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Hiring for a mission-driven early-stage startup

I have recently had the privilege of working with the team at Comand AI. Comand is a mission-driven startup that is building a platform to bolster NATO and NATO-aligned countries' defense capabilities by building products that help make operations more efficient and effective.

The company is at a very early stage and are currently sprinting towards finding product-market fit. At the same time they have a very clear mission and vision, and have seen early signs of traction in the market. This means as they continue to gather user feedback and iterate on their product, they need to build a team that can move quickly and adapt to the changing needs of their customers.

The Challenge

The founding team at Comand AI is really strong on the technical side. It is exactly the kind of team you would expect to see at a mission-driven startup - highly motivated, technically strong, and deeply passionate about the problem they are solving. However, they needed help in building out the team further. How do you identify the traits that would make someone successful in a mission-driven startup? How do you build a hiring process that can help you identify these traits?

At the pre-product-market-fit stage you generally want people who have spikes in at least one of the following two areas:

  1. Highly Creative: They need to be someone who can explore the product space and come up with innovative solutions.
  2. Strong Execution: They need to be someone who can take a vague idea and turn it into a product really quickly.

You either need someone who can chart out uncharted territories and come up with innovative ideas, or someone who can quickly build a prototype and test it out with users. Ideally both.

Separately, you need to be mindful of the mission-driven aspect of the company. You need people who are deeply passionate about the problem you are solving, and who are willing to go the extra mile to make sure you succeed. And you need to think about the kind of culture you want to build. You want people who are collaborative, who are willing to take ownership of the outcome, and who are able to work effectively with others.

Designing a hiring process that can help identify these traits is crucial to building a team that can help you achieve your mission.

The Process

I started by understanding the current team makeup, their values, and the business goals they were trying to achieve. This was mapped to the hiring goals for the next 6 months. I also did some ground work by shadowing a few interviews and understanding the current process. This revealed the different interviewing styles, their preferences, the kind of questions they were asking, and the synthesis process.

One of the main gaps I noticed was something I have written about before - being ok with the unfairness of interviews. The team has high empathy for the candidates, and at times this meant they were not making the hard decisions that were needed. An empathetic interviewer is a good thing - being empathetic helps build a genuine connection with the candidate, but while synthesising the feedback, it is important to be objective. This is especially important when evaluating candidates who are good, but not great. At such an early stage, you want to hire great people.

I also worked with the internal recruiting lead to design a process that would help identify the traits we were looking for. This included:

  • A screening call with the internal officer and me to understand the candidate's motivations and values.
  • (Optional) Another domain-specific call with the technical lead to understand the candidate's technical capabilities.
  • Coding assessment.
  • Onsite interviews that included a mix of technical and behavioural interviews.
  • A founder interview to understand the candidate's alignment with the mission and vision of the company.

The first screening call was designed to protect the team's time and ensure that only candidates who were deeply aligned with the mission and vision of the company were brought onsite.

We are still in the process of iterating on the process, but the early signs are promising. The team is excited about the candidates they are seeing, and the candidates are excited about the opportunity to work at Comand AI. As we get more reps under our belt, we hope to add more rigor and accountability by introducing hiring theses to have a historical record of why we made the decisions we did, as well as to have an understanding of how and where to staff new hires.

Looking Forward

As Comand AI continues to grow, they will need to continue to iterate on their hiring process. They will need to think about how to scale the process, how to ensure that the process is fair and unbiased, and how to ensure that they are hiring the right people for the right roles. And all of this without losing sight of the mission and vision of the company. But the passion and drive of the founding team was apparent since the beginning, and I am confident that they will be able to build a team that can help them achieve their goals.

Get in touch if you would like to work at Comand AI, or if you would like to know more about the hiring process we are building. I am always happy to chat about hiring, startups, and everything in between. If you are currently in the process of hiring for your startup, and would like some help, feel free to reach out to me at me@anjor.xyz.