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It feels a bit like hunting season. Startups in Austin are aggresively hiring while eager, would-be employees — whether from in the area or out, newly graduated or onto their second, third, fourth or 18th job — are applying like, well, their jobs depended on it.
What do startup leaders use to ascertain who should make the cut? Since entrepreneurs have become synonymous with atypical questions and tasks in deciding who to bring on board their fast-changing companies, Built In asked an array of startups about their approach.
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Adam Greenspan, director of communications at Everfest, says his startup, which is a hub for information on festivals of all kinds, naturally asks applicants to submit their favorite festival story. “You get a sense of their passion for festivals, or sometimes they will divulge some questionable decisions — a great screening process,” he said.
Prior to Everfest, when he worked for uShip, Greenspan had a more elaborate interview set-up planned for those looking to be hired. “I put a whole bunch of Zoobooks on the coffee table in the reception area. When our office manager would message me that my candidate had arrived, I’d tell her to have them wait a few minutes so she could tell me which Zoobook they started reading and I could make them defend their choice at a random point in the interview,” he said. “Sounds silly, but some people would get really creative without missing a beat while others would totally freeze up as soon as you gave them a curveball.”
Ryan Farley, founder of LawnStarter, a digital marketplace for landscaping services, delves into what someone did at his or her previous role. “Typically I get a high-level answer. I iterate about seven or eight times until I get a very explicit answer. I found that honing down on their previous experience like this really gets the truth out and cuts through the fluff on the resume,” he said.
Farley is also a fan of asking what the job seeker thinks working at LawnStarter is like, which, in essence, provides a better answer to the question of "Why do you want to work here?"
Bryan Eisenberg, founder of commercial real estate company IdealSpot, tries to get a flavor for the applicant’s curiosity factor by asking what books they are reading or listening to.
Lauren Foster, founder of Stretch Recipes, a mobile app that brings users nutritional chef recipes and savings, contracts those looking to be hired for a project — either sales based or task based. Through that task, she says she can see how they problem solve, how much effort they’re willing to expend, their ability to independently think and to gauge what their attitude toward failure and success is. “How they respond to adversity and initiative determines if they are a good fit for the startup environment and, most importantly, a fit within my culture,” Foster said.
One other thing she says she plans to start asking going forward: What does work/life balance mean to you?
The tact for Allen Stone, cofunder of LyfeLens, is to ask what the person is better at than he is. “If someone has done their homework on who they're interviewing with, they should know my background already and why I'm hiring them,” Stone said. “If they don't have the confidence to tell me how their expertise outweighs mine in their field, it indicates to me that they're a ‘yes man’ and won't shoot to me straight and have the tough conversations once I hire them.”
At online gaming learning company SkillCapped, founder Cel Arrington said he has a favorite question: "If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, what are the three items you would want and why?" The answer is far less important than how the interviewee arrived at the answer, and is a “nice disruption in the interview,” Arrington said.
Able Lending’s Jennifer Lind says her favorite question to ask measures fear, wisdom, and honesty all at once: What is the one thing, that if it were true about this company, would mean that you wouldn't want this job?
