Building Talent
Attract + retain top talent with responsible innovation.
Purpose
- Build a company with a compelling mission and you’ll be surprised how that lowers the friction for attracting and retaining top talent.
- Hiring is hard. A little bit of process and curated metrics can create a culture where people want to work. Remember, “people don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses.”
- Lay early groundwork for the kind of org you want to lead and you'll stand out from other startups and gain an accumulating advantage.
- You have a choice on organization structure and the permission structure for making decisions.
Method
- Map your approach
Break your recruiting approach into strategic + tactical work.
- From a strategic standpoint, people want to work for a company with a good mission + vision. How are you going to communicate that mission + vision to help source the right candidates?
- From a tactical standpoint, what hiring process will you build to attract and retain the right candidates? What metrics will you track so you don’t end up with a homogenous team that can imperil your long term success?
- Measure your funnel
When you recruit, keep track of who responds to your ads, who gets through your process, and who ends up accepting an offer. Measuring from the beginning helps identify early patterns and blind spots so you can course correct. Homogenous organizations run the risk of groupthink. - Look for values alignment
Once you have a candidate pool, make sure interview questions reflect company values. Add to the standard questions ones that reflect your internal goals, such as:
- What specific skills and traits are non-negotiables for your org?
- How do you balance specialized expertise with adaptability?
- What is your approach to diversity of skills in technical teams?
- How will you evaluate potential beyond credentials?
- Score objectively
Before an interview, create a scorecard to help each member of an interview loop evaluate candidates. Articulated metrics will help you make better decisions, especially when you’re moving fast (See Tools, below). - Build for retention
Effective recruitment includes retention. Clear onboarding, performance evaluation frameworks, and promotion pathways and criteria help retain talent. Help new team members rapidly develop skills, create an environment where technical and non-technical talent can collaborate effectively, and build a team that reflects your user base.
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Trap Doors
- Be humane when…
Be humane when you put people through a hiring process. Every candidate is a potential word of mouth recruiter for you. Even if they aren’t the right hire, how can you make them likely to refer their friends to your company? - Don’t put off…
Don’t put off everything for when you “finally get HR infrastructure in place.” That’s just creating another kind of technical debt for someone else to clean up. Seed-strapping is here to stay and you might never be so large that you have a full HR team – in which case you’ll be the one cleaning up that technical debt. - Don’t make things too…
Don’t make things too complicated at the beginning. The most important thing is to establish benchmarks and let the team know you have them.
Soundbites aside, there’s a business case for building a diverse organization.
Simply put, every piece of research shows that more diverse organizations outperform on every metric. It’s hard for diversity to move the needle without intentionality
Cases
Hear Gitlab’s co-founder talk about how transparency, remote work, and a written handbook helped them scale to 30M users in this podcast.
Source: Ries, Eric. “How GitLab scaled to 30M users with transparency, remote work, and the ultimate employee handbook.” The Lean Startup, 2025. Available here.
Read about a “bottoms-up” structure on Pinterest’s growth engineering team in this post.
Source: Chandra, Neeraj. “Bottoms-Up: How the Pinterest growth team decentralizes its structure.” Medium, 2019. Available here.
Read about Slack’s approach through a period of rapid growth in this report.
Source: Slack. 2018. “Diversity at Slack.” Available here.
Read about how Textio navigates a changing landscape in this post.
Source: Howard, Rocki. “From practitioner to practitioner: navigating DEI in an era of uncertainty.” Textio, 2025. Available here.
Who to Enlist
Use advisors, coaches or board members to help you refine your leadership goals.
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Work with cofounders to articulate a talent philosophy.
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Ask early team members to weigh in on what attracted them to the position and what makes them stay.