“Mediocrity is a disease. Excellence is a habit.” – God knows who. If you have a startup that is doubling in size every quarter, hiring must be the most important part of your job. The pressure to hire right makes the job all the more stressful. Nobody likes making mistakes (especially recruiting mistakes). Looking back, some of the key reasons why we have made recruiting mistakes are: 1) Desperation to add people to a very overworked team 2) Not being able to pinpoint what is wrong with the candidate while your gut says ‘no’ 3) Not knowing what kind of people to hire for a specific role The last one is part of the learning process for a startup. There is pretty much nothing you can do to avoid it. Especially if you are trying to reinvent the way things work. The first two are the side-effects of a hire-fast policy. Over time, we have learnt that hiring fast can be handled in a much smarter way. In a young and growing startup, you have to make sure that you don’t lower the bar for incoming people, because you will never be able to raise it again. To compensate for the deceleration which comes with maintaining a high bar, put more people into scaling up your hiring so that you meet more people before finding the perfect fit. Only hire when you are not able to find an excuse to not hire that person. However, no matter how many interview rounds you conduct, or who interviews potential candidates, or how low your acceptance rate is, the fact of the matter is that you will always end up making a few recruiting mistakes. Why? Because it is very difficult to judge people over interviews. You have to work with them for a few days to get to know what they are worth. They will only be their real self once they start working with you on a regular basis. The key is to not get bogged down by these mistakes, but take them in your stride and fix them as soon as possible. And it’s vital to move as fast as possible. Procrastinating on firings always lead to the question – “Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?”. Sometimes, though, firing decisions are not simple. To make the decision making process simpler and cleaner for ourselves, we have developed a way of thinking which has almost always served us well. All people while being evaluated (on whether they should be asked to leave), go through a step-by-step filter, where each step has a different set of consequences. Here’s the rule set that we follow:

Level 1: Ethics

There has to be a zero compromise on ethics. If a Sales person tells us that he had a meeting with a client while he was chilling at home, it is not acceptable. If an employee makes a mistake and tells us that it wasn’t him, it is not acceptable. Honesty and hard work are the basics which bond a startup team together – there is no space for such demeanour. The worst part is that if you warn people at such things, they almost always never learn. They would do the same thing after a few months. The only thing that makes people learn and imbibe these things are repercussions. Repercussions teach them that the potential long-term downside of failing at ethics is always bigger than the short-term upside. Failing at ethics leads to instant firings. No questions asked.

Level 2: Respect

Every last person in your organization deserves the same amount of respect as the first. If an employee disrespects someone, even for a valid reason, he/she contributes to a negative vibe in the office which makes it difficult for work to happen. It is vital to maintain a positive and pleasant working environment in a startup. This is where it gets subjective. But your instinct will tell you whether what you are about to do is right or wrong. e.g. if a male employee calls his female colleague a b**ch (and other things) in front of 10 other people for some stupid reason, you know what to do.

Level 3: Attitude

Everybody needs to sport a “can-do” attitude and believe that nothing is below his/her dignity. The proverbial “bringing coffee for the team” is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about even simpler things like taking packaging paper and wrapping 1000 copies of a book with gift paper overnight. If someone says that this is not his/her job description, it’s a problem. Every last thing in a startup is everybody’s job description. In such cases, someone needs to sit with the person and explain to him/her that they need to pull up their socks. Still, if this person acts pricey one more time (make sure you put him on a test soon enough), you have a problem which you need to fix.

Level 4: Skills

This is where people are not able to do their job well. This is ok, as long as they are trying. As long as they are asking for help. This is where people are given enough time to learn and do a better job – of course, only if they are doing well on Levels 1, 2 & 3. They are not asked to leave as long as they are putting in their best effort. If possible, try to find some other role for them where they can possibly contribute more. Over time, however, if things don’t start working out, it becomes counterproductive for the person to stay at the company. It is then mutually decided that the person needs to find somewhere else where he/she would fit and perform better.

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Looking back, all the people that we have asked to leave have either failed at Level 1 (Ethics) or Level 3 (Attitude). Mostly at Level 3. Overall, quickly asking these people to leave has resulted in a very healthy organization where all the good people know that they are valued as long as they are contributing to the growth of the company. Everybody understands that it is completely meritocratic here and that age and experience do not count for anything. But what about all those people who left us? My perspective here is that parting ways is good for the employee as well as the organization. It relieves the organization of dead weight and gives these employees an opportunity to spend enough time to look for an alternative organization with a culture and a role they would do very well at. Thoughts?