How to hire well: Troy Hammond

Startups often hire too quickly, without doing the proper planning and strategising beforehand, says Troy Hammond, Talent Army co-founder. The recruitment company helps tech companies get the talent they need to scale.

Here's his advice to early-stage founders on hiring the right people.

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What are you willing to give up?

I work with a lot of early-stage founders and the first question I ask is, what are you willing to give up? Founders are usually the biggest roadblocks themselves because it's their baby and they have a certain way they want to do things. I’ll ask: what jobs are you doing currently? What are you prepared to give up? Where do your skill sets lie?

And I try to counsel them – you can give up that role pretty easily; this is where you're probably more experienced. Normally founders work three or four hats at the start, and up until Series A they're probably going to be wearing two, so think about the hats that you're going to keep.

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Don't just hire friends

Probably one of the biggest mistakes people make is they hire their friends, because recruitment in your own company is really scary.

We tend to hire people because we know and trust them and hope they'll be able to fill that role because we like them and we know we can work with them.

A lot of times that ends up with having to manage a friend, which can be really detrimental to the business and the personal relationship.

So I ask, who's going to be the best person for your business regardless of whether you know them or not? Let's write a proper description of the job it is now and what it's going to be in the next 12 months. And let's figure out where the skills and gaps are in terms of what you're looking for.

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Look for T-shaped skills

T-shaped skills (where the vertical line is a person’s area of expertise, and then they can go left or right from that base to grow into opportunities) is a term that's thrown around a lot, but it's super relevant and important in startups because your role is going to change, no matter how much you love it or hate it, within six months, and every six months.

In a fast-growing startup, there are things you're going to have to jump into so we're looking for people who have the skills not necessarily just for that role for the next three years, but also for a multitude of roles that we're going to need them for.

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Have a workforce plan

I encourage companies and founders to have a good workforce plan so they know, we've got this amount of money, and these are the roles and responsibilities that we'll need over the next six to 12 months. And then don’t deviate too much from that workforce plan.

What I see a lot is that Joe Bloggs will start a company that wants to be the next Xero, say, so they’ll hire someone from Xero because they want to bring in that experience and that culture.

But they might hire the wrong person who's been in a senior management position and actually hasn't done much for the last three years; their team has done it all. And then this person will want to start bringing in their team straight away because they can't do the work themselves.

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Who has the playbook?

You need to be very strategic about hiring people who have credibility in the space that you're looking for. I define that by asking, who's got the playbook?

Then it’s identifying, well, this person's got the playbook for the next 24 months, let's see if they're willing to come back and do it again.

I often say building an early-stage team is a lot like playing poker: a lot of people are out there bluffing, so you have to find the people that are credible in that space.

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As told to Caitlin Sykes

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