# 5 Secrets to Hiring Top Tier Talent for Your Startup 📈 Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lypHMpAoOsA Duration: 9 min Language: English Words: 1835 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/lypHMpAoOsA --- [0:00] in this video I cover five secrets to hiring top tier talent for your startup and if you stick around to the end I'll share a bonus secret that might just be the most important one in the video I'm Rob Walling I've started and grown six companies invested in more than 100 startups and written three books about entrepreneurship building your team with top tier Talent great team members however you describe them it can be absolutely game changing for you and your startup and how far and how fast you can grow it but hiring top tier Talent is not easy because top tier Talent can work anywhere and you have to [0:32] show folks why working for you will be amazing well it will be different why it will make them happy great team members want to be challenged by their work constantly learning they want to enjoy the day-to-day because they don't have to put up with crappy work experiences and they've likely worked at companies they didn't enjoy and so in order to recruit folks like that you can't look like every other company you can't be a commodity just another paycheck you have to do some things differently and that's a great segue into my first point which is to be different when I was hiring for my last SAS company I used to write in [1:04] the job description and communicate in interviews that we view software as a craft that we are crafts people we have 2.5 lines of test code for every line of production code we build very carefully our code base is immaculate but communicated to Engineers that this is probably a pretty unique and interesting place to work and obviously when I communicated it to a customer success person or a sales person or a support person it was a different conversation but you get the idea you want folks to know that working at your company is not going to be like every other experience they have and it's not enough to just [1:37] say that you're different you actually have to be different because if you convince people to come work for you and you're just like every other employer and it's kind of a crappy job they're not gonna stay very long and you're going to turn people out and realize that word gets around it's not enough just to say you're different you actually do have to behave differently and stand for something be opinionated about what you're doing and and realize the differences that you have between yourself and other employers and then communicate that tip number two is to work on interesting problems amazing team members they want to be challenged [2:11] and they want to learn day to day it's especially helpful if you happen to be working on a really interesting Innovative product but it doesn't need to be my last SAS company was an email service provider it's kind of a boring business there are a bunch of them out there and is building an email service provider that interesting probably not but again when I would recruit developers the conversation was the code base is immaculate we're scaling we're growing fast so scaling can often be an interesting problem to work on we have a ton of different ux paradigms really amazing designs so the product looks great it's fun to work on there's going [2:42] to be a variety of work because we send a lot of emails but also we have user interfaces and we render emails and you know there was so much going on that a developer could pretty obviously see the work was going to be interesting and they weren't going to be grinding away or working at a financial institution where it was going to be a bunch of grunt work and so even if your company itself is not not in the most interesting space there are often pretty interesting problems that you're working on day to day and learning how to communicate those to potential recruits is a good way to find great people tip [3:11] number three is to lean into your advantages as a small company whether you're bootstrap mostly bootstrapped High pay great benefits are probably not going to be your advantages those are the advantages of Fortune 500 Fortune 1000 companies but those companies also have Achilles heels and that they have politics they have these big massive teams they have a lot of meetings we used to call it combat pay where you weren't going to enjoy your job but you probably get paid a lot and have really good retirement and usually great team members you know they don't want to deal with the headache of that and so your big Advantage is not pay or benefits [3:46] it's finding out what motivates top performers and giving that to them here are some examples that I've used at companies that I've grown so I would tell people we are a fully remote small team there's no politics you're going to work with and learn directly from the founders we're a fast growing company so it's interesting it's exciting and we're working on interesting problems I could give that exact pitch which was 100 True to any role that I was hiring for and then for specific roles I could add even more differences even more advantages that we have over what could potentially be a higher paying job things like if [4:20] you're a developer you're going to have a huge impact on the product and the company you're going to work on an amazing code base ship features on a daily or a weekly basis where if I was hiring a customer success person I said you know we have a great product our customers love us it makes your job easy because the product's not buggy and we have high feature velocity so the bulk of your job is not dealing with angry customers who are complaining that the product is buggy and complaining that we don't ship features fast enough because that wasn't the case and so you figure out the advantages you do have as a [4:48] small Nimble agile bootstrapped mostly bootstrap startup and you communicate those to the people that you're recruiting and that can make a big difference in the quality of recruits that you can land tip number four is to think of your job description as a sales letter trying to convince someone that you're an amazing company to work for and that they should apply and that they should really want this job part of this involves writing like a human being and having personality not copying the the target the Best Buy The General Mills you know whatever Fortune 5 000 company you can think of their job descriptions are pretty dry and so we used to have [5:23] lines in our job description for developers like crappy code makes you want to flip a table which is it's a quirky thing to say right but it made people realize I might be a fit for this like I want to work with a team that has this much personality in addition you want to communicate that you are picky about who you hire there's a Velvet Rope policy you don't just hire anyone and this makes you a great company to work for it's a great place to work when you know they're going to be working with other top performers a players want to work with other a players and if you are [5:53] able to communicate well that you are picky about who you hire it can show that it's your great company to work for my fifth and final tip before I get to the bonus is one that I actually struggle with and the advice is to build an audience the reason I struggle with this advice is because you can absolutely build an amazing company with no audience I've seen not just tens but hundreds if not thousands of Founders who have successful companies their bootstrap they mostly bootstrap and they don't need an audience because they build a great product they sell it to real customers for real money they learn [6:23] how to Market they do the blocking and tackling and they grow the company you don't need an audience to build an amazing startup but it makes hiring a lot easier I'm gonna be honest I know I've had an audience for what 15 years now and when you have an audience that knows you likes you and they trust you it is so much easier to hire great people especially if top tier Talent is in your audience top tier Talent is constantly learning and so they are reading blogs reading books they're listening to podcasts if you are one of the people they learn from it really does make hiring easier because it's no [6:56] longer an anonymous process you have kind of a curated group poop when you have an audience and you will find that you're going to have a higher percentage of probably top tier talent in that audience and realize that not everyone wants to build an audience I get it in that case don't like I'm not saying you have to do this but it is one way that I have taken advantage of to hire some really a players and I've seen other folks do it as well so it's something to consider I'm going to tell you my bonus tip in just a second but before I do that if this video was helpful I'd love [7:25] it if you'd hit that like button and subscribe to the channel we have videos like this coming out every week in addition to conference talks from the in-person events we run live streams there's all kinds of stuff coming at you and it's really top quality content aimed at helping you build launch and grow your bootstraps or mostly bootstrap SAS company and my bonus secret is that hiring is hard and hiring great people is amazing but retaining those people is perhaps even more important great people want to learn they want challenges they want autonomy you have to figure out how to let them grow and evolve and learn [7:57] over time so that they don't move on because you can hire all the great people in the world but if you turn them out because you misrepresented what the work experience is like or you just don't keep folks interested top tier Talent will move on because they have an infinite amount of choices and they can go anywhere at any time so realize that hiring great people is hard but retaining them is so so so important I hope these ideas for hiring top tier talent for your startup were helpful I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you foreign [Music] --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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