The Gradience
How to Hire the Best Talents as a Start-up Founder with Jennifer Smith, Co-Founder of Scribe
September 27, 2022
As a founder, your company's overall success in the market is adversely impacted if you do not release products fast enough. Joining us this week to explore this topic is Jennifer Smith, Co-Founder of Scribe, a company with a mission to unleash know-how across teams, organizations, and communities. Scribe was founded in 2019 to provide an easier, more effective way to share what you know.
Most early-stage startup hiring processes take up fifty percent of the founder's time if you want to be more efficient, having a procedure already established and a team taking care of recruiting can drastically minimize the time you spend on it.

People with previous experience working in early-stage organizations are an attractive candidate pool for early-stage employment opportunities. You might also think of people interested in contributing to creating something new but haven't previously had the chance.

When recruiting for an early-stage company, the most crucial thing to remember is that you are not attempting to persuade people to join your company alone, but you offer a conducive environment where their talent and skills can flourish, and their careers grow. 

In this episode of The Gradience Podcast, Nigel is joined by Jennifer Smith, Co-Founder of Scribe. 

They cover:

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:08:07 ] As a founder, not shipping things fast enough by spending too much time thinking about the product and not letting your customers' feedback shape the process affects the overall performance in the market

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:08:34 ] If you hear a lot of feedback from people concerning your business, that means they care about your product. The more feedback, the better

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:08:46 ] As a founder, you need to have a vision for the problem you are trying to solve and how the world will improve afterward
 
πŸ‘‰ [ 00:08:59 ] Hire great people and point them in the direction of your vision

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:09:07 ] Always listen to your customers and respond to the feedback you receive from them

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:11:00 ] To get the best candidate for the roles within your startup, "it is important to talk to many people". And from the pool of candidates, you will be able to identify the right people to fit those roles

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:14:48 ] For your early engineering hires, candidates that are both incredibly technical and creative simultaneously

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:22:07 ] The most important thing to realize when doing early-stage recruiting is "you are not trying to convince people to come to do an early-stage company".

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:22:26 ] Your ideal early-stage hires should be people who have experience working in early-stage companies. Also, you may consider candidates who want to be a part of building something but haven't had the opportunity

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:28:03 ] Founders spend fifty percent of their time recruiting. To be more efficient, having a process in place and a team that takes care of hiring will greatly reduce the time you spend 

πŸ‘‰ [ 00:29:25 ] Access "culture fits" straight from the beginning. 

If you’re interested in getting team building tips from a successful founder, want a peek into being a founder in an unexplored niche, want to learn how to create an organic culture for your team, interested in knowing what it's like to be a founder in an unfamiliar industry, want to build a cross-functional team and a team with the right atmosphere, tune in to this episode of The Gradience Podcast, a Podcast by Build Talent.

Subscribe here:

πŸ‘‰ YouTube: https://bit.ly/3MCamCW 
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πŸ‘‰ RSS: https://bit.ly/38yhi4n
πŸ‘‰ Email: podcast@buildtalent.io 

And connect with Jennifer here:

πŸ‘‰ LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmith/  
πŸ‘‰ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/scribeceo

About the Show

β€œThe Gradience” is a podcast by Build Talent & hosted by Nigel Robinson, wherein each episode, we’ll be speaking with a founder or expert as we discuss the art & science of hiring leaders, why it matters, and how you can keep up. 


The Gradience is hand crafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Previous guests include: Riley Ennis of Freenome, Matt Birnbaum of Pear VC, Derek Lo of Medallion, Chandan Lodha of CoinTracker, Jennifer Smith of Scribe

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