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How to Recruit and Hire Top People for a Startup

Given my experience co-founding Standout Jobs (which I sold in 2010), I’ve written a fair number of posts about sourcing, recruiting and hiring. Most of my focus is on sourcing, recruiting and hiring for startups, but many of the lessons learned and experience gained can be applied to different types and sizes of businesses.

Without question: Recruiting is hard.

And time and time again, the #1 challenge that most startup founders speak about is recruiting people. It’s not raising money, closing deals, doing sales, finding partners. It’s hiring people. I bet if you polled a bunch of startup founders the data would be very conclusive.

What’s incredible is that this has been the case for many, many years. The processes by which we raise financing have changed quite a bit in recent years. At least the emergence of angel investors, angel groups and seed accelerators and incubators has radically changed the funding landscape. And continues to do so.

But what about startup recruiting? What’s change there? Nothing. Personally, I believe it’s because startup CEOs and founders are typically very inexperienced at recruiting and hiring people (I don’t know many startup founders with an HR background!), and they simply don’t devote enough time to the process.

Anyway, looking back I wanted to put together a collection of all the posts I’ve written on the subjects of sourcing, recruiting and hiring for startups. Maybe as a collection of posts and ideas all in one place it will help more people put their recruiting efforts into high gear!

  • How to Design a Successful Interview Process for Hiring Top Talent
  • 8 Things to Look for When Hiring Startup Talent
  • Recruit Top Talent Before and While Raising Capital
  • 10 Steps to Successfully Sourcing and Recruiting Startup Talent
  • How to Turn Your Company into a Recruiting Magnet
  • The Key to Startup Hiring: Build a Magnet
  • The Future of Recruiting is Inbound
  • The Future of Recruiting is Trust Agents

Ben Yoskovitz

Founding Partner at Highline Beta, a hybrid venture studio and VC firm that works with large, ambitious companies to identify new areas of opportunity through internal and external innovation.

Previously I was VP Product at VarageSale and GoInstant (acq. $CRM), and Founding Partner at Year One Labs.

Angel investments include: Breather, Spoiler Alert, SendWithUs and others.

My bio »

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