How to Hire First Employees For a Startup
Nobody starts a company because they love writing job ads. But at some point, if you don't have an agency or someone in HR whose whole job is recruitment, that job lands on you. Honestly, most of what separates a good hiring process from a chaotic one isn't fancy tools or extreme fees paid to a recruitment agency. It's a handful of habits done consistently.
Here's what I'd actually tell a founder doing this on their own.
Know what you're hiring for before you write the ad. This sounds obvious, but skip it and everything downstream gets harder. Before you post anything, sit down and figure out what "good" looks like 90 days in — what will this person have actually done? Then work out which 3 or 4 things are true must-haves, versus stuff that'd just be nice.
The instinct is to list every skill you can imagine needing. Resist it. A long wishlist doesn't filter out weak candidates, instead it just puts off good ones who tick 7 boxes out of 10 and assume they're not qualified enough to apply. Write an ad that sells the job, not just describes it Good candidates are usually already employed. They're not desperate for a job. They're deciding whether uprooting their current one is worth it. So treat the ad like you're making a case, not filing a spec sheet.
A few things worth doing:
Lead with what's actually interesting about the role, not the history of the company. Put a salary range in there (if you can) — it saves time and signals you're not going to waste anyone's time. Describe what success looks like rather than a laundry list of daily tasks. Cut anything that sounds like it was pulled from a job board template. "Fast-paced," "rockstar," that sort of thing puts off exactly the senior people you want. Don't wait for people to find the ad — GO FIND THEM You genuinely don't need a job board budget to reach the right people.
Start with your own network
A short, specific message to someone you used to work with, or someone whose work you admire on LinkedIn, will beat a public post nearly every time. Ask your team and anyone else close to the business for referrals too, and be specific about what you're after. Build a process and actually stick to it This is the biggest lever you have, and it costs nothing but discipline.
Pick your stages up front, usually somewhere between 2 and 4 (an intro call, a skills-based conversation, a culture or team chat, references), and don't skip one just because you liked someone. Ask every candidate roughly the same core questions so you're comparing like for like instead of relying on vibes.
A basic scorecard helps too: even a shared spreadsheet with your must-haves down one side and a 1–5 next to each candidate forces you to separate "I liked them" from "they can actually do this."
Move quickly
Good people don't sit around waiting on you. If your process drags out over weeks with long silences in between, you'll lose candidates to whoever moved faster, not necessarily whoever was better. A few habits that help: respond within a day or two even if it's just to say you're still deciding, compress a three-week process down to two weeks where you can.
Skip the expensive software
You don't need an ATS built for large teams. A shared spreadsheet, a free or cheap tracker, and whatever you already use for scheduling will get you through a few single hires a year. Know when to bring someone in Doing this yourself works fine for the odd hire. It gets harder when you're hiring for several roles at once, hiring outside your own expertise, or when getting it wrong would be expensive.
Once you know that you need to hire 5+ people in the next few months and you have a real future growth plan. That's usually the point where it's worth bringing someone in to build the process with you, rather than handing the whole thing over to an agency.
You don't always need a full-time recruiter or a 20%+ agency fee — sometimes you just need an experienced pair of hands for a few weeks. That's exactly where Talent Runway comes in.
If you're building this out and want a second opinion, book a free call with us and we'll help you figure out the right next step for where you're at.