How to recruit the right skills for your team

Building a team that can get the job done is the primary role of all leaders and founders. While this may include strategy and operations work, it all starts with recruiting talent. Great talent can always achieve more with less process or strategic clarity than employees who are not well suited to the task, so everything a leader does is secondary to recruiting. Many leaders struggle to determine what skills or experience are necessary for specific roles or teams because it is challenging to find candidates who tick every box. I believe the best way to build high-performing teams is to recruit a patchwork of skills and experience.

Candidates generally fit into these high-level categories:

• Business model experience. These candidates have worked at companies with similar business models (e.g., B2B SaaS), so they strongly understand how companies like yours operate.
• Technical experience. These candidates have worked with the technologies used by your company. They bring technical expertise that can level up your company.
• Industry experience. These candidates know the market you are targeting. They deeply understand your customers, partners and competitors.

For example, when hiring a product manager for a B2B SaaS product that targets the hospitality industry, the experience to look for might look like this:

• A candidate with business model experience has previously worked in a B2B SaaS company. They understand how these companies are typically structured and how they operate. This understanding is essential for product managers because building software products is very different from hardware, and candidates who haven’t worked in product companies might not have the required operational experience. For example, people who’ve only worked in professional services may be better with project management rather than product management. When hiring product managers, it’s generally safe to consider this a must-have.
• Technical expertise for product managers is broad. It includes their experience with the specialised practice of product management and their experience with specific technologies. Relevant technologies include productivity tools (e.g., JIRA, Confluence), analysis technologies (e.g., SQL, Excel, Salesforce) and the technical stack for your product (e.g., iOS, web apps, Ruby on Rails, Jamstack).
• Industry experience in this scenario would be the hospitality industry. This experience usually means the candidate has worked for a competitor, customer, partner, or prospect. A product manager with industry experience will find it easy to understand your customers, their needs, and the market in which you operate.

The same company hiring a customer success manager would look like this:

• A customer success candidate who has previously worked in a B2B SaaS company should understand how customer success typically works in these businesses. They’ve probably done quarterly business reviews before. They know how to ask a customer for a testimonial or case study. They know how to work with other teams to achieve customer results.
• Technical expertise for this role usually means experience with CRM software and other customer success tools. For some companies, it may also extend into their ability to use and solve problems with your product (candidates internally promoted from customer support roles often meet this profile). It can be valuable for customer success managers to be able to solve some problems themselves.
• Industry experience is precious in customer-facing roles like customer success because it can take years to acquire a deep understanding of your customer’s problems. Many companies achieve this by hiring employees from their customers’ businesses.

In both of these examples, it is easy to imagine how a candidate who fits these criteria would be the perfect recruit. Unfortunately, while some candidates may fit into multiple categories, finding people who fit into all three can be challenging. Additionally, broadly experienced candidates rarely go deep into any specific area, which may water down their effectiveness. This challenge is why the best way to recruit is to build a team of individuals with complementary experience that collectively have broad experience. Instead of looking for individual candidates with all these traits, build a team with combined expertise in these areas.

In the early days of startup building, one or two individuals will power most functions. This resource constraint can make building a solid patchwork of experience and skills challenging, so it is essential to consider what type of experience is most important for your team. For example:

• Unique business models might demand a team with experience in similar businesses.
• Some technical stacks can be too complex for new candidates to learn from scratch, so you might need to prioritise specialised experience.
• Some markets are less approachable than others. The average person has a lot more exposure to retail than to business banking or biotech, so industry experience also varies in importance.

By being intentional about what types of experience are most important for each role, and considering team-wide capability rather than individual capability, leaders and founders can create powerful teams and nail the first and most crucial step of startup building.