Last week was exhausting, and I think it’s mostly because of hiring. Lots of calls, meetings, and text support for our design challenge. That being said, it’s also becoming clear to me that hiring is one of, if not THE most important thing for us to get right.

I’m excited – about growing the team and also in growing myself. To me the core of being a founder is simple: it’s being able to recruit capital and a team to execute on a shared vision.

Thinking about growing our team gets me really excited about the future and what’s in store. Here's what I'm learning about hiring from our experiences so far:

Trusting your gut

If it’s not a “hell yes”, then it’s a no.

This has been the guiding question of our hiring process.

When Helena first posed this to me, it helped me arrive at a decision immediately for a candidate. We would keep asking each other this for every candidate, and it quickly became the core mantra to our entire recruiting philosophy.

At larger companies, hiring is a broken down to a science. Rubrics are used to quantatively score candidates, and every step of the process is designed to eliminate individual bias.

This makes sense for a large company that is recruiting every year. They need to guarantee a minimum quality for the talent that they bring in. At that scale, the purpose of recruiting is to find people to fill in the existing corporate structure. Process limits variance and the long tail of bad outcomes, and in recruiting that means optimizing for not making a bad hire.

But process also caps your upside. In recruiting, this means you're probably missing opportunities to bring in a 10x engineer. Someone truly exceptional. Startups exist to swing big, and so it stands to reason that the approach to recruiting should be no different.

A lot of startups make the mistake of using rubrics & process in early recruiting. I know we did. The problem with this is that process is slow to adapt. If you're doing it right, you're probably learning more quickly than you can update your recruiting process. That's when it stops serving you and becomes something that is capping your upside potential.

Another hesitation with an intuition-driven approach is that it can feel "judgy". We don't like it when others jump to conclusions about us, so we hold back as well.

While I generally think people deserve the benefit of the doubt, I think it's different when it comes to running a startup. In startups, you either die by moving too slowly or making the wrong decision. Your job is to balance these things and make the highest quality decision with the information that's available in the shortest amount of time. That's why your intuition is your biggest edge as a founder.

Trusting your gut feels obvious, but it's more nuanced than that. It's doesn't mean you do whatever comes to mind first.

Where there's smoke, there's a fire

These are typically the questions Helena and I ask each other to debrief after a candidate call:

• How did it go? Is it a "hell yes"?
• If so, why? If not, why not?

The goal of these conversations is to gut check our intuitions and ask questions that quickly surface as much information as possible. All of our assumptions, biases, and feelings.

Then we try to play devil's advocate on some of these positions to see if they are falsifiable. The key question is: What would change your mind about this? Is there anything that would reverse this opinion? If so, what can you do to surface this?

For me what ultimately strikes the right balance is this:

1. Follow & trust my initial intuition that something is or isn't a "hell yes"
2. Explore why -> Do not take the first thing that pops into my head as reality. More often this justification is a reaction - something you conjure up to defned your position rather than the actual reason.

Putting our money where our mouth is

Here's what it means for us put this into practice:

• 1st phone screen w/ Helena → general screening, < 50% make it past this
• 2nd phone screen w/ Doug → more technical detail of previous projects, cover anything missing from initial screen
• 1 hr coding round screen → gauging general competency, quick filter because design challenge is a big commitment from us
• 1 week design challenge (8 hrs of actual work) → design & coding, very hard, 3 check-in’s w/ Doug & async support
• Reference checks
• 2 week contracting (ideally in-person) → work closely with rest of team
• Full-time offer

The goal of any hiring process is to answer a simple quesiton - “what would it be like to work with this person?”

The most direct way to gauge this is to a work trial with the candidate, but cost of that is high (for you and the candidate). That’s why we try to de-risk this as much as possible by asking ourselves "is this a hell yes" at every step of the process. If the answer is "no" and there's nothing that can change our minds, we don't move you forward to the next round.

Here's a couple of scenarios:

1. Candidate passes 2 phone screens. They seem hungry, but lean on the junior side. We're worried about their ability to lead projects and design systems. That's very falsifiable - put them on a system design challenge. Next round was originally a coding challenge, but we decide to switch up the sequence to de-risk the main concern.

2. Candidate once again passes phone screens. They are senior & very experienced, but come from big tech. We're worried about whether or not they would be willing to put in extra hours if we need them to. That's very falsifiable - work with them closely for a week and put them on a really hard project. We could do a coding screen, but given their background we're honestly not that worried about their abilities. Any concerns we have there would be addressed by seeing their work from the trial so we move things up.

3. Candidate goes through 2 phone screens and a coding round with us. We think they would be a great culture fit and we love their energy. But it's not a "hell yes". When we initially unpacked why, it was because I thought that they didn't show enough autonomy during the coding round. I couldn't see things working without a lot of coaching and guidance. But upon exploring that more, we realize that it was actually because they didn't take feedback during the interview very well so all of the coaching we tried in hour slot had no effect. There isn't really anything that can change our minds here - the 1 hour slot seemed representative enough of patterns that would emerge after spending more time together. We decide not to move on.

4. Candidate is 10/10 on paper, and a "hell yes" after each of the first 4 rounds. We bring them into a work trial very quickly, but 2 days in things feel off. We talk about it, and decide ultimately it wouldn't make sense to finish the 2 weeks. We end the work trial early.

And so many more! There really is no playbook at this stage, and if anything what we optimize for is learning. We debrief after every call and exchange notes. We even do this when we bring the candidate in-person - we will pull each other into 5 min sidebars in the parking lot to figure out what to do next.

Those conversations always remind that building a company is just as much as art as it is a science.

Building empathy

Hiring sits at the core of company-building. You have to think about payroll, burn, etc., but at times it can also feel quite personal.

Helena and I both care deeply about our team, and I can feel that we can get attached to candidates sometimes. Conversations where we fall on opposite sides of the same candidate can suck - especially if you’re the one saying no.

If you ever find yourself feeling this way, my advice would be to stick to your guns. Saying "no" is sacred, and the person who is willing to stick to it is the one that’s raising the bar. We play this role for each other, and it’s one of many reasons why having a co-founder is so game-changing.

For me, hiring has become an exercise of building empathy within our team as well. And on top of that, learning how to stick to my guns even when it's tempting to say "yes" because it's not a "hell yes".

Always open

Getting the chance to work with someone who is a “hell yes” is rare. Initially when we started hiring for Streamline, we were just looking for a founding engineer. But sure enough we got some referrals for designers as well, and one of them turned out to be amazing. Like “hell yes” amazing. We had him visit our office twice last week, and are super excited about extending an offer.

In the grand scheme of things when you consider how many times someone’s career opens up to a new opportunity, having those timelines align is with your company is extremely rare! That’s why the mentality that I’ve adopted is “always open.” The best founders can always keep the pipeline warm and surround themselves with talented people that one day might be looking for something. When that day comes, you have to be ready to jump on it.

Final thoughts

Recruiting is a core function, and as long as the company is around it has no end date.

For anything like that, you need a north star. Our north star is looking for "hell yes" kind of people, and it's an extremely high bar. But we won't settle for anything less. These are the people we are in the trenches with, and there's really nothing more exhilirating than finding a "hell yes". Someone you can describe as an animal.

It's one of the most sensational parts of building a company.