When Good Isn’t Good Enough

Great Business Week article (written by CEO of Rapleaf) on hiring the right employees as a startup or small company.

A company with fewer than 50 employees needs great programmers, not just good ones. And once you find them, you have to hold on to them. A startup needs people who not only can think creatively and process complex concepts quickly, but who are also fun to be around and enjoy working with others. We also look for people who value good ideas even when they come from someone else and who are unafraid to seize opportunities to grow. In a nutshell, we want the person everyone else asks for advice. In college, this is the person every other computer science student wanted on his team. No wonder so many people hire friends and former colleagues. One of the best predictors of future success is past performance.

Once you find great people, you need to work at keeping them. This, too, is an art.

The thing about great people is that they only want to work with other great people. This leaves you in something of a bind once you recruit a few. From then on, you can only recruit other great people or risk losing the ones you have.

Some great tips:

Don’t rely on academic background
Ask the candidate to solve a hard problem or show their creative skills, An example might be to explain a database to an 8 year old.
Avoid false positives (multiple rounds of interviews)
Work at keeping your great people
Big innovation often comes from massive collaboration and rapid iteration, get your people in one location