Terrible startup advice: Don't Hire Your Friends
There’s lots of terrible startup advice out there, but a particularly bad idea is that you should never hire your friends.
When you are starting a business, you have very little going for you. No product, no revenue, no sales tactics, no customers, no job, no idea what you’re doing. One thing you hopefully have is friends who believe in you.
We started Tanda as we were finishing university, so we had many awesome friends who also had a wide variety of useful skills. Many of them also had friends who weren’t shit. With these “talent pools” combined it was often easy to think of someone we knew who’d be a great fit for a role we wanted to fill.
Tomorrow I’m attending a quarterly meeting with all our regional team leaders and some global executives. Apart from my co-founders (aka. best mates), 6 people are attending. Of those 6, 4 were friends before they were colleagues. There’s also a bunch of similarly senior folks who aren’t attending and who we hired because they were friends. Most of these friendships stretch back over 10 years. The best man at my wedding leads our biggest engineering team.
Here’s a few things to consider next time someone tells you not to hire your friends:
If you have a friend who is smart, you can just hire them and figure out their role later. This gives you great flexibility and lets them find their perfect job. You can’t really do this with non-friends.
Good friends will probably have more patience with you. Growing a business is really hard and sometimes there will be chaos that everyone just needs to ride out. If you’ve been through difficult things together before, it’ll be easier to do it again.
Sometimes your friends will want to go and challenge themselves in different roles outside of your business. This is great, they’ll learn lots, and you should welcome them with open arms when they inevitably come back.
Yes, the warnings are true: you can ruin friendships by working together. But this doesn’t just happen out of the blue; it is more likely if you don’t treat each other with the respect and professionalism you’d give any colleague (so don’t do that). I think it is worth the risk. You can also ruin relationships by getting married, but nobody uses that as an argument against marriage.
Not every friend is automatically going to make a great hire. They might lack the technical skills to do the job you need, or they might not be as willing to mix work and play as you are. But some friends will be, and you should hire them.
Growing a business is one of the most fun things you can do. Wouldn’t you rather have your friends around for the journey?
I like the “hire smart people and find where they fit”. The other side of hiring friends (or people you’ve known a long time) is avoiding the whole ‘cultural fit’ minefield. You already know them, you already know if they’ll fit.
The alternative, an hour long interview (or three) is a hard way to get a real insight into how someone’s going to perform. And the cost of a bad hire is huge. Removing someone (in NZ) is a lengthy process. To the point where I’d consider having all new hires join as a contractor for 3 months, instead of probation. Consider the extra pay a hiring bonus, and let either party candidly, and without restriction, decide ‘is this working?’