Matt Blumberg is a known pioneer in technology-enabled business solutions. His success can be attributed to his people-first approach, which he promoted when he established Return Path – an email delivery specialist.
Thus, it’s no surprise when Matt opens with: “The people in your business are everything” when speaking about recruiting and hiring talent. After all, it’s people who make products, and people who talk to customers.
Top recruiting challenges
As you grow your startup and as you place importance in bringing the right people into it, you’re going to encounter many challenges around the recruiting process. Matt enumerates these as follows:
- Defining the job properly. “You’re not just going to be filling an existing job but creating a new one. Taking time to think about what you’ll be paying someone to do, is it a full-time job, and is it the kind of job that’s easy to hire for – that job definition piece becomes very important.”
- Putting enough time into the recruitment process. “You should think of this almost seriously as getting married or adopting because you’re going to spend a lot of time with this person and they’re going to be a big part of your workforce.”
- Ending the recruitment process too early. “The recruiting process doesn’t end until 90 days after the employee has started. That last leg – the onboarding piece – becomes particularly important to ensure the new hire sticks.”
A biology metaphor for hiring
Matt likens hiring to living organisms:
Early on in an organism’s life, it’s a single cell and it does everything. The cell then replicates into a bunch of other cells, all of which do everything. Eventually, you develop into a higher-order organism with specialised organs, and so on.
Early on in a company’s life, you want a bunch of people who are jack of all trades, who can be good at lots of things.
As the company scales, you need people who specialise.
Early employee characteristics
According to Matt, you want the following types of people in your startup:
- Those in sync with you and the way you think about building the business and running it.
- Those who are good at follow-through and getting things done.
- Those who don’t get caught up in perfection when what you need are speed and directional accuracy.
Common hiring trap
Matt notes that one of the traps that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is believing that every employee can scale with the business and grow into a more specialised role over time.
Some people aren’t good at that and don’t like it. Some thrive better in smaller environments, just as some are specialists and are probably more cut out for larger environments. I’ve had members of my team who scaled really well, and who have grown consistently with the role. I’ve had others who have over time decided or discovered it’s not for them.
Here’s Matt Blumberg’s complete video:
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