Startups, why didn't you recruit the best employees?

They prepare articles that tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. This article mainly on why the start-up company has not been able to recruit the most outstanding staff of the analysis, and put forward the corresponding views for the entrepreneur reference.

Startups often hear a piece of advice: Be sure to recruit the best employees, no matter how big your company is, you can't lower your hiring standards. This advice is true, because only a good team composed of excellent employees can turn a great idea into a great product.

About this suggestion, reasoning, it always feels wrong. We always talk about recruiting the best people in the world, and in fact, we're just hiring people around us who are good, not the best in the world. If we really want to hire the best employees in the world, we should really try to do that instead of just talking about it. To do this, we must abandon the idea that the recruiting staff must be able to work in the company.

When I joined with another co-founder Joel Spolsky in 2008 to jointly create the FAQ website Stack Overflow (now stack Exchange), my office was in Berkeley, and Spolsky's office was in New York, At that time we mainly through the telephone communication work matters. Later, they continued to join the developers from North Carolina, Texas and Oregon State, Britain and Germany, where they were still in their original offices. I am not in this company now, as far as I understand, the company now employs nearly 150 people, respectively, in different parts of the world office.

From the experience of stack overflow, one of the most valuable lessons I've learned is that many of the best software engineers are not from Silicon Valley, but only around the world, not just in the Bay Area, can you really be qualified to say you only hire the best people and do what you do.

Discourse is my new company, it is a forum platform that enables customers, fans and viewers around the world to discuss and communicate with each other on topics of common interest. I think that the internal structure of the company should be able to reflect their own user situation. If you want to have users all over the world use your software, you should let the world help you develop the software.

Practice Time

In the case of GitHub, at least two-thirds of its employees work in different parts of the world. Then look at WordPress, most of its employees are also off-site office. These are the typical examples of successful companies that have deeply influenced the internet and why they have been so successful, and I think making off-site office a part of the company's DNA plays a crucial role.
The ideal situation is that the company was originally created in the concept of off-site office, off-site office has become the company's intrinsic cultural genes.

Show the results of your work VS. Only people appear

An employee who goes to work on time does not show that he is doing his job effectively. This is in the company, not at school. In the company is not the attendance, but the results of the work.

The work results to assess the staff more scientific:

(1) How many features did an employee develop this week?

(2) How many bugs did he fix in a week?

(3) How many effective exchanges did he have with his clients during the week?

(4) How fast does he program?

In discourse, we usually decide whether the job is good or bad according to the employee's work log, so that you can have an accurate understanding of the employee's work. In this process, you can use some tools, such as Asana and Basecamp. In short:

"Let employees record what they have done. It's not a ' to-do item ', it's a ' complete matter '.

I don't care when employees come to work, how they work, what they do in the corner of the earth, or how they work. If you recruit really the best employees, then these employees will be able to work with their own results to prove themselves.

How do you know if this is going to work? When you hire employees who find that the product has a problem, and take the initiative to solve the problem, when you can safely and fully empower employees to make their own changes in the product, although you know that the process they may make some mistakes. At these times, you know it's going to work.

Interview in a practical way

You must have encountered this situation: the candidate passed the basic test, and the company culture is also more consistent, but also smoothly through the telephone interview and face-to-face interview, and finally successfully joined the company. But when they do work, they find it hard to do their job. I've had this situation myself. My experience is that if you want to know whether a candidate is really competent for the job, the best way to do it is through the actual practice of interviewing. Choose a product problem that you do need to solve in a real-world job that should normally be resolved in about a week. This issue as a real-time assessment project to assess the applicant to see if he really has the ability to solve the problem in the appropriate period This problem-solving process, candidates can choose to work in the company, also can choose off-site office.

I also know that many managers may not be able to find a project that can be solved in a specified time. "If you can't find a project that can be used to assess a person's workload, you may not be able to assign tasks to your employees well in your usual job," he said. ”

There is no problem in stack overflow that cannot be found for the actual interview, because we have some open source build, we often use this as a test project for the actual interview and assessment of the candidates. If the applicant can complete the assessment task independently within the specified time, congratulations, you have found an excellent employee. So far, I have not met the interviewer who can not be qualified for my job through the actual interview test.

Recruiting from your own product community

I have found that the cultural fit between employees and companies is more important to the company than the skills the employee has. How to create a company culture in the case of employees ' general off-site office?

I know that not every company has a large community of developers, users, and fans, and if your company has such a community, you should recruit from the community. Because if you are in your own community, and they certainly agree with your company and your company's products, they will have a higher cultural fit with your company, which is exactly what you need.

