5 Things I Learnt About Hiring in 10 Years of Bootstrapping

I have been hiring people for one project or the other, and one entity or the other for the last 10 years. I started as a 19 year old law student by recruiting classmates and juniors in law school to work either on freelance projects I bagged from leading coaching centres, or for ghost writing text books for civil services exams. I once hired liberal arts students to work on a project I was doing for renowned historian and author Ramachandra Guha who gave me some research work. Eventually, I would hire co-founders, lawyers, sales people, content writers, volunteers, community managers, developers, designers, researchers, bloggers, counselors, interns and back office support for 3 different startups, 2 web based communities and a not for profit that I started over the years. I am fortunate that most of them who really count still work for me.

Over time, I made thousands of mistakes as I convinced hundreds of people to join me on my various projects. What I learnt in the process has been invaluable life experience for me, applicable not just in business but in life in genral as well, and I have over time refined the insights into some key principles that have come handy time and again. Here are 5 key principles that may help you too, in hiring and who knows what else.

People who don’t care about integrity are not worth your time

No matter how tempting a hire is, if they are willing to breach a promise or bend a rule to come and join you, it’s not worth it. As Warren Buffett would say, hire people who have intelligence, energy and integrity. If they don’t have integrity, the first two will kill you. Now it’s one thing to appreciate the concept - but another to learn it the hard way when money, projects, reputation, success and even people’s lives are at stake. I have learnt it like that, it’s now in my bones. I have come to respect integrity in the people I work with above all else. I would anyday prefer colleagues, bosses, investors, vendors and partners who share the bad news first and do not gloss over things.

I have also noticed that a lot many of the most successful men and women I got to know look for integrity in the people they are considering working with. That way, I find integrity to be a massive competitive advantage. Anyone with high level of integrity is probably slated for success in their life.

Curiously, some people who worked with me appeared to look at telling the truth as a favour to me or a moral blanket. If I volunteer to tell you the truth how can you let me face the music? After all I could have hidden this indefinitely! This argument seems strong on the face but is hopelessly doomed.

It is important to understand that speaking the truth every time doesn’t protect you from the consequences of failure. It does not protect your boss either, but may give him some reaction or preparation time. Lying in those times will soften the blow on you, or probably delay it - but ruin your reputation and credibility completely eventually. Or else, you will be too busy hiding your tracks, and pay the psychological costs which are rarely understood when you are in the act.

It is critical that you don’t end up hiring people who do not care about integrity. It is not that you will always be able to tell in the beginning, but cost of ignoring early signs will be high. It is also not possible that every person you hire will always be in integrity, but the question is whether they give a damn about it and how long they take to clean up where there are integrity issues, be it their own or someone else’s.

Never engage anyone without a written agreement

Right in the beginning, when I was getting started with my first venture iPleaders, I would pay very less attention to the employment agreement. Sometimes we would even forget to get new joinees to sign the agreement and then would have to sign one retrospectively when an employee is leaving! This is quite disgraceful since at iPleaders, our flagship course was one for entrepreneurs where we had an entire module on legal issues related to employment and taught others to be diligent in such matters. I was lucky that I never had a dispute with anyone, except that once a lawyer refused to sign a non-compete agreement citing that she is worried she will not find a job anyway. I instead got her to give me an oral promise that if she somehow doesn’t find a job anywhere else and have to consider working with one of our handful of competing online legal education companies, she should first talk to me so I can help her to bag something better. Thankfully, she started working with a senior lawyer soon. If she indeed went to work for a competitor, it would have been very problematic.

I have a large number of people turn up to me with employee or employment related issues almost every week as I am a co-founder of ClikLawyer, a startup which helps individuals and companies to enforce contracts and recover money that is overdue. Breach of employment contracts is perhaps one of the most common breach of contract that takes place. However, not having a contract altogether leaves employers high and dry. Having a template contract for different categories of employees is a very good idea. However, remember that a contract that works for a software developer may not work for your CFO. Another thing that really works is to put a strong and enforceable arbitration clause into your employment agreements so that it can be enforced without having to go to a court if necessary.

People who gossip can wreck a happy (work) place

Successful people don’t gossip and those who do don’t remain successful for long. None of us can probably say that we never gossiped. Still, as a leader and custodian of workplace culture one must take steps to deal with gossip mongers. There is probably no harmless level of gossip, but there is a kind of people who suffer from chronic gossip and wield it like a political tool to gain passive power and satisfy their egoistic needs. It is important to train your personnel to avoid gossip, but you got to let go of the gossip kings and queens before they turn your best people against each other, create distance and animosity between teams, and make information trading and politics a survival skill in your organization.

Attachment to hiring highly qualified people is a weakness

It seemed to me at first that I need to hire more people like me - people who can take initiatives, be creative whenever needed and deliver solutions where most people can only see problems and provide leadership. Books and anecdotes told me I need to hire A type people, people who are better than me etc. I think the biggest struggle of the initial years involved a misguided scramble to hire highly qualified and capable people. I can’t tell you how many countless hours I have spent trying to woo and then retain talented and creative people who I toiled hard to afford. When discerning people like Hrishikesh Datar of Vakilsearch warned me that the scramble is perpetual, and that it could not take me very far, I would barely take such advice seriously.

Then one day, I just stopped trying to hire talented people, and started asking myself what will I have to do to get the average job seeker to do my work. One key influence in this was a gentleman called Rahul Jain, whose powerful sermon on hiring and managing employees really opened my eyes. A major turning point in my business was being comfortable in hiring people who didn’t exactly fit star profiles but then empowering them and training them inside the company. This made all the difference. Really high growth in salaries, sometimes even up to 50% a year, would take place frequently, which reflects on the kind of growth that people accomplished. Learning to invest significant time and resources in training has been another.

You can hire pretty much anyone to do anything, if processes are well developed enough. You definitely need qualified people to develop and design those processes, but you can’t scale if you are overly dependant on talented people on every step.

People won’t stay for money or equity, but the game

It may seem that the easy solution to retain people is to offer them money, equity or whatever else it is that they want. Maybe the key is to go easy on them when they want that. My experience has been that people don’t stay for any of these. What makes the good people be loyal to the organization for a long period is clarity of what they can accomplish, a bit of challenge and high level of growth achieved through coaching or mentorship. When people beat their own expectations in the kind of results they are producing again and again, it affects the kind of confidence they have or how they perceive themselves. When one can provide an environment like that, where there is joy of victory and the momentum of a game, everything else takes a backseat. Inventing a game worth playing and then keeping the focus of the people over there is perhaps the biggest people challenge that any business leaders ever face. In iPleaders, an online legal education business I started with my cofounders almost 5 years back, from time to time we had to create a new vision.

The current one that really inspires the team is a vision of creating extraordinary business lawyers and business leaders in India, and impact the entire Indian economy through that. Every small activity or any course we launch is seen as connected with the ultimate objective, and it never ceases to inspire me or my team. If people have to stay awake and work late to launch a course like this in record time, they would do so - because it’s a game worth playing. What game are you in?