I found that Brad Feld makes an excellent point in his post on Cultural fit – http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2012/12/12/why-cultural-fit-trumps-competence/ Starting out we hired a lot of smart people that were great at what they did, they clearly had a high competence. But we ran into issues on several projects, because they did not want to travel or work after a certain time. They were awesome at what they did but other people had to pick up the slack for what they did not want to do. Coming from a large enterprise firm they were not able to adjust to the different customer requirements on how they wanted to run projects and their environment.
Going forward I have focused on getting a fit not just for competence but also cultural fit. I had to rethink our hiring process and define the type of employee we are looking for. Just being good at what you do is not enough. I have changed our hiring process to not just focus on competence but also fit with the business we are trying to build. I did the following:
1. Define what our expectations of the employee is at the firm in the business we are building.
2. Set expectations about what will be required from the employee in meeting our goals as a company.
3. If people are not meeting expectations let them go, quit waiting for them to catch fire and get on our page.
Start ups have to run differently and the right people can make or break your organization.
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