Here are some hiring tips to help you get started. I also included insights from two entrepreneurs who have been very successful at hiring top performers: Jason Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of RunKeeper, and Boris Revsin, co-founder & CEO of CampusLIVE, whom I’ve helped recruit a senior director of product and analytics.

1.  Make a plan.

Hiring the best people is critical to your success so you need a strategy or roadmap to do it well (like any other aspect of your business).

Start off by prioritizing which positions need to be hired first by determining the importance they will have to your business today. Then write a detailed profile of the ideal candidates. Jacobs adds, “They say when fundraising, if you ask for money you get advice and if you ask for advice, you get money. Hiring is the same way. Reach out to people you think would be perfect for the role and get their advice on how you are thinking about the position.”

Of course, the recruiting pipeline doesn’t just fill up with top candidates automatically. It takes a lot of work. You should outline a project plan with specific tasks that will help you build your list of prospective candidates. Here are some ideas and tasks you should follow to help you set goals and measure your success.

2.  Work your network.

Working your network is a crucial piece of any successful recruiting effort. You should already be diligent about connecting with people on LinkedIn, which helps. And this point cannot be emphasized enough: A-plus players know other A-plus players. “You want the people you trust to recommend other top performers,” says Revsin.

Another great suggestion from Revsin: make your advisors and investors an extension of your recruiting efforts. They have extensive networks that should open up introductions to key people in the industry. Ask them to help make introductions for you. After all, they too are invested in your success.

3.  Get out there.

You are your company’s chief evangelist! People need to see the passion in your vision and believe that the climb is worthwhile. So you need to be out there and visible in the community.  Every major city has networking events going on within your industry.  Attend big events like NY Tech Meetup in New York or WebInno in Boston, but also find out about smaller groups where people are talking about topics relevant to your business.

While networking is central to recruiting, it also helps build your brand and creates buzz. Once people are talking about your company, you might actually get requests from candidates actively seeking to work for you.

4.  Recruit all the time.

You never know when you are going to be meeting someone who could be your next hire. Have your recruiting hat on at all times.

And if you already have a co-founder or a few early employees, make sure they are all out there helping out with the recruiting efforts too.  Everyone should be involved, especially in the early stages. Make sure your story is consistent from everyone. Getting a mixed message about the position or the vision of the company is a red flag for most candidates.

5.  Aim high.

If you are going to build a successful company, you need to find the best of the best employees. If you truly believe that your company offers amazing opportunities, be fearless and go after the top performers out there. Yes, people do leave Google.

You will want to move quickly, but don’t just hire for the sake of having a warm body in the seat. Take your time and do the proper amount of due diligence to help ensure you are making the right hires.

Jacobs validates this point. “If you aren’t over the moon about the hire you are about to make, don’t hire [him or her]. Every single hire in an early stage company is critically important to get right.”

Since every hire at a startup is critical, it is very helpful to get one or two backdoor references to further validate the person’s performance and potential fit for your company.

Here are three tips on identifying sources to provide you with that critical, final vote of confidence that you are truly making the right hire.

1. Look inside your own company

This is the obvious one.  As you are reading a resume, you should pick up on the companies where the candidate worked in the past and be able to recognize if there is any cross over with current employees.

2. LinkedIn is your friend

Hopefully, you have been doing a great job at building out your network on LinkedIn because there are two ways that you can use LinkedIn to identify potential backdoor references.

First, look up the candidate on LinkedIn.  If they are a second degree connection, you will see “shared connections,” which is the contact between the two of you.  Hopefully, the mutual connection is a former co-worker, but if not, perhaps he/she has previously dealt with that person in some professional capacity.

Second, if you are a LinkedIn Premium account holder, there is a great feature called Reference Search.  This feature allows you to find coworkers by doing a search via company name and years they were employed there.  The search results will give you everyone in your network who overlapped during the same period of time.

3. Founders typically help founders

If the candidate previously worked at company, where the founder was involved in the hiring process or potentially worked directly with the candidate… don’t be shy.  Reach out directly to the founder and introduce yourself.  Let him/her know your intentions about talking about the performance of a past employee.  Since they understand the entrepreneurial journey and the critical importance of every hire being a star performer, it is likely that they will respond to your request and give you the inside scoop.

To make matters worse, most of the top engineers are not actively looking and they are certainly not scanning the plethora of job descriptions out there.

This is why I’m a fan of engineering blogs as a differentiator for startups. How is an engineering blog going to help you with recruiting? It’s a very effective and subtle way to attract candidates by showcasing your company’s technology, people, and engineering culture. For instance, it can highlight the technologies being used at the company, the types of technical challenges candidates might help solve, and the personalities of the engineering team and culture of the company.

Let’s take a look at three strong examples:

Etsy A marketplace for handmade and vintage goods? Doesn’t sound too techno savvy. But wait. Once you dive deep into Code as Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog, you will see a world full of blog posts talking about big data, scaling, MongoDB, and Hadoop. In addition, you’ll notice that Etsy is committed to having its team learn from other experts in the industry via its Etsy Speaker Series.

