Seed Stage Best Practices: Talent Hacking
A few tips for CEOs to get the talent flywheel moving
Just like VCs, startups are in the talent business.
The best early stage startups have a talent flywheel. They attract talented, motivated, culture-fitting team members who become high performers. Top players attract other top players. Success begets success. The talent flywheel accelerates.
Many seed stage startups have a talented founding team, yet struggle to build their talent flywheel. Some of the most common pitfalls:
Wishful thinking: projecting positive attributes on a candidate when evidence is weak…one subpar performer can quickly lead to another, and the talent flywheel grinds to a halt
Low expectations: startups have tight budgets, so it can be tempting to reduce expectations…a surefire way to attract subpar talent
No time: it takes time to build a talent flywheel, so a CEO must make it a priority and dedicate significant time to it (at leas 20-30%)
Let’s say a CEO avoids these pitfalls. What should they be doing?
One of my favorite talent hacks only requires Google, LinkedIn Premium, the CEO title, and cold outreach.
Let’s say you want to hire your first marketer. Let’s also say you don’t have a personal network filled with ace marketers.1 Here’s what to do:
Learn what a great marketer looks like. You’ll need to talk to (at least) 5-10 accomplished marketers. So, find 10 non-competitive startups that are a stage or two ahead of you that have marketing that you admire.
Go to LinkedIn. At each of the 10 companies, find someone in marketing. Send them an InMail over LinkedIn. Complement them on their startup’s marketing execution. Tell them you are CEO & founder of a growing startup and you are trying to prepare for your first marketing hire. Ask if they would be willing to chat for 15 minutes. If you can write a good email, you should be able to get a response rate of 30% or more. If LinkedIn response is poor, look up their emails and send the message to their inbox. Keep on doing outreach until you’ve talked to 5-10 marketers. If you haven’t done this before, you will be surprised that being a CEO & founder will make people at later stage startups particularly responsive to you.
Prepare for each conversation. To get the conversation going, be ready to make a specific compliment about their startup’s marketing. Ask them about how it was accomplished. After getting a sense for how they execute, guide the conversation to talent. Ask them for their opinion on what to look for in a first marketing hire. Ask them if they have any talented marketers who might be interested in talking to you. Note: don’t try to hire the person you are talking with in these initial conversations - you need to first cast a wide talent net.
Form your ideal candidate profile (ICP). Once you have talked to 5-10 (or more) experienced marketers, you should be able to form a view about the ideal candidate for you.
Build your funnel by efficient targeting. This is the fun part. Use Google + LinkedIn to do interest-based targeting to find candidates likely to respond. Let’s say your startup is in non-profit software in San Francisco. Try this in Google:
linkedin.com "marketing director" volunteering software san francisco
This will search LinkedIn for someone with Marketing Director in their experience, who has volunteering experience, and has ties to San Francisco. A marketer with volunteering experience is more likely to be interested in a non-profit software startup than one without it. Iterate your search to get more targeted. The key is that everyone has some signals of their interests on their LinkedIn profile. Think about what are the ideal interests for someone who will be attracted to your company’s mission and voila!
This strategy won’t turn water into wine, but it will give a good push in the right direction. The hardest part is finding the hours in the day. Like any goal - improving fitness, learning to play an instrument, starting a Substack - it will take time. The good news is that the more you do it, the more efficient you become.
A talent flywheel is the single most valuable asset in the technology industry. So hopefully you can find the time!
If you have a strong network, use it! But I would still advocate for using cold outreach to widen your talent net