Is There Anything You Can Do About It?

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When you have an internal candidate who throws his or her hat into the ring and you choose not to put them in that seat, that increases the chances that they'll actually stay. Sometimes people's egos are getting the best of them. I've often found, though, personally, if you can involve the person in the process of hiring their manager, this goes whether they wanted the top job or not. This also flies somewhat in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom.

Today’s episode is with Jack Altman, co-founder & CEO of Lattice. There were so many topics we could have gotten into with Jack as it relates to scaling as a founder and CEO, but we decided to dive deep on executive hiring, a huge challenge for founders.

The conversation starts with how the hiring profile for executives changes as the company grows. Jack is a strong believer that you should focus on hiring someone who’s a great fit for the next 18-24 months, not the next 5 or 10 years. (Here's the blog post he mentioned about the different stages a CEO faces.)

He also talks about the traps of hiring “too big,” whether that’s over indexing on BigCo experience, or focusing on seniority and titles that don’t match your startup’s current challenges. Instead, Jack shares more about why founders should focus on getting good at assessing and taking a chance on more junior, undiscovered talent.

Next, we dig deep into his end-to-end hiring process, from how he sources folks and what he asks in interviews, to why he sometimes does references on a candidates’ references. Whether it’s diving into how a leader might build out their team, or the red flags that signal that an executive candidate doesn’t have an ownership mentality, Jack shares tons of tactical pointers.

We also get into where executive hiring errors come from, as well as the leading performance indicators to look for and what to do when a new executive leader doesn’t work out. We end by chatting about promoting internally versus hiring externally, and why you should think about your executive team like you’re constructing a portfolio.

You can follow Jack on Twitter at @jaltma. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.