How to Hire Between the Lines for Your Company Stage

It’s so critical to hire the right talent for the stage of your company and things can go badly when this isn’t considered in the hiring process.

Between the Lines Talent Qualification

Hiring talent for your stage of growth and scale gets neglected too often because it’s relatively intangible. In business, there are people who are builders, and there are those who are users or managers of the things already built. This distinction is critical to hiring for fit and the job to be done at the evolutionary stage of your company. It’s between the lines because it’s often about what someone hasn’t done or shown. Since we often evaluate candidates on what they have done, it’s sometimes hard to step back and look for those gaps that do or don’t align with the work we need to be done.

Builders Create Things from Nothing

Builders love the challenge of the blank slate and the opportunity to define and design the machine. If this is in marketing, they want to hypothesize and test go-to-market strategies; choose, implement, and integrate marketing technology; define scoring, and rapidly learn from a data-driven funnel. They’re anything but overwhelmed by the number of variables. They actually love distilling those down via iterative loops. They want to create the machine.

Users Scale the Machine

Users are often people who need to focus on a more narrow set of more defined objectives. When they can do that, they’re also phenomenally successful. They are scalers, who can focus on a mission, execute against it, and amplify momentum starting with something that is already built. They’re incredibly valuable once there is a pattern to follow. They can take over the reins on something that’s been created and operate it. Ideally, they also improve upon it.

Matching Talent to Company Stage

Startups need builders and growth-stage companies need users. When you get users in builder roles, they can be overwhelmed — often degrading into analysis paralysis from a sea of opportunities they treat as problems. And conversely, when you put builders in user roles, they are bored — often trying to reinvent the wheel and in the process stifling scale and momentum.

If you need something created from the ground up, hire for that skillset and experience. if you need someone to operate and contribute to something that’s already running, hire for that. This is an important distinction. Often, startups can misunderstand a candidate’s experience because the user can speak to how something was operated, it can sound like fluency with how it was built. When this happens, users end up in roles that require building. This can work out in some cases, but often it results in executional missteps that can result in momentum loss.

It’s easy to be mismatch talent to your company stage. Talent is scarce and people can look great on paper. How do you veto the candidate who’s already had the title you’re hiring for with a track record of success? You do if the work you need to be done is defining and designing, and everything in the candidate’s resumé is using established systems and processes.

Users just don’t magically become builders. They’re not the same talents. One of the biggest mistakes a startup can make with early, key hires is to give users builder responsibilities.

Startups Need Builders

The stakes at a startup are high. There is precious little room for error.

That doesn’t mean that users can’t build. But it’s highly unlikely that what gets created by a user will be as innovative and high performing as the solution an experienced builder would define. In my experience, a startup of users is handicapping its upside.

Builders can have those edge conversations about innovation and articulate how they are going to evaluate those opportunities. They can organize a wide array of variables into a logical matrix of tasks to be done and hypotheses to be tested. And they can move the development of systems forward from a blank slate by stack ranking priorities and methodically executing against that list. In your search for SaaS talent — at the startup stage — hold out for those people who can build. Look for those characteristics between the lines and change stages faster.