Thank you to Guy Allen, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Futura Talent for providing us with this guest blog as part of People Month at techSPARK.
Every founder knows that their team is what makes or breaks them, yet so many start-ups still approach hiring like it’s a numbers game: post a job, wait, and hope someone good applies.
If you’re serious about attracting the best talent, you need to take a more intentional, proactive approach. Here’s how.
Be clear on what you actually need
One of the biggest hiring mistakes I see early-stage founders make is hiring too senior, too soon.
If you’re a commercial founder, you don’t necessarily need a full-time CTO when you haven’t even got product-market fit. You probably need a founding engineer, someone who’s happy to get their hands dirty, build quickly, and help you get to that next milestone.
If you do need senior technical oversight, bring in fractional or NED support. You’ll get the strategic guidance without burning through your runway or locking into a hire (and salary) you’re not ready for.
It’s about hiring the right roles at the right time. That means being honest about where your business is and what skills are critical for the next 6–12 months, not the next five years.
Some ambiguity in scope and spec is fine, especially early on, but the more specifically you define responsibilities and skillsets, the more likely you are to attract relevant people.
Your earliest hires will (probably) come from your network
Early hires often come from people you already know and trust. They know you and your reputation, and they’ll take a bet on you if they believe in your mission. But they won’t necessarily reach out to you.
Don’t assume a LinkedIn post or job advert will be enough to get their attention. You need to approach them directly.
The “low-hanging fruit” of your own network can be gold. Ask your team (if you have one) and your network for referrals. Consider offering financial incentives in return for any successful hires.
Don’t leave it to chance
If your plan is to “stick an advert out and see what comes back,” you’re leaving your hiring to luck. That’s not a strategy.
The best people aren’t scrolling job boards, they’re already in good jobs, well looked after, and being approached about multiple opportunities. If you want them, you need to be proactive. Reach out, leverage your network, and tell a compelling story about why your business is worth their attention.
Tools like LinkedIn Recruiter can help you to pro-actively headhunt, but they’re expensive, require annual contracts and headhunting is time-consuming.
Posting a job will still attract hundreds of applicants, often 300+, sometimes 1000+, but the quality and relevance will vary significantly. Many will ignore detailed requirements on location, salary, visa status, or skills.
Some candidates will use AI to tailor their CVs, ranging from light edits to outright fabrications. Don’t assume every CV is genuine. Dig deeper.
Be aware of candidates using AI in interviews too. Ask for specific examples and consider in-person interviews if possible.
Sell the opportunity as much as you assess the person
Hiring is a two-way process. Sure, you’re assessing them, but they’re assessing you too.
Be clear about your employee value proposition:
- Your mission and the impact they can have
- The growth and career development opportunities
- Your package, benefits, working arrangements and culture
- The kind of problems they’ll get to solve
Document it properly and include it in your adverts and job specs.
Be transparent about your runway, your plans, your challenges and your vision. If you’re not comfortable sharing that, consider whether you’re ready to hire yet.
Make your hiring process efficient and human
Speed and communication matter. What does an inefficient process suggest about your business?
Consistent, transparent communication throughout the process not only improves your chances of securing great people, it also protects your brand for the future. People are more vocal about a negative experience than a positive one. A bad experience today could lose you a great hire in three years’ time, and you’ll never know about it.
Keep your process lean, no more than three stages. If multiple stakeholders are involved, block time in diaries upfront and combine interviews where possible.
For technical roles, make your testing reflective of real work. Timed “gotcha” coding tests are outdated and don’t reflect how engineers actually work. Take-home tests can be a lot to ask of someone in a full-time job going through multiple processes elsewhere.
Collaborative code reviews or paired exercises during interviews are usually a better option. The questions they ask and their approach will show you how they think, communicate and solve problems in real-world conditions.
Think about where your time is best spent
As a founder, your time and focus are everything. Hiring is time-consuming, and the context switching between outreach, reviewing CVs, organising and conducting interviews and managing offers can kill your productivity.
AI recruiting solutions can create efficiency, but miss human nuance, and many top candidates won’t interview with AI bots.
If you can’t yet justify an internal recruiter, work with a solid specialist agency that knows your space. You’ll offload the tooling costs, time, effort, headaches and context switching with this as well as harnessing their existing specialist network.
Give them the role exclusively to start with. You’ll get more commitment, better results, and a partnership approach instead of a fast mess.
Sure, agency fees aren’t cheap. But what value could a great hire add to your business? What could a poor hire cost you? And what can you achieve with the time and focus you get back from outsourcing this?
Final thoughts
Hiring top talent, done properly, takes time, focus, resource and expertise.
If you’re looking to hire and would like a no-obligation discussion to go over the role(s), spec, market availability, salary insight, hiring process and more, feel free to reach out: guy.allen@futura-talent.com.
