September 29th marks the end of my decade-long journey at SalesScreen which I've decided to leave to start on a new project. 

I have joined the company as part of the founding team back in April 2013 and helped to grow it from a small bootstrapped consultancy shop to a funded SaaS product company with 40+ employees and over $7M+ ARR. This has been hands down, the most rewarding experience in my professional life to date. In an attempt to process what closing such a rich chapter means, I have decided to put in writing some of the learnings this adventure taught me. 

These opinions are my own.

This might seem either obvious or controversial depending on your company’s trajectory but I strongly believe in doing the actual job for some time with your existing team before hiring someone more specialized to do it. It will most likely hurt as your team stretches thinner and probably lacks some skills. But there is no better way to fully grasp what the job is about, what skills are required, what obstacles a prospective hire will face and even if you need to hire at all. If you still need to, you will be immensely more informed and capable to pick, guide and assess a new teammate for the job.

Candidates are expected to stand out through their application and yet too often that not, companies resort to the same boring templated job posting that nobody cares to read. What you get with this approach are candidates that want ONE job. Set the bar high and spend the time to truly distill the essence of what makes your company stand apart, what type of individual you are after and not after and why that position is a great opportunity. What you’ll get in return are candidates who want THIS job. I can tell you from experience sitting on both sides of the table that a truly unique job description makes a massive difference.

If you are lucky to get a substantial volume of applications (Learning #2 certainly helps with that), going through them can be tedious. The simplest way to making this easier and surfacing the cream of the crop is to tweak your application form to act as the first filter. Ask specific questions with mandatory short answers that requires some thinking. A few examples:

You hire for the long haul and while being friend is not a requirement, disliking a teammate will be a massive hurdle and having deeper bonds with your fellow colleagues is a huge advantage. Use the first interview to find out who they are as individuals, especially outside of work. Think outside the box to come up with unconventional questions that will surface some of their most prevalent personality traits. A few examples that I have used in the past:

You’ll be surprised by the answers you’ll get and how telling they can be.

In a world where remote work is becoming more and more prevalent, we are all copywriters. We spend a good portion of our days writing either in realtime over Slack or Teams or collaborating asynchronously on documents. Being able to write with clarity, conciseness and coherence is absolutely essential regardless of role or seniority. You should assess your candidates on this.

A company is an operating system which needs constant patching. Any team or individual needs an outside perspective from time to time not to default to the status quo, the “we’ve always done it this way”. I don’t believe in teammates operating solely within the frame of their job description and resorting to “This is not my responsibility” the moment they get close to the fringes. I believe in curious people, interested in understanding the business as a whole, and in proactive individuals that solve or suggest solutions to problems or inefficiencies they observe outside the strict demarcation of their role. Look for those types of individuals, they will make all the difference.

I must admit that I was initially sceptical about the idea to leverage standardized testing to assess candidates at SalesScreen. But research indicates that tests of General Mental Ability are the best single predictors of job performance., and some of our recent hires proved that assessment to be spot on. As a complement, Personality testing will give you and your people operations team, a more unbiased assessment of a candidate’s personality traits that can be evaluated in the light of what the job and your company culture require.

Cases are tough to build for hiring teams and scary to tackle for candidates. But boy, how they help make the right choice. They help you assess who can walk the talk, surface their strengths and weaknesses, see how they react under pressure, gauge how deep they’ve been able to think about a problem. It is also a fantastic way for candidates to confront themselves with what their future job will be like and confirm that they are actually ready and willing to make the jump.

While onboarding new teammates is hugely important and should be properly crafted, that process usually means getting them acquainted with your operating procedures. But one thing you might loose as a result is their fresh perspectives on how your business operates. Don’t loose sight of that and from the get-go, communicate that their questions and inputs are welcomed. This might prove to be a treasure-trove of signals that either can guide improvements or confirm that you are already doing the right things.

Running a 10-Person, a 50-Person or a 200-Person company are radically different beasts. SalesScreen’s CEO Sindre Haaland often talks about the importance aligning individual vectors in an organization towards a common goal but needless to say that doing so gets more and more complex as the number of said vectors (headcount) increases. Growing your business will most likely require increasing your workforce but having a solid vision, blueprint, and processes in place BEFORE doing so is essential. Whenever possible make sure that you have data backing up that your recipe is working before scaling. Nothing is more painful than scaling before being ready to do so.

To be continued…