The Key Driver of Startup Hiring & Team Building Success

I wanted to share a quick observation I’ve seen in the tech labor market since last February (when the US tech ecosystem started contracting a bit). In conversations with founders, I’ve been increasingly hearing a focus on hiring the “most senior team” possible and that for every position they need a ‘senior’ developer with a laundry list of technical requirements that a unicorn would be lucky to possess. The definition I hear for a “senior’ developer is years of experience, particular technologies they’ve worked with for a long time, etc. A CEO, product owner, developer, QA automation engineer, and designer all rolled into one.

This desire to hire only “senior” people at startups comes into significant conflict with my observations of what drives success (based on the 75+ of startups I’ve been involved with over the past 7 years). There is nothing wrong with having ‘senior developers’ on your team…in fact you should have some. Just like Argentina’s World Cup team should have a Lionel Messi and an Angel DiMaria…but they also need to be surrounded by a team who is motivated to do the work that is required of them (in the case of Argentina…that meant running, defending, staying organized defensively, winning tackles, etc and in the case of a development team it means bug fixing, refactoring, paying attention to detail on small UI elements, etc…the not so sexy stuffy). To continue with the Argentina soccer metaphor…their coach Lionel Scaloni had never even coached a professional team before. The moral of this example is that some great people have limited experience and some great people have tons of experience. Experience is often not a great proxy for competence combined with a winning attitude.

Startups need balanced technology teams with senior leaders and highly motivated mid-level and junior team members whose tasks are at the achievable edge of their skills. What I’ve seen is that there are a lot more people who are technically capable of getting most jobs done and far fewer people who are highly motivated for the specific work they are assigned and are proactive in terms of putting their stamp of excellence and attention to detail on anything they touch. I was chatting with a friend (cc Jeremy Klein ) in November about what makes someone irreplaceable to a team — its almost never the hard skills (whether a developer, designer, salesperson, marketer, etc) but rather how they work within the team and make their group more successful.

A few months ago, I had another great conversation (cc Scott MacGregor ) about why so many employers over-index for experience and under-index for intangibles like “resilience, diligence, grit”. He had an excellent theory which is that ‘experience’ is much easier to quantify on a resume than ‘resilience, diligence, grit” and evaluating for those intangibles requires a lot more work. Since people are generally lazy, they often default to the less effort-intensive method. If you ask a startup founder directly “do you want someone gritty”, they will say “yes of course” as if its the most obvious thing in the world. The irony is that these intangible skills are the hardest to find and the real drivers of great teams.

I plan to write a longer article on this topic with examples and data in the next few weeks. I have seen so much evidence of the misalignment between startups and potential talent over the past 10 months. The purpose of this post is not to say that it’s wrong to hire experienced talent…it definitely is not. Every team needs to start with a foundation of great leaders AND THEN add other team members whose work challenges them and demands the best of them. This intersection between competence and motivation is the real secret to great teams and requires deliberate team composition planning. It also scales much more effectively.