Many people talk about the importance of recruiting in building a startup. What most people mean by that is that attracting and retaining key talent is incredibly valuable. Here at RunKeeper, we agree. But our recruiting process is important to us for another reason beyond who we end up hiring – the actual process we go through to identify key hires is as valuable as the end result.
I’ll give you an example. Now that we launched the Health Graph API, we are currently searching for a head of platform evangelism. This is a key hire for the company, as building out the Health Graph ecosystem is a cornerstone of our future direction and success. We need to make sure that we get the right person to come in and be the face of the company to the developer community.
When we started looking for this person, the first step was to calibrate internally on a job description. The next step was to start socializing it with thought leaders in the industry. This includes platform evangelists, people who have built teams of platform evangelists, product managers and heads of business development from web platform companies who have worked closely with platform evangelists, and so on.
This socializing process does few things. First, it enables us to get feedback on how we are thinking about the role from people who have been doing it for a long time. This helps us refine the profile of the person we are looking for, and get a better sense of how we want to go about building out the developer community. It also enables us to start building up a rolodex and credibility in the platform evangelism world. The more platform evangelists that know about our efforts and think highly of what we are doing, the easier it will be to establish credibility once we identify the person we ultimately want to hire.
As we start to cover more ground, word starts to spread and when these platform evangelists come across others in their peer group who may be thinking about making a career change, we will be top-of-mind and the first person they put that person in touch with. Before long, interesting candidates start bubbling up. And when they do, we have a clearer idea of what we are after from the discussions we have had with other platform evangelists along the way. We then narrow the process down to a short-list of candidates who we like and feel good about, check references, and from there, hopefully choose the one that is the best fit and move forward with a shiny new head of platform evangelism! The process we use to narrow down the candidates probably merits a separate post altogether, so I won’t even try.
Along the way, all of the seeds we have planted with other thought leaders from the industry are not wasted effort. These then serve as the foundation for a rolodex we can leverage as we then seek to hire product managers, heads of business development, and other key hires as we grow. These conversations and relationships can also lead to additional unintended benefits, such as partnership opportunities, introductions to key investors/advisors, and general buzz/excitement around our company and the market opportunity that is in front of us.
So as you can see, while our main objective is to hire a star, we get a lot of additional benefits out of the recruiting process beyond the person we end up hiring. I have been meaning to write this post for a while, in order to share some of the tips and best practices that we try to follow when building out our team. I would love to hear from others about the approaches you have found success with, as I am sure that we can learn a lot from what all of you are doing as well.
