Don’t Hire CEOs, Architects, Gamers, or Dualies

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited.  I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. from various domains including particle physics.  Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types.  Sales managers back when I never managed sales.  Internet marketers when I didn’t know how to internet market.

You get the picture.  Anyhow the one thing I learned, beyond getting help screening and hiring for these positions from domain experts, is to look for Flags.  For signs the prospective hire just won’t work out, no matter how strong they might look on paper.

And I’ve learned again and again, including quite recently, there are 4 types of hires to just avoid:

• CEOs.  If someone puts “CEO” on their LinkedIn as a prior job, do not pass go, do not hire them.  Why join a start-up?  Well reason #1 is personal and career advancement.  It’s hard to advance going from ahem “CEO” to Director of Something.  These folks are too full of themselves.  Just pass.  {Note: if you were a CEO of your own company, then just don’t put that on your resume.  Write Owner.  Or Principal.  Or GM.  NOT CEO.}

• Architects.  OK, I know many great developers are architects.  The problem is, it’s an awkward title which suggests an awkward hire, for a start-up at least.  An architect is often someone that wants to be more than an individual contributor, indeed is and thinks they are better than an individual contributor — but often doesn’t want to be a real manager.  Doesn’t want to be a Director or a VP.  Do you really have room for this in your start-up?  For one, perhaps — to step up as your CTO or VPE.   But probably just that one, at least for a while.  If you hire an architect as an individual contributor developer … that never seems to work out.  This can change for companies with 60-100+ developers.  At that point, VPEs need them to scale.  But.  Not for start-ups.

• Gamers.  This isn’t personal.  But I’ve learned in SaaS at least, consumer guys usually don’t work out.  Folks from consumer internet are used to users, not customers.  They don’t like it when you have to build something for a customer.  But at least sometimes, they sort of get it if they were at least sort of close to consumers-as-customers. But guys from gaming companies.  They.  Don’t.  Get.  Customers.  At.  All.  They are often super smart (lots of maths here).  They build games.  Millions use them.  If the game is cool, they win.  No need to talk to anyone, or make anyone happy.  They hate working at SaaS companies.

• Dualies.  The VP of Sales and Marketing.  The VP of Sales and Business Development.  The VP of Product and Engineering.  Yes, the areas are adjacent.  But, no.  Sales and Marketing are different, with different goals, different metrics, and different deliverables.  You can’t be fish and fowl.  And you can’t do both right, at least not in a start-up.  You need the best of the best in Sales, Marketing, Client Success, Biz Dev, Product, Engineering.  Not a VP doing a mediocre job of both.   Pass on the Dualies, unless it was just a single stint in an otherwise string of Singlies.

Ok there are many exceptions.  But in my experience, for over a decade of senior-level hiring, these 4 types never work out, for start-ups at least …

Bad hire image from here.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)