How to Define Your Ideal Hire: A Guide For Startups

Your company is only as good as the team behind it. That isn’t just an opinion; it’s a fact.

In the early stages of a startup (say 50-100 employees), each hire can have an outsized impact on your company.

Or hold your growth back.

It’s tempting to think that once you’ve found product market fit, then you’re on the right track. The truth is, 75% of such companies never return cash to investors, and up to 40% of them lose their initial investment.

You can avoid this by bringing the right people into your company, which starts with defining your ideal hire.

But what does an ‘ideal hire’ actually mean for your startup? Will you look for someone with many years of experience? Someone who doesn’t mind working well into the night, fueled by coffee and ramen noodles? In this guide, I’ll share how I’ve defined an ideal hire for 7, 8, and 9-figure companies.

Why Hiring Matters for Startups

Fast-growing startups everywhere look to hiring as a solution to meet demand and maintain growth.

Companies often tout goals with specific headcount figures in mind, thinking that more hands on deck will almost always lead to increased productivity. This is a flawed assumption.

Hiring just about anyone will not help your company nearly as much as hiring the right people. 60% of companies fail because of problems within the team rather than external challenges facing the business. And survey after survey paints a stark and often grim picture of today’s recruitment landscape:

• In a survey conducted by CareerBuilder involving 2000 hiring managers, 74% acknowledged having hired the wrong person for a position at least once, while 41% reported that such hiring mistakes had cost them over $25,000.
• A study by Harvard Business Review revealed that 80% of employee turnover can be attributed to flawed hiring decisions.
• A survey by Robert Half of 1000 employees indicated that 39% would consider resigning if their manager hired someone who was a poor fit for the team.

Beyond those statistics, bringing the right people into your company matters because each new hire will have an outsized impact on your company culture, product innovation, growth trajectory, and precedents for future hires.

You can avoid these mistakes, though, by defining an ideal hire. Read on as I show you how to do that next.

How to Define Your Ideal Hire

Defining the right hire is more than a job description or a list of responsibilities.

Anyone can write a job description requesting a set of skills or years of experience, but to truly scale, you need to equip your company with the very best employees.

I like to take a three-step approach to defining an ideal hire to focus the recruitment process:

1. Define your needs
2. Create an ideal profile for each role
3. Recruit and choose the right match

I’ll walk you through each one next.

Define Your Needs

It’s worth repeating: an ideal hire does not start with a job description or target headcount; it starts with your company’s and team’s needs.

Assuming you’ve already examined the capacity and capability of your existing team and have concluded that you do need to hire someone, you then need to develop a hiring strategy that aligns with the overarching strategy and goals of your company.

Hiring for capacity means increasing headcount to do more of what you are already doing. This can work if you feel that your team has all of the pieces in place that it needs skill-wise, and you simply need to increase headcount to increase the pace of work. On the other hand, hiring for capability means hiring for a specific set of skills that your company lacks.

Many early-stage startups need to hire for capability to expand their team’s skills. It’s also important to consider:

• The impact you need from each new hire as they join your company
• Budget constraints for a new hire
• Your forecast for future needs

Starting with the business needs in mind ensures that each hire aligns with your strategy. This, in turn, helps ensure that each hire can make an appropriate impact, and it minimizes the risk of overhiring.

Create an Ideal Profile for Each Role

It’s not enough to hire anyone remotely qualified; you need the very best fits for your company.

High performers can be up to an astounding 800% more productive than their average counterparts, so it’s important that you get this right the first time.

An ideal hire isn’t always necessarily the most experienced person on paper. You need to find a hire who is a culture-fit and skill-fit while also being ready to impact your organization.

Much like a marketer or sales rep will create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to focus their efforts, I recommend that founders, HR professionals, and recruiters identify an Ideal Candidate Profile. This ensures that your recruitment process is focused on pinpointing the exact people you need to scale your company towards its goals while also providing a helpful yardstick to filter out bad-fit candidates.

A recruiter’s ICP should contain the following:

• Culture fit: Will they contribute to and reinforce your company culture?
• Attitude: Do they have the right attitude to match your company culture, and are they willing and able to make an impact where necessary?
• Ability and skills: What skills do they bring to the table, and what impact will that have on your company?

For example, suppose you’re in charge of hiring a Product Manager.

Right now, your company has 60 people, and 10 of them are in the product organization with one product manager. At this stage, a new product manager must hit the ground running and fit in as a leader within the organization. Beyond knowledge of Scrum and product management best practices, they must be comfortable moving fast and operating with unknowns. They would also be able and willing to scale within their role, taking on more teams as the company grows.

While a job description for a Product Manager could be quite broad, you can narrow your focus by keeping this ideal candidate profile in mind.

Design a Recruitment Process to Attract and Find Your Match

Finally, you need a process to bring your ideal hire to your company rather than casting a wide net hoping you’ll catch him or her.

Having a compelling company culture and brand are pieces of attracting the right hires to your startup. Beyond that, you should have a clear plan to get in front of your ideal candidate with help from the following:

• Clear and effective job descriptions that communicate the responsibilities well and filter out unwanted candidates who may not be a good fit
• Keep platforms in mind where your ideal hire will most likely be and respond to your job postings
• Interview scoring and questions that are designed to assess each candidate’s skill level rather than take them at face value.
• Incentives like referral bonuses or rewards to encourage your top employees to bring in like-minded candidates.

With the ideal candidate profile and recruitment plan in place, finding the right hire is a matter of getting in front of your target audience and evaluating applicants effectively as they move through your hiring process.

3 Common Pitfalls To Avoid When Defining an Ideal Hire for Startups

You have the framework for defining and attracting your ideal hire, but there are a few common pitfalls you need to be aware of.

Avoid these at all costs as you begin your hiring process:

1. Failing to understand the need for each hire: You must hire with a strategic assessment of true need, rather than relying on your intuition. Knowing the business need for each hire ensures everyone you bring into your company makes an impact. It also helps prevent overhiring and future layoffs.
2. Poor alignment on candidate profiles: As discussed earlier, it’s important to create an ideal candidate profile and distribute it to your entire team. This ensures alignment on who to hire and prevents subjective evaluations.
3. Cutting corners in your hiring process: Startups move fast, and sometimes there’s a temptation to fast-track candidates or cut corners. Don’t. All candidates must go through the same process. It doesn’t matter if they are a referral, an online candidate, or your best friend from high school.

Avoid these common hiring pitfalls, and you set your recruitment process up for success.

Get Hiring Right the First Time: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of HR.

The most successful startups know that their path to scaling from 7 to 9 figures will be made possible by the people practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
• How to hire
• How HR evolves as your company grows

And more! Fill out the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hypergrowth.