Are there some advanced users who help answer other users ' questions on your forums every day? Has an engineer discovered a flaw in your product and alerted you in a timely manner? That's the kind of person you should try to recruit. To increase the weight of successful recruiting these people, you should increase your communication with them and offer them special offers to deepen their sense of identity with your company. In Discourse and Stack Overflow, that's what we do.

If your company is now too small to form a community of its own size, you have other options. There must be other communities of scale that are similar to the communities you want to build. Go to these communities and find people who resonate with you, and try to convince each other that it will not be a problem if the way is right.

Daily use of mass communication tools

If a lot of your company's employees are offsite, then the Mass communication tool plays a vital role, to be used at all times, to make it an important part of the work. For companies with off-site office problems, the following elements are essential:

Live Chat

If you have a lot of people in your team who are in the apart, and when you need to ask one of the questions that needs to be answered in a timely manner, you need the appropriate Instant messaging tools to help you, and now there are a lot of tools, including Hipchat, Slack, IM, etc. A particularly important point here is to ensure that everyone on the team can be contacted at any time using this communication tool.

Online bulletin Boards

Most of the time, team members who work offsite can understand the details of a project, but cannot understand the progress of many other projects. In this case, you'll need an online virtual bulletin board, and a lot of content can be posted on the bulletin boards, including team work Zhou Zhi, meeting minutes, and other issues that need to be announced. There are already many businesses offering online bulletin board services, and discourse itself offers such services.

Voice Video Chat

In many cases, it is not enough to communicate by voice, because a lot of information is difficult to get through pure voice communication. It is not easy for a company to be truly face-to-face, because it is possible to be 108,000 miles apart between people. In this case, the Voice video chat tool comes in handy.

In the case of fast enough speed, the effect of video chat is very close to the real face-to-face chat effect, you can capture each other's body language and facial expressions in real time, these are the mail exchange or pure voice communication can not match. I recommend that all members of the team have at least one video exchange per week. The conversation here doesn't have to be a lengthy video conference, and I hate those lengthy meetings without substance. In a company where office phenomenon is ubiquitous, regular video conferencing is still necessary to maintain the cohesion and efficiency of the team.

Report on team work every Monday

Every Monday, your company's team should submit a job report covering:

(1) What did we do last week?

(2) What are we going to do next week?

(3) What difficulties or concerns are encountered in the work?

The job report is not too long, and the more concise the job report is, the better it will be if it is guaranteed to contain the main useful information. Every Monday, the report will be posted on the online bulletin board, so that many off-site employees can well understand other people's work dynamics.

Meeting Minutes

Once you have a meeting to solve a problem, be sure to do the minutes of the meeting and put the minutes of the meeting on the online bulletin board so that those who are not in the meeting can selectively get information that is useful to them.
Likewise, the minutes of the meeting need not be too long. If you think the work of meeting minutes is too heavy, you can only say that you remember the wrong way. In fact, you only need to record the key information points, do not need to remember everything. What needs to be recorded include: participants, the topics discussed, the conclusions of the meeting, and the next step to work.

For some specific cases, off-site office also has its drawbacks

Brainstorming

On certain occasions, when you need a team brainstorming to collide with Sparks, the drawbacks of off-site office are evident. If you need to do brainstorming, it is best to be in a room, so that everyone's body language, facial expression can be at a glance, the collision between the views of each other is more likely to collide sparks. But in stack overflow and discourse, it's very rare to have such brainstorming. Even if we really need it, we can do it at the annual annual meeting, when the company's employees will gather together to imagine the next year's plans and dreams.

Staff Coaching

Coaching staff requires repeated communication and questioning between the master and the pupil. For a company with a ubiquitous office phenomenon, the coaching of new employees seems powerless. In this way, our solution is to avoid recruiting those who need counseling. Whether it's in stack overflow or discourse, we keep a high standard for recruiting staff, not because we don't believe in potential developers, but because for companies that are ubiquitous in our off-site offices, It's unrealistic to have a coaching training for new employees. If you want to develop a company by helping a junior developer grow into a senior developer, you have to make sure that you have enough time together.

After taking full account of the pros and cons, imagine what the developer's job would be like 20 years later, 40 years or even 60 years later. Or do you have to take a 2-hour bus to work every day?

"In your opinion, should the recruitment policy be based on the mode of work 10 years ago or should it be based on the mode of work after 10 years?" "The answer goes without saying.

Recruiting the best employees around the world, whether in discourse or stack Overflow, has been an important strategic advantage for the company. I am convinced that developers off-site office is the future trend of development. Although we will make some mistakes and waste some time in the process, it is worthwhile. The future is now, why wait?