A few months back, I was closing a deal I was super excited for my team to work on. This startup had worked with many other companies to try to hire the right developer for their company. Some developers lasted a month and some didn’t. They even use some hiring platforms but still couldn't find the right person. The company had lost hope, I wanted to show them what Awana could do.
We started on the process to hire, showing them multiple profiles that matched what they were looking for. They came back with more questions for the candidates. They asked for more proofs. I could tell they were scared to hire.
Then, one day I posed to them to figure out if they were actually ready to hire. We all came to find out that they wanted to do more testing on the product.
While I was disappointed we couldn’t help the company hire, I was happy to find out the information quickly and that the company found out why hiring someone wouldn’t be right for them at this point.
This led us to start thinking about a checklist people should consider when hiring for a new role.
If you're seeing that hiring a new person, from a cost perspective, it's not going to be beneficial:
It's fundamental to get some clarity so testing things out is a must, like an MVP. For instance in the case of the recent deal we had, they initially thought their product was ready to scale, after we worked with them they saw that they needed to do a little bit more testing in the market.
If you are thinking about getting started on scaling, double check whether you are ready. Investing in a person to scale your company is not only costly from a monetary standpoint but a time standpoint as well.
Overall hiring is a big decision for any company to make. You don’t want to get caught up where you are hiring to just keep your product going but you also don’t want to prevent your product from scaling because you are too worried. Putting together a roadmap with appropriate testing in place will help figure out when to start hiring.
References
Studioroman (2023) Happy Company Employees Joining Parts of Jigsaw Puzzle during Work Meeting or Team Building Activity. Retrieved from https://www.canva.com/photos/MAELszMKRJM/
The Muse. (2022). Hiring Needs: How to Determine When You Need to Hire