Hiring well is hard and might be near the number one critical success factor for a startup.

You might have the greatest business ideas, the needed financial wherewithal and the raw talent of the founders to pull on, but if your ideas are ever to bear fruit in the real world it will take a strong core team. As many of you no doubt have experienced, either in school or at work, teams by their very nature form into political units and those politics will help dictate if the team is successful.

If the team is uneven in talent, the team will become divided between the contributors and the part of the team they are carrying. That division will cause wasted energy, something most businesses don't have the luxury for. If the team is too heavy in "superstars," the egos might cause the team to break apart due to differing opinions and a lack of unity. If there is too strong of leadership, teams can buckle under the stress from the lack of freedom to explore alternative ideas. If the team is weak overall, or has weak leadership, the idea may never become a reality.

So, how do you build a really great team?

I created the GACT acronym to help guide hires at the company.

It takes Growth, Attitude, Culture and Talent to all align before we bring someone into the Elluminates Software family.

1. Growth

Can you see the person having a career at the company or is it a dead end for them? Based on your time horizon, a career at your company could mean a three to five year exit from an acquisition or a twenty-year career in various roles. No one likes to feel like they are not going to have opportunities to continue learning or that they have no opportunity for financial growth. Before we hire someone we make sure they fit with hiring and corporate strategy. Or if they are a tactical hire, we let them know the limits of the position. Bringing on people under false pretenses on their actual growth options is a major mistake you can make. Even when people leave your company, which they will for a number of reasons over the lifetime of the company, you want everyone to feel like they were treated fairly and honestly. The next hires will likely research your company and if the word on the street that you treat your employees poorly, they will steer clear of you.

2. Attitude

Does the person have an attitude you can handle and manage? I find this area to be the most challenging to hire for since interviews don't always give you a great feel for how that person behaves socially. Overtime, I have developed heuristics that I use to guide the hiring process at the company to protect the company from attitude mismatches. Attitude is also the hardest to change since our personalities tend to be fairly stable once we are a young adult. So, just like wishful thinking that you can change your partner's attitudes once you are married, don't hire someone with the hope you can fix their attitude.

3. Culture

Culture is different from attitude in that attitude is what the person being interviewed brings to the interview while culture is something the interviewers have instilled within them. It defines what social norms are at the company and how the world is viewed from a social group point of view.

For example, we have a meritocracy-focused culture, much like the Open Source world, where we judge our hires by what they can do. Our culture focuses on how productive a person is beyond other characteristics. And, of course, we have other social norms, when it comes to how we treat employees, what we focus on, and what we have fun doing. Ignoring if the person will adapt to the company's culture is a major mistake. You should always try to ensure the candidate could fit in from a social norm perspective before hiring them.

4. Talent

Of course, the candidate needs to have the skills to do the work or be adaptable enough to develop the skills. Since we focus on high-end IT architecture and engineering, we tend to be very hard in our technical interviews.

For example, we like to test both breadth and depth of knowledge and also get into any design decisions the interviewee made in previous work. Unlike straight engineering efforts, where there may only be so many ways to do something, designing requires a holistic understanding of the problem, the needed solution and the constraints around the work. Discussions around design can help highlight a thorough understanding of technical problem areas or just the opposite, that the interviewee didn't think things through enough.

For non-technical interviews, we focus on the areas the interviewee has experience in and make sure we understand enough about the problem area to ask unique questions we might have. We also test the candidates with logical thought exercises that make sure that even if we can't ask them a programming or systems question, that they think through problems similarly enough that everyone can communicate.

It ultimately comes down to the interviewers making sure they understand what they are looking for and testing candidates at the level required to do the work. It's important to be upfront about both the social and task expectations so that everyone can evaluate the opportunity to work together transparently. Good hires have incredible dividends but poorly made hires cost more than that person's time; it costs everyone who works with them.

Updated on 1/19/2009