On Hiring Process

Disclaimer: I'm not an HR expert, but I'm the manager of a small company, below is what worked for me in the past

If you are managing a company or a project, you have to deal with hiring people, and specially if you are in a small company or a startup, you really need to take care about how you do it.

The success or failure of your project will depend a lot on the people working on it, all of them count, so be conscious when you choose them.

Key factors to consider when hiring people

As a startup or small company, you may not count with the help of a big HR department, with all those tests. So you have to count on your own. There are a lot of aspects to look at, when hiring people, but I recommend to pay attention to this ones:

Responsibility

This may be one of the most important ones, as you will be busy looking for financing sources, or looking for customers. You really need the job done while you are away. And you can't afford having another person watching, that everybody is doing his job, or being over their shoulders to see what they are doing. You will be better having responsible people working for you, so can focus in other aspects of the company.

I have usually hired people in other cities, where they work from home, just with an Internet connection and a cell phone, so trust is a very important aspect when hiring them.

Initiative

This is another important key to take into account, if the person has his own initiative, you will be able to give him directions, and then when he run in troubles, he will try to find a solution by himself. So you are saving time. Of course you need to supervise the job, but you do not have to deal with every small obstacle that may appear.

Willingness to learn new things

Because you will be choosing by the above characteristics, you may end up with people who are not the best "technically qualified", so they will have to learn new things, everyone can learn, if they like to study, they only need to have the bases of what you are needing.

How to get the info needed

All the above may sound OK, but how to get all that subjective info about the persons you are interviewing?

It will take time, but most of the info will come from the interview itself, you will manage to see how the person is by talking to him.

Once you have pre-selected some of them, you will have to invest time getting the rest of the info, but it is better to invest that time now, than loosing it later when the project is running and you realize that you do not have the right person working at it.

You will have to:

• Call previous bosses
• Talk to previous co-workers
• Try to find a friend that knows him
• LinkedIn may help too

The message is: Do anything needed to get the right person, invest time when hiring him or them, because it will cost you a lot more then when the project or company is already running