Always be recruiting

We quickly realized we had made a huge mistake. We were laser focused on execution, so when the time came to achieve the objective of hiring a person per week, we realized we hadn’t made a hire for months and our pipeline was empty. Good luck hiring a person per week with an empty pipeline, which take us to our first lesson learned (on day 1, awesome!).

You cannot allow yourself to have an empty pipeline the moment you decide that your team needs to grow.

As a leader, you should always be pitching your startup to possible hires. It doesn’t matter if they are happy where they are (great people are happy where they are!).

Make an habit of having lunch with great potential candidates every week.

At that moment, we had 3 people working full time on our recruiting efforts. You could either ask these 3 persons to hire 30 people, or ask the whole 70 people team to hire 30. The first one seems like a mythological task, the second one… not so much!

Make sure everyone understands the value of working with great people they already know and then ask everyone for referrals!

Recruiting is a lot about timing. When great people decide to look the other way, then that’s the time when they should be thinking about your startup.

You should already be building a brand for your customers, but you should also be building a brand around potential hires. Think about working at your startup as the job great people should be hiring to find motivation.

A great way to build a brand around potential hires is to share what you learned! Great people crave for knowledge and love their mentors. IMHO, three companies that do this really well are Basecamp, Intercom and Spotify. Sure, they have great products, but what I truly love about them is all that I got to learn just by reading about the experiences they shared while building their products. There’s no coincidence Tienda Nube worships remote work, thinks about problems instead of solutions or works in a squad-like fashion; we learned from them, and that puts these three companies on our radar.

You cannot realize enough the value of sharing your experiences with the world. There will always be new startups, and I can assure you that they will go through exactly the same challenges you are currently facing. You can be their mentor and, along the way, build a name for your company.

Related posts:

Does your life feel purposeless and like it’s filled with more negatives than positives? I get it — I’ve been there, and it’s not a fun place to be. But don’t worry! You can turn your unhappiness…

This story was originally published on NatureHub blog: a community of healthy lifestyle enthusiasts and environmentally conscious individuals. Um, I mean — what the heck do you buy for your friends…