Identifying talent
In the search for a person, a company simply wants to find someone that can already do the role. Practically speaking, they want to find someone who ultimately delivers the most and costs the least. However, the other side of the picture has a person who is driven by a combinatorial nuance of motivations that often boil down towards
- People - they like the people / culture they're working with
- Product - they like the challenges of the product or the mission ascribed to it
- Potential - they find strong monetary or career upside to the role they're taking on
How then should a company position - especially an earlier stage company?
People
There is one around the people - which really is an extension of the founders from day zero. They set the tone and culture of the organization. The things that they get excited about, the things they complain about - on a day to day level, already set a tone for how the company's culture and ultimately in the long-run defines the "political capital" of how relationships operate.This eventually becomes naked whether today or later.
A company that is ingenuine here either has a mass exodus when the nature of the founders is not what they assumed. And a company that was never fully coherent here or principled in anything but finances often finds that they are paying higher premiums for talent as potential becomes a louder selling point.
However, it is the genuine nature of the pitch that creates a consistent culture. Management is often a game of consistent axioms of reward and detraction anyhow. Companies such as Bridgewater attract people in spite of being on a more "polar" management style but their consistency ensures stability. It is inconsistency that breeds discontent and signals nepotism or a general lack of principles / authenticity.
Product
In terms of product, you find a mix of people in this range. Classifying engineers, there are often two buckets in this direction.
One is that the technical and / or product challenges are so interesting that if you were allowed to work on this, you'd be fulfilled (whether from domain complexity, technical challenge, you name it).
The other being the mission around it - the potential impact of a real working product in this space is something that moves you emotionally and covers the core motivators of your own personal values.
On the first point around the tech / product, engineers who go to the game industry often fit this bill. They face longer working hours, potentially toxic cultures, and multiple standard deviations below in pay compared to the industry. However, the desire to specifically make games is so high that people are willing to do this and take the loss.
The technical variation of this can be a database engineer who simply loves thinking through the various esoteric data structures only applied in this field combined with the first principled thinking that goes through the read / write tradeoffs along with consistency requirements at scale that become an increasingly entertaining puzzle to crack. The mission on its own may not be important in the purest sense but each of these buckets often overlap to some degree with a person.
Consider someone who chooses to pursue a PhD, they are not paid particularly well and the long-term return of their degree in generality barring very few topics of research will never give financial reward. For the vast majority of these fields, they are contributing to research that the industry would not find particularly useful on its own and the hiring of said person into the industry utilizes their research as a badge of competence and intelligence rather than direct application.
The other case is a mission-driven product. This often shows up in healthcare, non-profits, educational institutions, etc. where people have had someone in their life face struggles that became a deeply personal driver. These are struggles they ultimately believe are solvable or preventable. It is one of the most powerful motivators for everyone involved in the company as it creates a near "irrational" behavior for people to push an extra 20% of effort simply because the problem must be solved at the highest standard for ethical reasons.
A mixed variation of this can be early machine learning engineers before there was a market. The idea of contributing to the longtail of solving AGI is so big that people searched for roles enabling them to experiment on various reinforcement learning algorithms or the applications of ML into recommendation engines simply because it seemed like a sexy-ier problem combined with the potential mathematical complexity was exciting in the early days before the libraries and tools abstracted more and more of the concepts.
Potential
On potential, this is often the pay increase that came along or the ability to take on more ownership in work to then take the next title. This is the sort of person that joins the hottest companies, the person that goes to the most reputable institutions, and is most likely to jump every few years to catch the next part of the cycle.
For an earlier stage company, you often find that the potential aspect is not really pitchable. On the raw financial perspective in the immediate term, a person's risk-return function of an early employee is not lucrative enough compared to other institutions. If no other reason resonated except this, it would surely imply the other institutions are not in reach which for multiple reasons - is not ideal for the employer-side.
For future opportunity as tomorrow founders, the pitch tends to go towards their investors and suggesting the potential of being more connected on a network level assuming the employee wants and will go start their own venture next.
The last variation on potential is responsibility increase / title increase. The increase in responsibility is a lot more rare specifically because companies tend to hire for people already performing at the level of responsibility. However, for title increase - this is often somewhat more flexible because startups at the earliest stages are still forming the responsibility tree while the company is scaling (though not fully flexible as title is immensely important due to its leverage capacity in defining and setting the tone for reward / retraction in "political capital"). As an aside, there are the "member of technical staff" titles and the optics of a flat structure though not going over that here.
Figuring it out
Given these motivators, the employer's job is to identify
- What are the weights assigned to each of these?
- What does the company offer in contrast to the company they're at currently?
- Can you justify the firm as the "efficient frontier" considering People, Product, Potential?
Often, people's history of actions tells you what the weights are.
- For example, did they just go to the optically "best" route every time they had the chance? -> Probably implies prestige and / or pay matter most
- Did they go from a "reputable" large company to a small one? -> may be open to smaller
- Are the companies mission-driven in a specific domain? -> they are likely mission-driven about that specific domain
- etc.
Overall, pretty obvious though the nuances come in with intrepretation and information standardization (especially as some signals are not as "agreed" on) or the in-betweens when people break perceived trends. After all, it is not uncommon to hear about a compelling pivot in priorities for a person.
In an account-based marketing way, you are trying to reverse map based on what you know on a company's culture and position who the people are and when you might catch them on a transition out. Priors are a strong derisking mechanism in this case.
When the employer meet the candidate, the employer's next goal is to identify where they are on the three factors. If the candidate has already gotten on a call, they are either looking for a new role (or fishing for market value). In the first case, the employer will find that there should be at least one thing in the three they are looking for a change in. This can be anything from "I don't like the tech I'm working in", "The company culture has changed since XYZ and I liked before XYZ", or "I'm looking to grow and take more responsibilities but the company doesn't have the capacity".
This is where the goal is to calibrate on a personalized "efficient frontier" for everyone. People is non-negotiable as the company's culture has to be consistent and this is a force multiplier. The moment this shatters, nearly all motivation is gone. On Product, this is easier to measure as you're often hiring someone with activity around it in some capacity and stage / scope of the project gives flexibility on the ownership range. On Potential, this is where salary expectations should meet (whether this is sometimes a downgrade or otherwise).
If there isn't a match on the efficient frontier, this often means motivation for both the company and the applicant are not a fit. To compromise somewhere here implies an ephemeral relationship which can also compromise the overall culture of the company as inauthentic decision making increases to justify one's choices.
Hiring is ultimately about people - not convincing them but qualifying a two-way street of motivators. It's about knowing what both the employer and candidate deeply want in life and finding that intersection and overlap in an honest way.