Introduction

My name is Vardhan, and I am the founder of Tortoise. In the past, I have built and sold a startup, launched Udacity in India as its first Country Manager, and lead TripAdvisor's India market development.

I had also consulted startups like FamPay and UrbanPiper in the early days when hiring was always on the top of the mind of founders.

Below is a playbook of a sort that I created to help pass on most of my learning while devising a robust hiring system in my assignments for founders.

<aside> 💡 Assumptions:

1. Most of these points are formulated for an early stage team and may not apply after a certain point.
2. It is also assumed that the company is capitalized enough to pay the required salaries.

</aside>

It's tough to build a great team

Hiring is tough, and it requires considerable effort and time to do it right. If you are a first-time founder, you will need to internalize the following:

1. Hiring is not trivial and often the most important job of the founders
2. Bad hires hurt a lot, so avoid reckless offers
3. Culture fit is important
4. No, you are not a natural in identifying good folks. Your hiring skills can always be improved
5. You might not know that, but you likely have blinding biases

Guiding Principles

1. Your values and principles will form the base of the culture you will build. A right culture will act as both a booster for business and insurance in tough times. Remember:
   • Culture is defined by what behavioral traits are promoted, tolerated, and penalized inside the company.
   • It evolves with time, new managers and business performance.
2. Identify the core motivation of the interviewing candidates early on increase the probability of accepting the offer letter. The top 6 motivators are as follows:
   1. Money (not always at top, but true for well funded startups)
   2. Brand
   3. High quality/ high impact work with flexibility around processes usually implemented in a low-trust environment
   4. Access to leadership and mentors from within and outside the startups
   5. Their own entrepreneurial ambitions
   6. A comparatively less political environment with a better understanding of decision making, when switching from a large corp.
3. The output of every team member should be > Cost of that team member. The costs to consider are:
   • Time to train and manage
   • Salary costs
   • Coordination cost that creeps with more people working on the same project
   • Externalities, like insecurity to existing members.
4. Speed:
   1. Hiring: Slow;
   2. Firing for fit issue: Fast;
   3. Firing for performance: Medium and after thorough evaluation
5. Do not forcefully optimize for advance concerns like diversity, benefits, Tennis Table etc. early on. The early team needs to be gritty, cohesive and respect-worthy to each other. Every other optimization can wait for you to stabilize. Google or Amazon's best practices cannot be copied by you blindly.

Steps to build a hiring system