Here's how to build an effective team for an IT startup

Let's start with hiring. The way you hire defines your overall business success. The general principle is simple - keep searching until you find the best candidate. No compromises. At the beginning of my career, I hired candidates who didn't suit the project 100%. There were always some excuses on my side. The job for which I was hiring does not always seem vital. I believed that the candidate would quickly catch up. Frankly speaking, sometimes I just didn't want to search further. 

After two faulty hires, I realized that I was making a big mistake. The unfit candidates suffered themselves and negatively affected the team's productivity. Today I hire people based on the following principles:

1. The recruiter can search for candidates, but only those who will manage candidates' work should contact them directly. The longer a startup can hire without involving a recruiter, the better the team will be. As a manager, search for candidates yourself, contact them, communicate one-on-one.
2. Create an excellent test assignment. It should be comprehensive enough to demonstrate the full range of the candidate's abilities. A candidate should formulate an issue, prove the solution, and eventually solve the problem within one task. Do not forget that the test assignment must be paid for. You demand a lot, but you also cover the costs.
3. Include a trial in-office week as a critical element of the hiring process. Quite often, a candidate fits the manager professionally but will not accommodate other colleagues. The new employee should be professional and be comfortable with others. A week spent with your team will help you and the applicant understand each other better.
4. If you have hired someone, trust them 100%. And if you don't trust, don't hire. Try to surround yourself with specialists whose work and skills you do not doubt. The worst things I've seen in the startup business happened when leaders lost faith in their teams. Trust me, your business can survive any setback other than this one.

Now that you have a team of professionals getting along well, it's time to establish processes. Team building is about building the process, not its content. Often executives get bogged down in micromanagement and re-doing ordinary tasks. This could have been avoided if a business had well-established procedures. This applies to every part of a startup, from the legal counsel to the development and QA department. Teams do not scale; processes do. Keep this in mind even when you are hiring. Having worked as a venture investor, I have always paid most attention to establishing work processes in the teams I have invested in. You should never forget that no matter how good the staff is, it is the proper process that makes people produce great things.

Another essential secret I want to share is simple. Maintain a comfortable climate in the team. A team built on trust and professionalism can count on independence and freedom. It can decide where and how to work. As long as the work gets done well, don't ask employees how much time they spend on work, why they need to leave early, and why they take vacations so often. Get together with your team in an informal setting once a quarter. Look for common ground outside of work.