Etsy tracks the number of referrals, interviews, and hires that originate in its blog. Although the company doesn’t share specific details, it does say the numbers are significant. It also stresses the importance of having the blog “speak with the voice of the engineering culture behind it” and thus…it’s critical to have established a great engineering culture in the first place.

Airbnb Airbnb raised $112 million this past summer and it is one of the fastest-growing web companies. Its Nerd Blog takes you deep into a variety of technical factors that make Airbnb tick, such as improving search performance, and MySQL in the cloud. Sharing this information with the general engineering community is very positive, as this content is very useful for everyone. Remember, as with most things in life… the more you give, the more you get in return.

Wayfair Wayfair is a rapidly-growing e-commerce company in Boston. It recently launched an engineering blog for a couple of reasons. For one, Wayfair executives have learned a lot from other engineering blogs and this was a great way for them to give back. They also agreed that an engineering blog allows them to promote the engineering strength of the company, which in turn helps attract top talent.

The two biggest barriers for most companies in terms of setting up an engineering blog are time and content. We are all busy with constant demands and deadlines, but it can be worthwhile if your company creates a buzz in the engineering community as a top place to work.

I recommend you spread out the content creation across multiple team members and assign realistic goals to keep a continuous stream of content. Aim for at least one new post on the blog per week. Have fun, and show the personality of your company. A blog is only effective if it has fresh material, which keeps people coming back for more. Perhaps switch up the content by posting a video highlighting a recent event at your company or pictures of your team.

Over time, those followers of your blog just might end up being your next employees.

StyleFeeder is a perfect example of how a startup can achieve great levels of success with a fairly limited amount of resources.  The company was started in 2005 and raised $4M in funding in May of 2006.  The team included 7 people, plus a half-time office manager.  Although the acquisition price was never officially disclosed, a journalist at The Wall Street Journal pegged the deal “well into eight figures.”

Here are some key takeaways from the blog post:

The Pivot…what are you good at?

StyleFeeder started out as a social sharing site or like a “del.icio.us for clothes.”  Philip was able to anticipate some of the challenges of this business model in advance and thus, started to invest heavily in their recommendation engine.  Philip notes:

“Our investment in innovation and technology stands out still as one of the key differentiators of StyleFeeder.  While our competitors invested in other areas, leading edge technology was one zone where we really stood out.  You have to do what you were good at… and we were good at building product.  So we did that.”

Running Lean, hiring smart

Per above, StyleFeeder was operating with only 7 employees plus a part-time resource.  As a company, they instilled a “no passengers” rule which Philip describes in his post:

“I had a “no passengers” hiring rule which basically meant that everyone has to be both an individual contributor, able to do their job without support and capable of handling a team (or contractors, or vendors, etc.). We divided our efforts and learned to trust each other to get the job done.”

Be patient… stay focused and learn

Over the course of time, many different companies expressed interested in acquiring StyleFeeder.  I’m sure it is a challenge for most entrepreneurs to turn down a potential acquisition that could be life changing, but Philip talks about this experience and how he stayed focused… and learned from each situation… which ultimately led to a very positive outcome.

“We received offers from four different companies (three of which are public companies); I won’t disclose who these companies are as I intend to honor my NDAs. I learned a lot from this experience: the cost of distraction, the importance of a simple deal structure, what matters to a buyer, how to build leverage and so on.  Turning down a written offer from the CEO of a public company is not a bubbly fun experience, especially when that offer could set you up pretty well in life.  However, it pays to be patient and cold-blooded in analyzing deal terms.  I had to learn that.  It didn’t come naturally at first.”

As a next generation eCommerce company, StyleFeeder was a unique company in the Boston area a few years ago, especially one that was focused on the fashion inudstry.  We are starting to see more companies pop up in Boston that intersect fashion with eCommerce which is great to see.  Companies include: Rue La La, Gemvara, Krush, & Open Runway.  Plus, we can’t forget Daily Grommet & Fashion Playtes, who also overlap.

Philip announced that he is moving on from Time, Inc., so I can’t wait to see what he is up to next…

Birchbox is a disruptive subscription and eCommerce business, where subscribers receive 4 – 5 curated samples of beauty products each month that are delivered to their home.  A subscription costs $10 a month or you can purchase a yearly subscription at $110.  Members can also purchase the full size products from their eCommerce store.

We were honored to be introduced to Hayley Barna & Katia Beauchamp (co-founders) at Birchbox by one of their investors at First Round Capital back in February.  I was familiar with their business after giving my wife a subscription to Birchbox for Christmas (trust me… if you are looking for a gift, this one is a no-brainer).

For two months, I spent quite a bit of time with Hayley, Katia and the Birchbox team.  Hayley & Katia met each other at Harvard Business School and started the business as they were wrapping up their studies.  They are the perfect co-founder team, as they compliment each other exceptionally well.  They are brilliant, driven, innovative,… yet smart to know “what they don’t know” and empower a team around them to help build a very successful business.

Congrats!  I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds for them… which no doubt, will be very, very bright!

Here’s a great video that was published last April by The Daily:

Stay tuned as we will be blogging about different industry related topics.

In the interim, if you need to contact us… feel free to send us an email:  keith @ dissero.com or eric @ dissero.com.

Cheers – Keith