Thursday, February 20, 2014

Hiring on a Shoestring

Courtesy SXC.hu
When one of our readers recently asked us about the best sourcing options for a boot-strapped startup we were more than happy to offer our humble opinion. And, by the way, if anyone out there would like to add their perspective please feel free.

Bringing an employee on board is no simple task. In fact it's a balancing act in which you have to weigh up at least these three variables: (i) finding the candidate with the right skills, (ii) the time needed for training and (iii) availability of financial resources to attract and retain such a candidate.

What are the options you are on a tight budget?

Interns are often willing to work in return for references and valuable on-the-job experience rather than for a monetary wage. The positive side of this is you get work done with no cash outlay, you can feel good about furthering someone's career and there's also a good chance that your talented intern will end up as a valued full-time member of your team. On the down side, interns who lack experience (possibly a majority of them) will need a lot of guidance, i.e. a lot of your valuable time. There could also be issues with limited availability, not to mention the risk of interns leaving at short notice because they find a paying job or deciding to go back to school.

Entry level employees may have a higher skillset, require less guidance and be less likely to quit unexpectedly. Many of them would also welcome the opportunity of working in an entrepreneurial environment where they could try their hand at different disciplines and enhance their professional profile. However, their initial output is likely to be low—and it's you who'll be paying for that.

Experienced mid-tier employees can be among the hardest to bring on board; not only because of cost but also because of their reasonable concerns about job security in a firm that hasn't established itself in the industry yet. That said, as a boot-strapped organization, the chances are you won't need any mid-tier workers in the near future. And by the time you do, you should have no difficulty affording them.

Executive/upper management. At this level there are even fewer options. You might be able to persuade someone to work for you for equity and/or use deferred or minimal payment. Prior to going this route it's wise to review your current skill set and determine where you are in the life cycle of both the company and the product in order to decide whether you really need a team member of this caliber. For example if you still have months of work ahead in developing the product, bringing in a VP of Sales at this stage is liable to be an unnecessary expense. If you decide to move forward don't skip on the necessary due diligence as this can have a significant impact on your growing organization moving forward.

Other options

Consider setting up hourly or project-based engagements with professionals. This way you'll be able to manage costs and be sure of getting a job done well by a professional who will require little or no supervision. The same approach can work with accounting, lead-gen, legal or similar tasks. For design and copywriting work too, crowdsourcing is a great idea. It can also provide a marvelous opportunity to evaluate prospective employees prior to bringing them on board if that option exists. Apart from saving on the payroll, you won't have to invest in a new computer or find additional office space.

Friends, relatives, and professional networks can come in very handy as well. They can allow you to brainstorm; they can act as your future focus group, or maybe even as your future client. Friends, relatives, and professional peers who believe in your cause will usually be more than willing to help out. For example if you can't afford to hire an expensive UI design outfit right away and this is something you need, find people you know who would be willing to go through your pilot, point out issues to you and tell you how they would want the application to work—a free and very informative focus study.

There are many resources available on attracting the right candidates for a startup experience with LinkedIn and your local college job board topping the list. There are also specialized such as angel.co, workinstartups.com and others.

What's the experience like in your startup team?

Rachel, Dan, & Dmitry

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Crowdsourcing Graphic Design

 Courtesy Vjeran Lisjak
Image courtesy Vjeran Lisjak
If you're looking for great graphic design, crowdsourcing is a wonderful option. Leveraging the collective talents of creative cloud-based designers will give you dozens of designs to choose from. The more traditional route involves an arduous search through scores of graphic design outfits and individual designers and, whether you plump for an outfit or an individual, you'll be lucky if you get to choose between more than three designs. What's more, if you don't like any of them, tough luck! You'll have to 'persuade' the designer to try again, or start your search from scratch. Either way, you'll be spending additional time and money with no guarantee of the desired results. Recently, after finding ourselves once again in this familiar situation, we decided to try our luck with 99designs.com, and we're very glad we did.

99designs work with hundreds and thousands of designers around the world to implement a wide range of graphic projects—logos, websites, infographics, book designs and more. You can describe the scope of your project and provide guidance for what you are looking for and then sit back and enjoy the most amazing realizations of your idea as they come through to you literally within hours. Keep the momentum going by providing suggestions on how to tweak designs to fit your vision. Finally, when you've selected the winning design, you award the project fee to the designer and collect your files. You get the benefit of working with multiple designers while only having to pay for one. And the whole process can be completed in just a few days.

We've discovered several things you can do to ensure that the very best talent is working on your project. For starters, raising the reward a few points above the recommended price will attract the better designers, and for a small fee 99designs will promote your project within the designer community. Secondly, take a look at the top projects in your category and if you see designers whose work you particularly like or who've won the most awards in previous contests, message them and invite them to join your project. Finally, as a way of encouraging the widest variety of ideas during the initial stages, we keep designs hidden from other designers. Once we've zeroed in on the best one, we put all the designs on view with comments explaining what we like about them and why. This intensifies the competition and encourages some incredible final designs.

