Critical Hiring Mistake #1 – Leading With You


Hello and welcome. I hope you’re intrigued and excited to learn about the five critical mistakes that can hinder your team growth, and the one question you need to be able to answer for your ideal candidate.

My name is Shaun Martin. I’m the founder of Rebase, and I founded Rebase in order to provide cheat codes for growing startups so that they can grow and build amazing and effective teams … teams that would make other companies jealous.

I’m here to share this information with you today because I’ve been in your shoes. And really, building and growing a team does seem kind of like black magic sometimes, and like there’s very little within your control.

In my years as a hiring manager, a leader, and an executive in the software startup, I’ve learned that there are things you can do that can make that stuff that’s outside of your control completely irrelevant. And I want to share this with you because I believe that startups like yours have the capacity to change the world and solve some of the humanities greatest challenges.

So without further ado, I want to share that first mistake with you, so you can assess whether or not you are actually committing this error when you are marketing your new job opportunity to the employment economy, if you will.

That first mistake is that, when somebody goes to look at your job ad or they ask you about the particular role that you have, is that you lead by talking about yourself. Not yourself individually, obviously, but you start with a company history. You describe the company and the organization, maybe the team a little bit, and you start talking about you as opposed to talking about something that will be more appealing to your ideal candidates.

And I understand why it is that we do this: It’s because we have a tendency to lead with what we know. And what we really know, deep down is our company, our organization, our team, and so that’s what we start with.

But I want you to, just for a second, put yourself in the shoes of a job seeker who maybe knows little or nothing about your company. They are searching through thousands of open positions, just hoping to find one that speaks to them. And they get to your job ad in that list of search results. They click in and the first couple of paragraphs that they read are talking about the history of the organization, the market that the company operates in, and it’s really just not appealing. You’re going to lose their interest. You’re going to deter them from being interested in applying for that position if you start off by talking about yourself.

So instead of living with talking about you, you should do something that interests them. Speak to what they are going to be intrigued by, not when the company was founded, where it’s located, what it’s doing. You can get to that, but you don’t want to lead with that because you want to capture their attention right off the bat. And you’re not going to do that by talking about how your company was founded six years ago by two people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You just are not going to capture anybody’s attention that way. So you need to not make this mistake of leading by talking about yourself. That’s mistake number one.