules and key collaborators.
  • Feel confident in their role.

17. Advanced Tactics and Tools

As you scale, introduce metrics and KPIs to optimize recruiting processes:

  • Track applicant sources and conversion rates.
  • Use AI tools for sourcing, screening, and scheduling.

Tip:
Hire entrepreneurial HR professionals who align with your startup culture. Avoid administrative-only hires that might dilute your culture.

18. Using Speed as a Competitive Advantage

Startups have an edge over corporates when it comes to speed.

  • Schedule interviews closer together.
  • Provide feedback and offers quickly.
  • Close candidates before competitors can.

Most candidates accept the first good offer, so speed matters.

19. Preparing for Startup Risks

Borrowing from astronaut Chris Hadfield’s advice, regularly ask:
“What’s the next thing that could kill us, and how do we prevent it?”

As a startup, risks could include:

  • Running out of cash.
  • Losing a key customer or team member.
  • Facing a new competitor.

Proactively identifying and planning for risks reduces panic and improves decision-making.

20. Closing Thoughts and Resources

Free resources from Funded.club:

  • Download the Startup Recruiting Guide from the Funded.club website.
  • Explore Talent Tech Labs’ ecosystem map for recruiting tools.

About Funded.club:
We help startups build great teams globally with a 100% success rate. Our fixed-fee model starts at $4,500 per hire, saving customers up to 73% on hiring costs.

Thank you for joining the session. If you have questions or feedback, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or through the Funded.club website.