Welcome to the second edition of Tactical Hiring, a series dedicated to giving founders actionable hiring advise— from the people who've done it before at a high level. Today's guest is Gagan Biyani, previous co-founder at Udemy and current CEO of Maven. Maven is an education startup that offers cohort based courses taught by industry experts. I've personally taken a Maven marketing course led by Emily Kramer of MKT1, which was excellent. If you're looking for an outlet to learn not just from an industry expert, but also your peers who might also take the course, I couldn't recommend it enough.
Now, on to the conversation: today we cover effective recruitment channels in the early days, how to scan a candidate profile, and what kind of attributes you might want to prioritize from the jump.
What were your most effective recruitment channels in the earliest days of Udemy?
The best candidates came in via inbound channels. Given Udemy was not a well-known startup, I was quite surprised by this. At the end of the day, though, the best candidates are out there doing research and following companies they think are interesting. They will self-select to finding your job postings (provided you link to them from your website). All of our best employees on the non-engineering side were inbound. For engineers, our best employees all came through word-of-mouth and referral.
Were there any experiences (negative or positive) at Udemy and Sprig which informed your recruitment process when starting Maven? Did you adapt your own hiring process?
The most notable experience is that only about 50-75% of hires work out. This is a really tough nut to crack and I’ve rarely ever met someone who believes they can beat that percentage. This sets a benchmark that is more achievable than 100% - and means that sometimes you will find someone who doesn’t work out and don’t need to immediately assume it was preventable.
The other main lesson is that some people are really good at selling themselves in an interview process, but often they are not the best employees. The best people at startups are doers, not sellers. So at Maven we now have a hiring task that we create for each job and ask all prospective employees to do. This both weeds out people who aren’t that serious about the role, and also helps us look at actual work product when evaluating capabilities.
A lot of recruitment is spent looking at profiles and resumes, how can founders become good “profile scanners”? What signals do you look for in terms of who you’d like to target and reach out too?
Trajectory is more important than pedigree. Look for someone who is moving up from position to position, not in terms of title but more in terms of company. Also its always good to see someone who has been at one company for a long time and clearly rose in the ranks because they were a high performer. Finally, I don’t always look for relevant experience but it is helpful - if someone has worked at a company that has similarities to yours, it is often an indication of being interested in and knowing how to solve your unique problems.
Outside of hiring for hard skills, what are some intangible qualities founders should seek in their earliest employees?
I’ve always picked founder-types as early hires. People who have shown that they can take extremely unstructured situations and come up with solutions entirely on their own. This can be through being founder of an actual company, or of being early on another early-stage team. I’ve even seen it through someone who rose to becoming CEO of a local non-profit (while maintaining their full-time job).
I also index high for rigorous thinking, interest in Maven, and ability to learn quickly.
How can founders screen for these qualities while conducting interviews?
The best thing we do at Maven is provide a task. On top of that, we look for actual evidence that someone has these aforementioned skills - whether it is through work samples, or anecdotal evidence presented during an interview. We also reference check aggressively - not only do we call given references, but we often look for references that were not given. One way to do that is to ask the given references who else was on the team and then come up with an org structure and ask the right person in the org. The second way is to use LinkedIn or personal connections to figure out who else worked with the candidate and reach out to them through warm or cold outreach.
What can one do to improve inbound? Should someone start marketing their company on public sites to try to increase the number of inbound candidates?
Early on, your sole marketing focus should be marketing to your customers. Anything else, including marketing to investors or marketing to candidates should be less important or almost non-existent. Your future employees should be more like your customers, so they should ideally find you through the channels you use to market to your customers. When they don’t, you are much better off going through personal networks, leveraging a recruiter, or doing cold outreach on your own.
Are you always looking for direct experience in the role you're hiring for? Have there been instances where you've seen experiences that may show potential for a new role?
Almost always, yes. Sometimes you have no choice - so you have to pick someone who has adjacent skill sets. However, if you can find someone who has done something very similar, that’s ideal. If you can’t, the key is to look for analogous skills. For example, we have hired a number of facilitators at Maven who must be good at interacting with instructors and running live events. Candidates with a background in teaching have been an excellent source of that - because they already have experience running an in-person classroom and interacting with people.
Netflix famously adopted a framework for recruitment by constantly assessing the relevance of an employee's skills to the present day challenges of the business. How should founders navigate hiring for current challenges versus seeking an employee who can add value long term?
Startups are highly unpredictable. You will change strategy - either a full pivot or even just a small iteration on how you sell, go to market, engage with customers or even build product. As such, I don’t think it is possible to be too particular about skillset relevance. In fact, I’d much rather a strong generalist who can shift to different needs than someone with perfect skillset match to the role I have, but who seems less adaptable. Even if they have high skillset match, they will still end up flailing because adaptability is critical for success at a startup.
