Hire Staff
Don't think big -- and other tips for picking those first few employees
When it comes to hiring for his start-up company, Konstantin Guericke knows exactly what he's looking for: people who are hyperaware of trends in his market. People who react quickly when the whole company needs to switch focus.
People who, instead of multitasking slowly through 10 projects, can work on one or two and get them done quickly. People so committed to the company's vision that they can withstand long hours and naysayers.
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He also knows how to find them: by mining his own extended network of colleagues and friends for start-up-savvy candidates.
Mr. Guericke's decisiveness is born of experience: LinkedIn Corp., the Palo Alto, Calif., Web networking firm he helped launch in 2003, is his fifth start-up, not counting consulting jobs, since the early '90s. Most start-up founders, however, wrestle at first with questions of where to find good candidates for their inherently risky venture, and then whom to hire and when.
Entrepreneurs preparing to hire their first employees should proceed with caution, says Ellen Rudnick, professor and executive director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
"There is clearly a danger in moving too fast," she says. It's costly to commit to an employee's salary and benefits prematurely; firing an employee means not only severance pay (and sometimes litigation), but also time and resources devoted to finding a replacement. "If you're a five-person company with one or two employees not working out well, you could destroy a company," she says.
Big-Time Problems
When it comes to finding the right candidate for a small business, some trends have outlasted several start-up booms and busts. Bob Marshall, a managing partner at Selby Venture Partners, has spent more than 40 years working with start-ups in Silicon Valley. He says that while entrepreneurs might be tempted to hire candidates with big-business credentials, they're rarely a good fit. "There are rules, regulations and processes to do everything" in a big company, says Mr. Marshall. "In a start-up, there are no set jobs. Everyone does everything." Start-ups should be looking for flexible candidates who are used to smaller environments.
Jeremy Stoppelman, who left Harvard Business School to start a company called Yelp.com last year, subscribes to that school of thought. He says he looks for people who "can take whatever is given to them, run with it, be autonomous and not require hand-holding." That's because at his San Francisco-based venture, the development cycle is much shorter than at a big company. In a matter of weeks, the eight-person company dreams up, tests and launches new features for their Web site, where members share reviews of everything from restaurants and hairdressers to real-estate agents and shoe stores.
JOB REQUIREMENTS
Start-up veterans and experts suggest new entrepreneurs look for some of these traits in their early hires
? FLEXIBILITY Able to change focus quickly as the company seeks out its niche; doesn't flinch when asked to make own copies; doesn't say things like, "At my old job, we did it like this..."
? START-UP EXPERIENCE Isn't wedded to the time-consuming processes, office politics or cushy benefits of a big company
? AUTONOMY Takes a project and runs with it; doesn't require micromanaging
? PASSIONATE ABOUT THE IDEA Understands the founder's vision; is willing to suffer long hours and a grueling pace for it
? GOOD WITH PEOPLE Works well in close quarters with a small staff, even during stressful periods
Source: WSJ research
Start-ups typically find their first 10 or 15 employees by networking, Mr. Marshall says. Each time new hires come on board, they widen the candidate pool with their own Rolodexes. But no matter how well-connected the employees are, at some point the internal network becomes exhausted.
By the Boards
While online job boards seem like an easy way to find employees, posting a job at a big board such as Monster.com can bring an unmanageable deluge of résumés. For a small company with no full-time recruiting staff, there might not be enough time or resources to sort through all of them.
"You want the right five résumés, not 5,500 résumés," says Rafat Ali, editor and publisher of PaidContent.org, an online magazine about digital media. "It used to be the usual suspects: Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder," he says, but now start-ups are advertising on much smaller niche sites (including, he says, his site's own job board). Start-up entrepreneurs, especially in the tech industry, should hunt down the Web logs or Web sites that are well-read in their industry, and try to post jobs there, says Mr. Ali.
In deciding what positions to fill first, entrepreneurs must boil down their staffing plan to a handful of people who can get the company's product or service to market. High-level executives aren't usually hired until the company has gone through a second round of financing, says Selby's Mr. Marshall. For example, you don't need a vice president of marketing or sales before there's a product, he says; in a tech company, an acting CEO and a chief technology officer usually suffice.
For each start-up, the hiring pattern will differ depending on industry, location and even the skills of the founders. In the case of Baked, a bakery in the up-and-coming Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., early hiring decisions were shaped by both product and location.
