Hiring for Startups

Hiring great people is one of the biggest problems facing the startup world right now. With less resources & prestige than Facebook or Google, how do you hire the best people?

Below is a handpicked list of the best articles on hiring for startups, curated by StartupDigest, to help you hire the best people who believe in your mission.

PS – Startups looking to hire, we also recommend checking out our StartupDigest VIP product.

Management Quality Assurance
By Ben Horowitz

Ben, co-founder of the VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz, outlines the requirements for becoming great at hiring and retaining top talent.

Can Recruiters Work with Startups?
By David Shen

While traditional recruiters tend not to attract the best candidates, new recruiting tools are becoming more useful to startups.

How to think about cash vs. equity compensation
By Jason Cohen

Jason helps you think about constructing the right compensation package for a key hire.

Recruiting tips
By Kelly Ford

Treat recruiting as a long term plan, not a series of one-shot blasts.

Hiring Developers: You’re Doing It Wrong
By Udo Schroeter

Allow your developer candidates to speak freely about their work instead of trying to find out who’s best at taking a random test.

Bored people quit
By Michael Lopp

Michael helps you think about how to detect employee boredom, act on it, and prevent it from coming back.

How to hire an idiot
By Bill

Even if you have a solid hiring process in place, some of the people you hire won’t turn out as advertised. Remove them from your team quickly and move on.

On Not Hiring
By Gabriel Weinberg

Great post by Gabriel on how holding off on hiring can actually strengthen your startup over the long term.

Commandos, Infantry, and Police
By Jeff Atwood

Jeff, co-founder of StackExchange, helps you think about the different types of people your company needs to operate efficiently.

Hiring Rockstars
By Scott Weiss

Scott, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, helps you think about what it takes to attract, add, and integrate top-quality people into your team.

Recruiting programmers to your startup
By Chris Dixon

Software development is a creative activity and needs to be treated as such.

On hiring: How not to annoy developers
By Fred Wu

Fred helps you think about building relationships with developers, timing, testing candidates, and treating developers with respect.