5Building a Team
Entrepreneurs ask me what’s one of the hardest parts of running a business and I always respond, hiring.
—Sevetri Wilson
Hiring and Finding Freelancers and Others
I've had some major wins with hiring. Those individuals I remember the most, their strengths, weaknesses, how we interacted and worked best together. What they brought to the team, the extra effort, the long hours, the willingness to step up when needed. So many different things made the individuals extraordinary at their roles respectfully. Yet, I'll also remember every time I got it wrong and why. Not a culture fit, the individual may have embellished their experience and couldn't perform once the time was needed, they doubted their work more than they should have. They stopped showing up not physically but they mentally clocked out and were not focused or perhaps they felt some work was beneath and was always waiting on someone else to do the job. Hiring is difficult yet, ultimately it will depend on your skills at (x) finding and (y) managing each type of resource. When people ask me what challenged me most early on, I say it was hiring. Hiring is hard. Over time it gets slightly easier, but not much.
When I hear from early-stage founders it's often to get my opinion on outsourcing various roles for their company, and if the founder is non-technical (meaning they can't themselves code or build their product), the question is always how I found engineers in lieu of having a CTO or hiring someone ...
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