"The neighborhood is very funky, so we wanted somebody who wasn't really interested in doing five-star desserts," says Matt Lewis, one of the founders, who once worked in advertising and founded a sweets shop before opening Baked. He placed advertisements for a baker and a finisher (to decorate the shop's cakes, cookies and brownies) at all of the city culinary schools, but too many of those applicants wanted to work in restaurants, making fancy pastries and plated desserts.
"People don't go to culinary school to learn to make the perfect brownie," he says. Instead, the candidates he ultimately hired came through Craigslist, an inexpensive, no-frills community site that posts all sorts of classifieds.
The other challenge facing the Baked founders was the neighborhood. Red Hook is out of the way of New York's subway system, so candidates who could realistically work the prebreakfast shift needed to live nearby. Also, unlike the neighborhood where co-founder Renato Poliafito once managed a coffee shop, a sign in the window didn't generate 1,000 résumés; one hire came from Craigslist, and the other was a walk-in who lives just around the corner.
Outsourcing Work
In other sorts of start-ups, many services can be outsourced or done by free-lancers, says Ms. Rudnick of the University of Chicago. As examples, she ticks off accounting, marketing, public relations and manufacturing.
Alicia Peck, founder and designer of BellaMuse, a one-woman New York start-up that sells handmade prints and stationery, hasn't hired a full-time employee since she began in 2003. A former public-relations staffer for International Business Machines Corp., Ms. Peck sells her wares in more than 30 stores and at a street stall in the city. In her business, a lot of cash changes hands; her biggest hiring concern is finding trustworthy employees.
She admits to being a bit of a control freak; during BellaMuse's first full-fledged holiday season, she would only rely on her mother, who lives in Michigan but came to the city to lend a hand. Later, she found part-time and weekend help by word-of-mouth and references from her former IBM colleagues. During the two years since the business began, Ms. Peck has outsourced Web-site design, email newsletters and marketing help.
Now, BellaMuse has grown enough to warrant her first solo office, and she's considering sending her card designs to a printer instead of making them by hand. It's time to find her first real employees; she started with postings at Parsons School of Design (where she earned an associate's degree) and other New York art schools, and she recently hired an intern.
"There comes a point when you have to give up control," says Ms. Peck. "You're either going to explode with opportunity, or you're going to implode if you can't take some risks. I really want to grow the business."
为初创企业的招聘支招
当康斯坦丁?格瑞克(Konstantin Guericke)为自己的初创公司招募员工时，他心里很清楚自己要找什么样的人：他（她）必须非常清楚所在市场的趋势；当整个公司需要转换重点时他（她）能迅速作出反应；如果同时面临10项任务，他（她）会迅速地逐一完成任务，而不是将10项任务同时摊开，但进展缓慢；他（她）应忠诚于公司的愿景，能承受长时间的工作和外界的拒绝。
他也知道如何才能找到这样的员工：通过同事、朋友等圈子细细搜寻适合初创企业的候选人。
格瑞克的这种判断来自经验：2003年他帮助成立的加州网络设备公司LinkedIn Corp.已经是他第五家初创企业，更不用提90年代初以来为其他人提供的咨询服务了。但大多数初创企业的创始人会首先困扰于到哪里去为自己高风险的企业招募素质良好的员工，其次是聘用什么样的人以及何时聘用员工。
芝加哥商学院Polsky创业中心的教授埃伦?鲁德尼克(Ellen Rudnick)提醒准备聘用首批员工的创业者们要谨慎。
她指出，行动太快显然存在风险。过早地承担起员工薪资和福利，从成本上来说不划算；解雇员工不仅意味著要支付遣散费（有时还会惹上官司），还要搭上时间和资源去找一位新的员工。“如果你是一个5人的公司，其中有1、2个员工工作不怎么好，就可能毁了整个公司。”
不管初创企业是否正在成为潮流，寻找小企业的理想雇员是一个永恒的问题。40多年来，Selby Venture Partners执行合伙人鲍勃?马歇尔(Bob Marshall)一直在与矽谷的初创企业合作。他说，虽然创业者们可能觉得雇佣有大企业工作背景的候选人比较有吸引力，但事实上这类候选人很少能适合初创企业。在一家大公司里，“什么事都有规章制度可循，有具体流程可参照，”马歇尔表示，“在初创企业中没有明确分工，每个人都是什么事都要干。”初创企业应寻找那些习惯小企业环境的、行事灵活的候选人。
去年离开哈佛商学院、创立了Yelp.com的杰瑞米?斯托普尔曼(Jeremy Stoppelman)也持这种观点。他说，他要找的人是“什么任务都能接受，具有主动性，无需手把手带的人”。斯托普尔曼位于旧金山的公司开发周期要远远短于大公司。在几周的时间内，这个8人的公司就可以完成网站新功能的设计、测试和推出。Yelp.com的会员们能在网站上分享对餐馆、美发店、房地产经纪、鞋店等评论。
马歇尔表示，初创企业通常都通过个人关系网找到首批10-15个员工。每次新员工加入，他们的关系网就会得到扩大。但不管这些员工的关系网多么广泛，到一定阶段这种资源都会消耗殆尽。
网上招聘公告似乎是招募员工的一个简单方式，在Monster.com等网站上发布一条招聘消息总会引来难以计数的简历投放。但对于一家没有全职招聘人员的公司来说，或许根本没有足够的时间或资源来从如此多的简历中进行筛选。
“你只要5份合适的简历就可以了，不需要5,500份，”数字媒体网络杂志PaidContent.org的编辑兼出版人拉法特?阿里(Rafat Ali)表示，“过去刊登招聘广告，人们只会想到Monster、HotJobs和CareerBuilder。”但现在初创企业开始在一些小得多的特色网站上发布招聘报告（包括PaidContent.org的就业版）。阿里称，创业者们，特别是如果身处科技行业，就应追踪业内影响较大的网络日志或网站，在这些地方发布招聘广告。
在决定哪些职位应首先招聘时，创业者首先应关注产品或服务的推广人员。Selby的马歇尔表示，在公司完成第二轮融资前，通常无需任命高层管理人员。例如，在还没有产品时，你通常并不需要一个营销或销售副总裁；在一家科技公司中，一个代理首席执行长和一个首席技术长通常就足够了。
对于每家初创公司来说，雇佣模式会因行业、地点、甚至创始人本身的技能而异。以纽约市布鲁克林Red Hook街区的面包店Baked为例，最初的雇佣考虑是基于产品和地点。
“这个街区的人们并不追逐时尚的东西，因此我们希望找的员工是那些并不梦想制作五星级甜品的人，”创始人之一的麦特?刘易斯(Matt Lewis)表示。刘易斯曾在广告行业工作，创立Baked之前也开过一家糖果店。他在纽约市所有的餐饮学校都发布了招聘一位烘焙师和一位面点装饰师的广告，但太多的应征者都希望能在餐馆里工作，制作漂亮价高的饼乾和甜品。
“人们上餐饮学校可不是为了学习如何制作完美的核仁巧克力饼，”刘易斯说。最终，他通过一个平实的社区分类广告网站Craigslist招到了合适的员工。
Baked创始人们面临的另一项挑战是周边环境。Red Hook不在纽约地铁的覆盖区域内，因此现实地来说能承担早餐前那一班工作的人必须要住在附近。而且，和共同创始人Renato Poliafito曾开立咖啡店的那个社区不同，在那里只要你在窗户上贴一个告示就能收到1,000份简历；最后，Baked通过Craigslist招募了一位员工，另外一位则是住在附近、自己上门找的工作。
芝加哥大学的鲁德尼克表示，在其他类别的初创企业中许多服务可以外包或聘用临时工。例如，她举出了会计、营销、公共关系和制造等。
BellaMuse的创始人和设计者阿利西亚?佩克(Alicia Peck)自从2003年公司开业以来，从未雇佣过全职员工。佩克独立一人支撑著这家生产手工制作印刷品和文具用品的纽约初创公司。作为国际商业机器公司(International Business Machines Corp.)的一位前公关人员，佩克将自己的产品在纽约市30多家店和一个街边小摊上出售。在经营中，公司有大量现金经手；她在雇佣员工时最大的考虑是如何找到可信赖的人。
她承认自己有点不切实际地想把一切掌控在手中；在BellaMuse成立后的第一个假日销售季节，她只愿意依赖母亲，住在密歇根州母亲来到了纽约市给她帮忙。后来在以前同事的介绍和推荐下，她找到了一些临时工和周末帮手。业务开展两年来，佩克已将网站设计、电子邮件定期通讯和营销等进行了外包。
现在，BellaMuse的发展已足以让她租下了第一个单人办公室，现在她正在考虑将自己的卡片设计交给一家印刷厂，而不再手工制作。现在是招募首批雇员的时候了；她在Parsons School of Design（在那里她获得了一个大专学位）等纽约艺术学校张贴了广告，最近她雇佣了一位实习生。
“到一定时候，你必须要放开手，”佩克表示，“放开手，企业就可能得到更大的发展，如果你不愿承担风险，则无异于作茧自缚。我的确希望看到业务的发展。”
