Hiring is harder than you think. After many flops, I figured out how to not suck at it.

As most posts here are about making money and selling, I feel like hiring is an underappreciated topic.Some entrepreneurs never break through the delegation barrier and get stuck along the way.Sure enough, it's essential to make your first dollar before you go recruit more people. Also, some businesses need minimum human labor or none at all.But, assuming not all of you here are selling NFTs for a living, and many have traditional product or service businesses that need a headcount to scale, I hope you find this valuable.My first hires were quick and opportunistic. My attitude used to be like "You seem to be a good guy, I like you, let's do it!" right after a first meeting. No wonder 70% of them were total flops (I'll leave these stories for another time). The other 30% were actually amazing, but that's not a ratio any business can afford.I didn't want to use external recruitment firms and HR services. However, your first hires define your company culture - how could I outsource it to someone whose only incentive is to take a chunk of their salary?I sat down with our Head of Design (for full context, we were hiring UX/UI designers for our digital product agency) and developed a questionnaire we asked ourselves to do the recruitment process right this time. Here are the questions and how we approached them:Do we hire for attitude or skill?Attitude and aptitude for junior positions The same + skills and experience for seniorDo we hire for short time-to-value, or do we treat it as an investment?Basically, do we how some urgent work to be done, or are we comfortable with investing our time and resources to train new people so they can bring real value in 3-6 months? In our case, we looked for both and interviewed accordingly.What's the objective of the short assignment part?Not all jobs have this part in the recruitment process. Our task was specific to the UX/UI designer position on designing a part of the missing interface and required some research.In our case, we looked for a balance between creativity and pragmatism. On the one hand, it's hard to assess creativity given the time constraint (6 hours). On the other hand, you want to pick something better than a generic outcome.We couldn't answer this question until we had all completed assignments, but eventually, the best assignments were about 40% creative and 60% pragmatic (solved the given problem). It sounds silly to put these 60/40 measures here, but I couldn't find a better way to illustrate it.There is no real prescription here, just a reminder to be mindful about the objective and how it will map on to the actual job.Why would someone pick us over somebody else?If money is the only answer, then you probably don't need to read this post anyway.Our answer was: We want to be authentic, we want to be clear about what we do and how, and we just look for like-minded people. If you don't know where to start, start right over there.Writing a thoughtful, inclusive, transparent job description is low-hanging fruit with crazy ROI. In the world of corporate slang and opaque, half-ass job postings, the ability to write like a human is very appreciated.​What is our unfair advantage? What can we see in other people top companies HR departments will overlook or not care about?Super important question.What trait that doesn't pass through corporate filters is valuable for us?First screening calls are usually dull and pretty basic. Instead, we doubled down on understanding what really tickles candidates' fancy. I shared my screen and said, "Hey, let's go explore the internet together. Show me something that blew your mind recently. What should I type?"The obvious benefit is that people felt appreciated and differentiated, but I really had a chance to understand their deep motivations, inspirations, how they think, and what they like.Again, I'm not saying these are all silver bullets, but hopefully, I gave you some food for thought.Oh, and BTW, back in the day when we first implemented this framework, we were looking for just one new team member. I ended up hiring four because I just couldn't miss the opportunity to work with such exceptional people. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy