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In my previous post, How to hire your first employees and what to expect…, I talked about some of the steps you might need to put in place before you hire that person, who you should hire and what to expect from them.
After I spoke at AWE (Affiliate World Europe) I had a lot of questions about who this Operations person was. So I thought I'd expand on the subject a little more.
You are an entrepreneur.
This means you probably love
But most entrepreneurs I've met don't enjoy taking all that and building it into a company.
But most entrepreneurs I’ve met don’t enjoy taking all that and building it into a company.
What do you mean Jason? I have a company already…
Just because you make money and/or you’re incorporated doesn’t mean you’re a company.
A company is repeatable measurable systems of operation. Stuff that other people can train with, hire with, etc.
Most of us entrepreneurs have little to no interest in building this stuff. We have a lot of ideas, we know how to solve the problems, etc . But when it comes to sitting down and writing all this out. We say we’ll do it… but we never will.
And honestly…
You shouldn’t be doing it. You should be focused on finding opportunities to make more money, hire better people or plan for the future.
A great operations person will sit side by side with you. Take all your amazing ideas that you have and turn them into a company. All the mean while you can focus on making money and keeping the company a float.
My CTO Sergey told me a long time ago that business and product are separate things. So what does this mean?
All "business" is relatively the same.
The business is:
Now the product in most businesses are very different. If you're in the affiliate world you product might be:
Product based things are things that require specific domain knowledge about what we give to our customers. They very widely across businesses.
As you can see the "business" and the "product" are different things and require different people to accomplish them.
When it comes to hiring for a role I like to think of things this way.
If they’re a “business” role like operations, I’ll hire without industry experience all day long. If they’re “product” side I prefer to hire with experience.
We do however hold roles in the company to bring up entry level people on the product side of the business. But we only hire those people once all the training, systems. measurement and management are built out.
If you’re going to hire people without experience please make sure you set them up for success. With strong systems, measurements, training and management. If you don’t they’ll just suck the life out of you and the business will struggle long term.
Being an entrepreneur I never thought much about titles or cared for them. They were just names that people got paid more money for having. More often then not they seemed to cause more issues then they helped.
Most of the time in the affiliate business titles are made up and the people with them are not in alignment with their titles.
But now I view that differently. I use titles to bucket what someone should be capable of doing in their role. Here’s my loose system.
But Jason I can't afford to hire all these people...
I like to break out roles like this so that you can understand that you and your employees are filling many different roles. When you go hire your Director of Operations that means you still have some roles to fill. That is the Role of VP and C level for the company. At some point you'll move your Director to a VP or hire a VP above him/her. But don't expect your Director level employee to do VP & C level things, this is a recipe for failure.
Be cautious…
I’ve made this mistake, on multiple occasions, of hiring a someone that is a Manager level person and asked them to do Director level tasks. This doesn’t work and typically ends up with the employee and management being frustrated.
I invite you to be cautious of resumes. Ask a lot of deep probing questions. Just because it says Director on 2 past roles doesn’t mean that they have the tools in their tool chest to do what I described above.
Just because someone has 20 years at IBM, in the role you want to hire for, doesn’t mean they’re going to b e a good fit.
You really want to hire someone that started with a very small company and grew it to the size that you want to be in head count.
Why do I say head count?
Because we’re discussing the business side of the business. And the business side the of the business is about people. So as part of our 5-10 year vision we want to create how many people would you like to have on your team? If that number is 20.
Then I would suggest you hire someone that has been at, at least 2 companies prior and grown them from 2-3 people to 20 people. Ideally if you can find someone that’s grown 2 companies to 50 people then you know that the 20 you want should be easy to manage vs. 50.
Again because this is a business role this person doesn’t need to have domain specific experience in my opinion. That’s what you bring to the table. They’re their to help build your vision.
We hire with ads, networking and recruiters.
First you need to put your needs analysis together. That is a list of things you want out of the candidate.
It’s always good to go look up job postings other have made for a similar position.You also want to go look at related “manager” level roles and get ideas from there as well. Because you’re going to need this person to build the systems, hire the team and manage the team. Then get your total list from those compiled together.
Just don’t forget to add the ideas from this post in as well…
As this is your first hire, I’d encourage you to engage 2-3 different recruiters to see how they operate. They typically ask for 30% of the first year salary. We negotiate all the ones we work with to 10-15%. They’ll guide you through the hiring process and have done it 100-1,000’s of times before. The good experienced ones also have history with lots of candidates that might fit your bill.
You can also put ads up yourself and see what you get.
Just remember people are on their best behavior in interviews. So if you hire without a recruiter just be careful you may not get what you think you’re getting in the end.
As an employer, at least in the U.S., you can only ask a past employer if someone worked there for that period of time. And I believe you can ask if they're eligible for rehire.
So one of the main things we look for is longevity at past job.
There's a ton of good material out there on how to interview people. So I'm not going to talk about that too much. But our process is
I'd suggest to do 3 interviews with the person or at least 2 spaced out. I know you're going to feel like this person is amazing when you find the right one. Then you're going to want hire them right away. Don't do this. Make them wait and slow the process down. This is going to be a marriage for a long time hopefully. You don't want to meet your wife one day and get married the next. You want to make sure you go through the dating process and that dating process in hiring is multiple interviews.
Another tactic we've used it hiring them for 30 days as a consultant. Feel what is like to work with them. However don't expect them to accomplish great things in 30 days time. As my last post said it takes quite a while for someone to have a reason impact. It will let you know what it's like to work with them and how they do these things below.
There's a lot of good interview questions you can ask that can get to the root of these things. I'm not going to list ours as we hire all the time. Go do a little research and you'll come up with lots of lists you can start using when you hire.
If you use a recruiter they should be able to guide you. You can also just do a salary search on Google like this.
Director of Operations San Diego Salary
Don’t be cheap. You get what you pay for. Find the right person that you think will be an amazing fit and pay them what they’re worth.
I’ve tried to hire cheap. It always turns out poorly. Good people know what they’re worth and even if you do get them, they won’t stay.
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