BUZZ in theHUB: Startup Watch and VentureBuzz

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.