This is Part 1 of Hiring for a Startup When You Can’t Outpay Big Tech. Part 2, on where to find talent, is here.
When you can’t win on compensation, who you choose to hire matters even more. Here are the three signals I trust most.
Look for a Track Record of Beating the Odds
The single most useful framework I’ve adopted comes from Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. The idea I keep coming back to is to look for adversaries a person has overcome in their life, without ever crossing a legal or ethical line to do it.
A story makes this concrete. I was once interviewing a candidate and asked how many years of coaching he took before sitting for the IIT entrance exam. He said two. I knew that most people in India spend four years on this, essentially all of high school from 9th to 12th grade. So I gently pushed on the gap. It turned out he had only two years of coaching for financial reasons, and despite that he secured a rank around 200 out of roughly 1.2 million people who took the exam.
That answer told me more than any credential could. We kept going and talked through other adversities he had overcome later in life, including in graduate school. People who have repeatedly found a way through hard circumstances tend to keep doing it, and that is exactly the kind of person you want in the foxhole with you at a startup.
Watch How People Work When No One Is Grading Them
Some of the best signal shows up after the interview, not during it.
I once hired a candidate who did not do well in about half of his interviews. What changed my mind happened on its own. Over the Christmas break, without anyone asking him to, he went back and completed all of the assignments based on the interviewers’ feedback, and then did a few more on top of that.
I hired him, and he turned out to be one of the best data engineers I have ever worked with. The interviews measured where he was that day. His response to the feedback measured something far more important, which is how he works when no one is watching.
Find People With a Passion to Build
The people who thrive at a startup are the ones who want what a startup actually offers, not just what it pays. Big organizations have their strengths, but they rarely give an engineer the things a certain kind of builder craves: shipping fast, seeing their work land in front of customers, and owning a problem end to end.
So in interviews I listen for that hunger. Does the candidate light up when they talk about building? Are they frustrated by how long things took at their last job, by how many layers sat between them and the customer, by how narrow their slice of the system was? Those frustrations are exactly what a startup cures.
And what you can offer in return is real:
- Speed. An idea can ship in days instead of quarters.
- Visibility. Their work is seen by the whole company and by customers, not buried three levels deep in a platform org.
- Customer interaction. The person who built the feature often sits in the call where a customer reacts to it.
- Multiple hats. Engineer, product thinker, support, sometimes salesperson — all in the same week.
Most engineers at big companies never get to experience any of this. When you find someone who genuinely wants that trade, compensation stops being the deciding factor. You aren’t asking them to accept less; you’re offering them something big tech structurally cannot.
Next: Where to Find Talent — the places most companies never bother to check.