How to build a great team, one interview at a time

Hiring the right people is the most important thing a founder can do.

In the investment world we tend to talk a lot about founders and funding, and less about the people who actually make the business go. That’s probably the opposite of how it should be. A startup’s ability to hire and recruit the right team is ultimately more important than how much it raised in its Series A; it’s what will enable the company to scale quickly.

Silicon Valley is full of people with brilliant ideas, drive, and ambition who’ve never had to interview and hire scores of employees. They’re often asked to evaluate people for high-level positions — like VP of marketing or head of business development — they know very little about. That’s why we work with our portfolio companies to help them identify and assess promising candidates.

We are always here to interview execs but we can’t sit in on every interview, especially as companies scale. When Lightspeed first funded Snap in May 2012 it had a handful of employees; today it has more than 3,000. Cameo and Calm had just 20 and 45 employees, respectively, when we invested and now have several hundred. So I’d like to share some of the advice we offer startups when they’re setting out to build a great team.

Technical and performance interviewing

There are three things you look for from every candidate:
1) Technical skills,
2) The ability to perform at a high level, and
3) Cultural fit.

Unless you’re hiring into a field you have personal experience with, it can be hard to assess some else’s technical skills. This is why it helps to bring in a domain expert who can analyze their resume and ask the right questions. It doesn’t have to be an employee; advisors, investors, or even friends can fill this role. It also helps to ask junior employees working within that department to participate in interviews. Though they may not understand the full scope of the position, they are more likely to be familiar with the technical requirements.

While technical qualifications tell you whether a person can do the job, performance interviewing tells you how well they do it. This includes personality characteristics such as attention to detail, problem solving, initiative, leadership, and ability to collaborate. Assessing these traits requires a technique known as behavioral interviewing, which is essentially using a person’s past behavior to predict future performance.

You’ll want to identify the key attributes for each position, then use questions to drill down to the details. Say you want to assess a person’s ability to act independently and take the initiative. If you’re interviewing them to be head of sales, you’ll want to ask about a specific instance when they turned a marginal lead into a big win. If you’re hiring a project manager, you want to hear about the time they volunteered to take on a special project above and beyond their normal work duties, and how well the project succeeded.

You are looking for specific anecdotes, not generalities. You want to learn the situation, the action, and the outcome in as much detail as possible. It’s hard for people to make up stories about their past experiences. That is why behavioral interviewing works so well.

Where culture and diversity converge

Of the three things to look for, the most important is cultural fit. The world is full of people with technical skills who perform at a high level; the question is, can you work with them? Does their interpersonal style mesh with the rest of your team? Do you share the same values? Is this someone you’d want to have lunch with?

This is why networking platforms like Lunchclub are so useful. They enable you to meet potential candidates in a more relaxed setting, to get a feel for what they’re like when they’re not sitting in a formal interview. For obvious reasons, most of these lunch meetings today happen over video; hopefully in a few weeks or months we’ll be able to start having them in person again.

At the same time, the last thing you want to do is hire a bunch of people who look just like you. Diversity is more important than ever, and it’s not simply about being ‘woke.’

Studies have shown that having a workforce that’s diverse in gender, age, ethnic or racial makeup, socio-economic backgrounds, and geographical location leads to better decisions. The wider the range of experiences you have to draw from, the more options you have to choose from — and that usually leads to better outcomes.

Diversity is something we’re very conscious of at Lightspeed. All 12 companies in my own portfolio have senior female executives, and half — like Goop, Illumix, and Haus — have female founders. Three quarters of them are located outside Silicon Valley, and three are outside the US. But as a whole, the investment community still has a long way to go when it comes to expanding the diversity of its workforce.

Hiring the right people is probably the single most important thing a startup can do. We try to help our portfolio companies as much as we can, but it’s ultimately up to them. Founders who devote the time and energy to do it right will scale faster and create more value over time.

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