The Founding Team Hiring Checklist: 10 Questions Before Your First Hire
Most first hires go wrong before the job post is even written. Here are ten questions worth answering honestly first.
1. What breaks if you don't make this hire in the next month? If the honest answer is "nothing much," you may be hiring out of anxiety rather than need. Hire for a real, specific gap, not for the feeling of having a bigger team.
2. What does this person need to have done, six months from now, for this to be a clear win? An outcome, not a list of responsibilities. If you can't answer this specifically, the job post won't be specific either, and neither will the candidates it attracts.
3. What's the blast radius if this hire is wrong? A cheap-to-reverse mistake (a role with clear, checkable output) is a fine place to bet on potential and pay less. An expensive, hard-to-reverse mistake (your first finance hire, the person setting your technical architecture) is worth paying for proven experience.
4. Can you actually afford this, all in, for 18 months? Not just the salary, the fully-loaded cost, and not just for this quarter's runway. A hire you can't sustain is worse than not hiring at all.
5. What would make this role genuinely exciting to a great candidate? Not what you need from them, what's in it for them. If the honest answer is thin, that's worth fixing before you go looking for candidates, not after you've lost a few good ones.
6. Who is actually going to run this process? If it's you, block real calendar time for it now. A hiring process that only happens in the gaps between everything else takes twice as long and loses candidates to companies that moved faster.
7. What's your evidence for "good" in this role, specifically? Not a vibe, an actual example: a project, a result, a piece of work you'd hold up as the bar. If you can't point to one, you're not ready to evaluate candidates against it yet.
8. What's the cash and equity number, before you talk to anyone? Decide this before the process starts, not in the room with a candidate. See our salary and equity guide for current ANZ benchmarks.
9. How will you actually source this, beyond posting and hoping? A job post alone competes against hundreds of others. Have a real plan: your own network, a targeted search, or a talent network built around evidence rather than applications. Browse candidates on Matchbox if you don't have a plan yet.
10. What happens if the search takes twice as long as you think? It usually does. Decide now what you'll do if it does, rather than making a rushed decision under pressure in week six. A rushed hire is the single most common reason bad hires happen at all.
For the process itself once you've answered these, read the startup hiring playbook.