Two reasons make recruitment tough: What happens before the hiring process, and what happens after it.
Everything Prior to It Is Way Easier
The typical 4-step path for a startup: Come up with a concept, cobble together a prototype, raise seed funds, and hire a team. The startup founder is great at the first three steps, since they’re why the founder got into startups in the first place. Max Skibinsky explains in a recent post on the subject: Early-stage recruiting involves 40 interviews a week, a surgical attention to detail, and the willingness to make the hard decision over and over. Most startup founder simply aren’t qualified, but want to think they are because they’ve been qualified for everything prior to hiring a team: It’s an example of consistency bias.
After Hiring, Confirmation Bias Keeps People On
It’s not over after you’ve hired. You still need to be willing to let people go even just a few weeks or months after they’ve been brought on. But since they went into the trouble of hiring, the startups founders will have a hard time seeing why they need to fire the same people who were so hard to pick out in the first place. As Skibinsky says:
