Hiring and Firing at a Startup

Hiring is one of the most important tasks of any startup. It’s critical to the success of a business. Hiring people can be fun and even motivating.

When hiring a person, you’re as much selling your business and yourself as the candidate is selling themselves to you and your business. Hiring quality people in India is very difficult. Being able to rely on them is 10x harder.

Bringing on a hire can make all the difference in getting your startup off the ground, or running it into the ground. Firing someone, even the wrong person, is never fun and it’s never easy to do. It’s especially difficult to do when the conversation turns emotional. However, as a business, you must make a very logical and unemotional decision about hiring and firing. Just because your business absolutely needs a network engineer, doesn’t mean you should hire the first or second network engineer that comes in for an interview (2 candidates might be all that you’ll get). It is better to take your time, look at as many candidates as you can. It’s far less risky to take your time finding the right candidate than taking the chance of hiring the the wrong person.

Ankit, the lead programmer on Bride’s View told me that I trust people too easily. I told him that is probably true, but to run a business, you MUST trust the people you hire to do what needs to be done. Trusting employees to do their work is about necessity. I trust people to do what they have to do. I trust them to give their work 100% if not 150%. I try to give them time and the tools and training they need to ramp up. However, when faced with a situation of retaining or firing the wrong person for the company, I’ve taken a very binary approach. Either the employee fits or doesn’t. If they don’t, they must go. This has set me back in terms of money and time but keeping the wrong person on board, I will be wasting more time and more money.