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 two 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.
Next: Where to Find Talent — the places most companies never bother to check.