Who should I hire first for my startup?

Recently, I was asked the same question word for word by two people who were completely unfamiliar with each other. The commonality between them is that they both plan to expand their technical team soon. So I decided to share my ideas, hoping they could be useful to every startup founder.

I have previous experience working with many international startups and have helped create recruiting strategies from scratch, as well as scale-up teams. All my conclusions are based on practical experience. Now I work for Diabolocom, it’s an established company, but we still maintain a startup-like atmosphere because of innovative solutions with AI technologies.

If you are hiring the first person for your team, you can easily do it using your personal network, but you still have to have some criteria to make the right choice.

1. At the CV Screening Stage

There is a simple piece of advice that you can apply and review the candidate's profile even before the interview.

How to check if you’re hiring an engineer? Not just a developer. Startups seek individuals who can solve complex tasks and be quite autonomous.

In the CV, if you can see technologies listed and find some exotic ones—like Haskell  or something similar alongside popular enterprise technologies like Java, .NET, etc., If you see this, you can assume that this person is curious and enjoys learning new things, which is important for a good engineer.

I was told by one of the very, very cool engineers, having a variety of tools is essential.”Good engineers need experience with various tools, my role as an engineer is to find what can help to solve this task the best”.

2. At the Interview

Another thing you can check during the call. It can help you to clarify candidates’ motivation and passion for programming.

'Why did you choose this specialization? When did you start becoming interested in technologies, engineering, programming, etc.?' 

If a person answers, 'Oh, I got into it during school; I created my first website at 12, tried to build some robots when I was 14, and I've always been curious about it,' it doesn't have to be programming specifically, it can be something related to the engineering field. This kind of answer will be a very good sign.

3. Your Hiring Strategy 

Another question: ‘What kind of specialist is better to hire?’ An expert with backend, frontend, or in a specific technology, or a full-stack engineer who is flexible and ambitious to learn something new?

I normally answer that a full-stack engineer is the best choice—a person who is open to learning more but already has a solid foundation. However, it depends. Some founders want to hire experts in a narrow field, and it depends on the project.

 A co-founder of a very successful company told me, they started to grow their engineering team with full-stack engineers. Later on, they had the luxury to hire more narrowly specialized experts.

And another question that I was asked is, 'Is it possible to hire a senior engineer for a small startup with no name?' I replied that it's absolutely possible, citing my own experience. 

For example, I successfully headhunted a highly skilled engineer from a well-known big company to join a promising but nameless British startup. During our conversation, we discussed the reasons behind his decision to join the startup.

💚 How to attract senior-level engineers to your startup? Here are some simple logical things that you need to include in your job description. I think I will write down more details in the next article.

🥳 If this topic interests you, feel free to like, comment and ask your questions! I'll be happy if my knowledge and experience in international tech recruitment can help you grow your team