This month, Heavybit interviewed two top recruitment experts to uncover tips and tricks for hiring a company’s first management layer. Guild Talent’s very own partner, Marissa Iteld, was identified as an industry influencer and featured in the publication.
A little more about Heavybit: they run an intensive 9-month accelerator program and fund that helps fledgling startups. Some graduates are very well-known and include the likes of Stripe, Treasure Data, PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly, and more.
Having worked with these well-known platforms at earlier points in their journeys, the benefits and expertise Heavybit maintains is quite clear. As such, a top priority of theirs involves getting that first layer of management right within a portfolio company.
It’s not about where your company is at right now, it’s about where it’s going…
The insights covered during the Heavybit interview include leadership hiring prioritization, the importance of an employer’s brand, job description advice, sourcing strategies, time-to-hire words of wisdom, recruiting options (in-house vs. agency), and nailing the onboarding.
The following are some of the high-level takeaways.
Leadership prioritization
- The priority of hiring functional leaders depends on the company’s target market and go-to-market philosophy.
- Bottom-up GTM strategies often translate to focusing on hiring Product and Engineering leaders.
- Top-down GTM strategies can translate to Sales and Engineering leadership hires.
Employer brand
- The founding team should produce thought leadership pieces when possible to lay the foundations of a solid brand.
- Have a 3-5 sentence elevator pitch ready for both your internal team and external stakeholders.
Job descriptions
- Know what you’re looking for, very specifically; otherwise, you shouldn’t be hiring.
- Personalize JDs to your company’s “voice.”
Sourcing
- Leverage your network to help you advertise openings.
- Know that you might not have the purchasing power to spearfish veterans at well-known companies.
Time-to-hire
- The more prep work you do, the more efficient you’ll be in finding your best-fit hire.
- Don’t pass on the best candidate just because it’s the first person you interviewed.
Recruiting options
- Founder-led hiring gets less and less efficient and more time obstructive past 1-2 open roles, depending on the founder(s) and busyness.
- In-house or contract recruiting is a must if there are heavy management hiring demands coupled with a number of IC roles.
…having a recruiter take care of [reqs] can save you from having not-so-great fits that require time getting up to speed.
Onboarding
- No silver bullet here, but it’s always important to make new hires feel comfortable as soon as possible.
- Set up meetings with cross functional teams and other leaders to help them get the lay of the land, along with a better idea of how to work together.
More on Heavybit
Heavybit is an accelerator and venture fund that helps pre-seed, Seed, and Series A companies scale their go-to-market. They focus on companies whose target markets are in the developer and enterprise spaces.
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It meant a lot to get this level of recognition from an established and well-known accelerator/fund. We hope they use the insights garnered from Marissa to share out to their ecosystem of startups and founders, so they can further refine their GTM strategies as well as scale more efficiently.
Read the whole interview/article on Heavybit’s website:
“Ask a Recruiter: Hiring Your First Management Layer”