Not Making the Right Hires for Culture Fit

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Keep your team lean if possible. Great startup employees 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.

Hiring People Who are too Specialized
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 tunisia telegram data 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.

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.

Waiting too Long to Cut Someone From Your Team
I’ll admit that I’m not perfect at hiring. I’m a big believer in hiring the person who’s a little too junior for the role—the go-getter with loads of potential. I’m a sucker for the underdog. But that sometimes means I become biased in their favor, which can affect how I evaluate their performance.