Missed hires

My first hire at Secfi was a terrible miss. I had thought I knew what I was looking for in a candidate, but in actuality, I overindexed on background and relevant experience. And I severely underindexed on hustle, initiative and fit.

Background and relevant experience is important, don’t get me wrong. You can’t completely ignore that and expect to find a good hire. Relevant experience more so than background. In terms of background, I don’t pay too much attention to school, major, etc. Most of the high performers I hired do not come from Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.

Relevant experience is important depending on the role you are hiring for. There are just too many roles where experience is major leverage. I do believe that relevant experience may be a lot less relevant for certain roles such as Business Development. I’ve hired many people for my BD team that have not had direct BD experience and they have been fantastic.

The biggest thing I look for in a hire by a large margin is hustle and initiative. At a startup, you need people who can go off on their own and operate without guidelines or a playbook. In most situations at a startup, there are no playbooks as you’re inventing it as you go. Someone needs to be self-motivated to hustle to get shit done, or you won’t be successful at a startup.

Fit is where the magic happens. In a sense, everything goes into “fit”. But when I look for fit for my team and our company, I simplify things and look for people who have the same goals and mindset. The main goal is to grow this company - individual accolades and achievements come along with that, but we need to be of the mindset that growing the company comes first.

In terms of mindset, I look for people who want to operate in a team environment. Growing up playing sports, I believe that the most successful teams operate with a championship mindset. That is putting the team first and working together. I can write paragraphs on this, but that’s hopefully a future post.

Missed hires unfortunately happen often at startups. It’s easy to like a candidate for the wrong reasons. It’s taken me 5+ years of hiring at Secfi to really hone in on my methodology and it has worked ever since I made that first missed hire. It’ll continue to evolve over time and change as our startup’s needs change as well.