I was reading QuickSprout one of my GOTO start-up blogs last night and this post really hit home. Are you Making These Mistakes?
Neil Patel asks 10 successful entrepreneurs who have all created companies that are worth at least 50 million dollars, what their biggest business mistake was.
Half of the ten named a hiring related issue as their biggest problem.
If you feel you need data points to emphasize the crucial importance of effective recruiting, look no further. Hiring is important for all companies, but for start-up companies it is the bedrock that will determine the success or failure of your endeavor. One mistake with a core team hire can throw the company into a death spiral from which it may not recover. The other take away from this advice is that once you identify a hiring mistake, you must correct it quickly or risk further damage.
"wrong hiring standards in certain parts of our company. We focused too much on specific skills, and too little on fundamental abilities, raw talent, and passion"
"The biggest mistakes are always bad hires."
"My biggest mistake has been hiring the wrong people."
"not taking fast corrective action in dealing with a bad hire."
"The biggest mistake I’ve made have been with hiring the wrong people. I think if you add everything up, including the cost of bad decisions, additional bad hires made by the original bad hire, and missed opportunity costs, bad hires have cost Zappos over $100 million."
Read the blog post to see who said what.
The best advice when building your team is to err on the side of caution. If you have any doubts about someone, don't hire them. Wait for the right candidate to come along.
To do this effectively, you must be recruiting at all times and use a lot of sources (including recruiters). It costs you nothing to see candidates from recruiters and if the candidate presented by the recruiter is the "right" one and beats those provided by your other sources, hire them. Too much emphasis is placed on cost per hire and you should be focused on quality of hire. Each good engineer is considered to be worth $ 1 Million in an acquisition (not even considering their output) so whatever it costs you to bring a great candidate on board is well worth it and is not significant over time.
Start-ups, Startup Jobs and Emerging Technology in theHUB: Boston and Cambridge area.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Startup Hiring Mistakes
Monday, February 22, 2010
Stamp Mobile
Genotrope Record: Stamp Mobile
Funding Status: Seed
Founders Backgrounds: Urban Interactive, Blackstone Group
Investors: ?
Industry: Mobile Applications, Mobile Commerce
Offering Description: Stamp’s loyalty program is a different breed. Points, rewards, customer management tools — sure, we have that. But we also provide the spark to help you build real relationships with your customers.
Funding Status: Seed
Founders Backgrounds: Urban Interactive, Blackstone Group
Investors: ?
Industry: Mobile Applications, Mobile Commerce
Offering Description: Stamp’s loyalty program is a different breed. Points, rewards, customer management tools — sure, we have that. But we also provide the spark to help you build real relationships with your customers.
Labels:
Boostrap,
Boston Startup,
Career,
Pre Funded,
Seed Round,
Start-ups,
Startup Job
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Peerium
Genotrope Record: Peerium
Funding Status: Self Funded?
Founders Backgrounds: Harvard PHD CS, Microsoft
Investors: ?
Industry: White label iPhone apps, B2B web infrastructure
Offering Description: A serverless platform that lowers the overhead of internet applications. Peerium is a software company focused on building a highly scaleable , serverless application platform. Currently creating white label iPhone apps.
Labels:
Boostrap,
Boston Startup,
First Round,
Seed Round,
Start-ups
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Performable
Genotrope Record: Performable
Currently Hiring
Funding Status: Series A
Founders Backgrounds: Compete, Lookery , Bokardo Design
Investors: CRV
Industry: B2B, Web Application
Offering Description: Performable's easy-to-use technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements in real-time, testing everything from a single word to an entire layout. These elements can be optimized depending on factors including where your visitor came from, location, user demographics, the time of day, or even results from your previous tests.
Currently Hiring
Funding Status: Series A
Founders Backgrounds: Compete, Lookery , Bokardo Design
Investors: CRV
Industry: B2B, Web Application
Offering Description: Performable's easy-to-use technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements in real-time, testing everything from a single word to an entire layout. These elements can be optimized depending on factors including where your visitor came from, location, user demographics, the time of day, or even results from your previous tests.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)