Hiring People Who are too Specialized

[rifat28dddd]

One of the key traits of any successful startup is adaptability. You need that even more than you need scalability, which you should consider only once you see signs of product-market fit.

Before then, you need to be ready to pivot, move around, and adjust to whatever the market tells you.

Avoid hiring simply because you think work will pick up down the line. You don’t want to hire people anticipating more work in the future.

What if you over-hire sales reps to accelerate your outbound efforts but later decide that your go-to-market strategy was wrong and now requires a different approach? Letting people go is never easy, and it’s certainly not good for your startup’s culture in the early days.

Keep your team lean if possible. Great startup employees kazakhstan telegram data understand the challenges and risks of being on a small team and are usually willing to stretch a little more before deciding they need help.

Remember: you want generalists. When you hire people who are too deeply specialized in one skill or another, you’re essentially placing a bet: you believe that skill will be critical to your startup’s success. And you don’t know that yet.

What if you need to pivot to a different aspect of your business? What if you planned on building a sales-as-a-service business, but what your customer actually wants is access to the CRM you’re building? (Yep, that happened to me.) Hiring specialists is going all-in on one skill. Hiring generalists is a bet on adaptability. Take the one with the lower risk.

Not Making the Right Hires for Culture Fit
I get it: When interviewing prospects for an open position, it’s easy to be blown away by how impressive some people are. They may have spent lifetimes developing skills you never dreamed of.

The problem occurs when you let this temptation cloud your judgment. What if they’re highly skilled and talented—but more of a fit at Alphabet or Apple than at a startup? You could make a costly mistake because you were swooning over their pedigree. Find the right fit for you.