There are many other crowdsourcing design sites: designcrowd.com, crowdspring.com, choosa.net to name but a few. Experience has taught us that even if you are lucky enough to find a competent designer to work with, nothing beats the creativity of the crowd. You can use crowdsourcing to collect ideas and then have your designer expand and refine the best of the bunch. We will talk about other things that could be crowdsourced in the upcoming posts.

One final point: what if you are absolutely unable to even visualize your idea? Image block. Not to worry, it happens to all of us now and then, especially when searching for that catchy stock photo for the blog post. A great way to kick start your imagination is to type a few words into Google Images and see what comes up. It's free and it can get you thinking about where to take it next.

Rachel, Dan, & Dmitry

Thursday, February 6, 2014

The Art of Hiring

In our recent Hire Bright and Hungry post we talked about some of the key criteria for making your best hires. Today we discuss specific processes that will help bring the very best into your organization. Keep in mind that local applicant assessment laws may apply with regard to some of the specifics you may choose to subject your applicants to.

Find a Winning Personality
Although personality typing is reputedly employed by about 20% of employers, we haven't used it in any formal way when hiring. That's not to say, however, that we don't take personality into account when hiring. For example, the best sales folk tend to be "pathologically optimistic." Even though we haven't yet found one who's truly pathological, high-energy, positive individuals do seem to be successful in sales and marketing positions. For our support team we had very favorable outcomes with hires who were nurturing, didactic, and enjoyed solving problems. For accounting, attention to detail was the personality type at the top of our list. As for using personality typing to find software developers, don't even think about it; just find out if your prospect can code and gently lure him or her with a promise of free food and clean clothing. But, seriously though folks, the best programmers come in all personality types. Everything else being equal, you can come across a suitable applicant whether they have a personality or not.

Professional Qualification Is Crucial
Next, we devised tests for every position, even for executive applicants. If you're looking to fill a PR position, applicants should be able to write a reasonable press release in a about an hour, given all the facts. A competent salesperson should be able to handle a basic set of objections as they convince you to buy the pen you're holding in your hand, and so on. Don't be afraid to ask applicants to demonstrate that they can do the job. Even if you are hiring a person with no experience, they should be able to read and write, especially if they're applying for an office job. Giving them a copy of your old press release with deliberate errors is a basic minimum; unless, of course, they are a developer, in which case, just give them some coding exercises to make sure they can code.

We strongly recommend that you test all prospective executives. They may have spent years concocting a very convincing narrative, but when it comes to showing the skills they'll actually need on the job, you may be unpleasantly surprised. Obviously, if you discover that applicants can't do the job, it's pointless for either side to take matters further.

For some industries professional certifications, background, and drug screening may be mandatory. Check your local legislation to find out if this applies to your organization as well.

Finally, now that you've ascertained that all the gold feathers are in place, go ahead and interview that future golden goose. They've invested enough time to prove themselves; now it's your turn.

Did You Find the Missing Piece of the Puzzle to Fill Out Your Team Fabric?
Get together a few folks across the team: a manager, future team members and possibly a few cross-functional team members; make sure they come armed with questions to cover the basic ground: work history, response to criticism, hobbies, etc. And get in to as much detail as possible to better understand applicants' individual drivers. Don't forget to de-brief your hiring committee after the interview. Questions help to ensure that you don't just get the "seemed-like-a-nice-guy" response as your interview feedback – that's pretty much useless in terms of hiring criteria. As your team gets larger, and the task of hiring gets delegated elsewhere, make the same basic principles with regard to hiring continue and continue to evolve in line with your changing organization.

Human beings have a knack of spotting when there's something incongruous about an applicant; even though they might not immediately be able to put their finger on it. Try to get at it and understand what it is. You may be able to find out more by following up on applicants' references and reviewing their social media history, but don't rely on these sources alone. If something bothers you, don't be afraid to go with your gut feeling.

You may think you had found the missing piece of the puzzle. Not so fast! What have you done to convey this vision to your star applicant and get their buy-in to come on-board? Getting them to say "Yes," will take some additional effort but it is well worth it!

Don't Leave Them Hanging!
Once you've got all the information and everyone's on the same page about moving forward, don't torture the applicant with months of anticipation :). Just make the offer. The title of this article is a deliberate misnomer. There is an art to spotting and bringing out the best in applicants at an interview, but the actual assessment of the applicants is a process that a company has to develop and apply consistently – and to all the applicants – if it is going to satisfy its unique hiring needs.

What applicant assessment practices do you use to make your organization stronger?

Rachel, Dan, & Dmitry