Recruiting Executives in a Startup

While there’s significant talk about recruiting great software engineers and sales people, even harder is finding key executives to join a startup. Like anything important, it requires tremendous time and effort to do well. Yet, with so few qualified candidates, it can be even more challenging than expected.

Here are a few thoughts on recruiting executives in a startup:

• Build a candidate pipeline well in advance of the hire and work to nurture the relationships (go ahead, set up a recurring quarterly calendar notification just to nurture the relationship)
• Bring the board and advisors in to the executive recruiting process to help identify potential candidates as well as meet with identified candidates
• When a qualified candidate has been identified, and is interested, run a Topgrading chronological in-depth survey (plan to spend 4 – 6 hours on interviewing each candidate)

Recruiting key executives to a startup is incredibly hard, and one of the most important things an entrepreneur will do. Invest the time to do it well and build out a great team.

What else? What are some more thoughts on recruiting executives in a startup?