They say freelancers are modern-day cowboys, overly proud to ask for anyone’s help.
But business is not a place for loners. Big ideas are rarely realized before innovative brains come together to inspect them from different angles and give them a much-needed structure. That’s exactly how today’s booming startup culture came to be – through collective ideation and the creative collaboration of passionate founding teams. Armed with new-age tech, these teams are capable of accomplishing virtually anything.
Just take Indian startups like Ola Cabs and Housing, for instance.
They relied on both teamwork and technology to help them impress investors, and they still put their trust in this match made in heaven to provide them with the best practices. These startups are living, breathing examples of a simple truth – that building great things alone is simply not possible, not without some help.
With this in mind, we’ve created a guide for assembling your own rockstar founding team.
Read on and take notes.
The Complete Startup Team: Your Own Fantastic Four
All visionaries share their game-changing ideas with their builders, and so should you. No, we won’t tell you to settle for just about anyone. Entrepreneurs and that’s who you are now, must seek other like-minded entrepreneurs, since they are the only ones who possess the same drive and leadership qualities.
For a startup founding team, both are essential.
In other words, you’ll need a group of equally passionate, ambitious, and skilled people to help you formalize your vision and make it official with a strong mission statement that will define your objectives and outline your path. No startup is a one-man band; they always need different perspectives to succeed.
The perspectives you’ll need are that of a CMO, COO, CTO, and CPO.
Here’s how to hire the best people for these founding positions:
- Chief Marketing Officer (CMO): A brilliant CMO must understand the context and type of business, the supply and demand chain, and the target audience that you’re planning to reach. As marketing professionals, they must know how to strategize and develop campaigns for all industries, sectors, audience segments, and niches on the market.
- Chief Operating Officer (COO): A chief operating officer is a person with great people skills, capable of building and managing diverse teams, timelines, and budgets. The best candidate for this job should be a goal-getter with analytical abilities and experience in conflict resolution, creative problem solving, and data-driven decision-making.
- Chief Technology Officer (CTO): A basic set of requirements for a CTO position includes coding and programming skills, but we suggest you look beyond these when hiring a chief technology officer. As one of the members of a founding team, this person must possess good managerial skills, and be great at strategic thinking and implementation.
- Chief Product Officer (CPO): A chief product officer should thrive at conceptualization and be able to clearly communicate their ideas and manage their people and products. Look for a person who understands the true value, meaning, and purpose of what you’re trying to achieve, and who knows exactly how to translate that into a real product.
How to Recruit and Hire for a Rockstar Startup Founding Team
Now that you know what to look for in candidates applying for these four essential positions, let’s underline again that all members of a founding team should share the same vision and drive. Every founder must showcase intelligence, curiosity, strong work ethics, and motivation to break new grounds.
Seems difficult to find in just one person, doesn’t it?
What’s even worse is that bad hiring leads to a troubling 39% decrease in productivity. That’s why a great number of successful startups are including cutting-edge technology in their hiring processes. In HR and beyond, the current technological revolution is led by artificial intelligence – AI solutions simply provide the best combination of sophisticated automation and necessary human touch.
In terms of recruitment and hiring, this implies comprehensive metrics for determining both hard and soft skills in candidates, just as well as their ability to make a good cultural fit. More importantly, still, AI-based hiring nips unconscious bias in the bud, thus evaluating candidates exclusively by their attitudes and skills.
More precisely, the trifecta of the behavioral, domain, and cognitive skills.
Here at Glider.ai, we offer a wide range of AI-based solutions for automated recruitment and unbiased hiring, including sophisticated stack rank techniques, auto-scored screening, and life-like simulations designed especially (though not exclusively) for employers in tech industries. Just read our case studies.
Luckily for you, there’s no shortage of quality talent on the job market.
The only thing you need to do is employ the best practices and technology, and hire the best people.
Final Thoughts on Building an Unstoppable Founding Team
Most startup business ideas are born in a single mind, but all of them are realized through joined effort. For great things to happen, you need to be surrounded by great people, so make sure to know exactly what you need (and what you don’t need), and to find a way to inspire and unify them with a strong vision.
Building a startup isn’t an overnight job, but Rome wasn’t built in a day either.
For business visions and ideas, stick to your gut.
For everything else, rely on proven hiring practices and AI technology.
Oh, and good luck!
