Startup 132: Why an Exit Strategy is a bad idea
My apologies that it has been so long since I’ve written but I’ve been a little busy the past year and a half. I started a new company called ZangZing which is building a new service to help groups share photos. You can sign up for the beta here. I am also on the board of 3 other companies – Lookout, Smartling, and ccLoop – and an adviser to a fourth – MobileIron.
Exit Strategies
I have been meaning to write about the question of “Exit Strategies” for many months.
Not only has there been lots of press about exit strategies with Groupon turning down a multi-billion dollar offer from Google, but in about 1 out of every 2 recruiting interviews, I am asked the same basic question, “What’s the company’s exit strategy?”.
Let me get right to the point. If you work for a company or meet with a startup CEO that says they have an exit strategy, then you should find the nearest exit. Think of a company with an exit strategy as your floor lighting that will illuminate and guide you to the nearest exit – which may be behind you. (OK, after flying almost 1.5 million miles, airplane humor is too easy).
Now some of you might be asking, “But Joseph, you sold a couple of companies. Why and how can you credibly you say that?”
Well, it’s simple. I don’t believe there really is such a thing as an exit strategy. And I have never had one for any of my companies. An exit strategy implies very short term thinking about how Google, or Facebook or some other deep pocketed, cash rich company is going to come along and scoop the company up. And that type of thinking is simply a bad idea. Check out the definition of exit strategy from Wikipedia:
An exit strategy is a means of escaping one’s current situation, typically an unfavorable situation. An organization or individual without an exit strategy may be in a quagmire. At worst, an exit strategy will save face; at best, an exit strategy will peg a withdrawal to the achievement of an objective worth more than the cost of continued involvement.
When you think of a startup, it’s probably not a good idea if the team is thinking about escape or saving face or withdrawal.
Instead of thinking about the exit, startup teams (and potential employees) need to be laser focused on a success strategy. This means thinking (and asking) about the 3-5 most important things that will make the company successful, e.g. Who do we need to hire? What products do we need to build? How do we grow our user base? How do we make money and become profitable?
A success strategy is about building value. And when you are successful and build value, then you will have lots of options including continuing to grow the company, selling the company, taking a company public, merging with another company and more.
So stay focused on your company’s long term success and along the way you will have lots of hard choices about if and when to “exit”. In writing this, it seems so obvious, yet I am continually amazed that so many people think and ask about exit strategies. Hopefully no one will ask about exit strategies in any future interviews and if they do, then I know they are not good at doing their homework. 
Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
And here is another post about strategy planing that you might appreciate. If you don’t know where you’re going, well, you’re lost.
Lastly, you can also follow me on twitter or subscribe to email updates.
Exit sign courtesy of heathbrandon
Airplane exit sign courtesy of joeshlabotnik
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Startup 122: Speech – The Final Frontier
OK, I’ll admit it. I am psyched to see the new Star Trek Movie. Check out the new preview. This is clearly not your Father’s Star Trek…
But what does Star Trek have to do with startups? It turns out that Star Trek has successfully “predicted” quite a few modern day inventions. The most famous being the Communicator and the Cell Phone.
Yet even with all this forward looking Star Trek technology, what we never saw on The Enterprise are the crackberry, text messaging, facebook updating, tweetering, iphone addicts we’ve become. Look around and what do we do each day instead of talking?
Lots and lots of email. Text messaging. Maybe a few instant messages and skypes. Throw in a few facebook updates. And then of course some Tweets about, well, the most random of things.
While Twitter is certainly an interesting phenomenon, in many ways it is causing people to forget one of the most important ingredients for a successful startup (or any organization for that matter).
That ingredient is simply speaking to one another.
Yes, the final frontier is taking people back to the future of sitting down face to face, one on one, or as a team, or worst case using the phone to actually speak versus texting, emailing or twittering the days away.
Why is this important?
One of the best ways to have an engaged and productive team is for them to understand and be part of a team’s success. Engagement happens when you speak to the team, answer questions on why something is important versus other ideas, discuss what’s working and what’s not and what the team needs to do to succeed long term. Engagement does not happen with a quarterly email or 140 character update. Those are important elements of communications, but nothing can replace the importance of having an open forum and interactive discussion with your team about what are the team’s wildly important goals, its strategies for how to achieve them and discussion about how well the team is achieving against a set of measurable objectives. (See previous post on goal setting)
What to Share
In general, it’s important to share everything -- the good, the bad and the ugly (Ok, I promise last movie reference…). There are really only a few things I would never discuss openly with the team. They are things such as performance reviews, any health or other private matters, or compensation information. Additionally, there are certain things that are simply illegal to cover such as an acquisition by a public company or other financial information that could be used for insider trading. Other than those two big buckets, there are not many “off limit” topics.
As part of that, one of the things I encourage people to do is regularly share a startups financial results. It is incredibly empowering to a team to see the cash flow chart and the date it hits $0. While it may make the team nervous, maybe not knowing will make them even more nervous? And maybe knowing will actually have the team work either smarter or harder to change the trajectory? And if you also share the top line results, everyone gets engaged in the competitive thrill of making the company a success.
I am often surprised at how few leaders regularly share this information so please don’t be afraid to share more than less. The flipside is that if you don’t share, the team will likely assume things and they usually assume the worst.
Playing the drums
Larry, a great friend and incredibly talented business executive, always talks about setting a rhythm for the business. He taught me to set expectations and have a regular pattern in the company for things such as business reviews. I extended this idea to communications as well.
For Vontu, my rhythm for communications was each week started off with a team meeting of my direct reports during which we reviewed key updates starting with the team, and then sales, development, et al. This was a small meeting of ~10 people during which we could openly discuss the successes and more importantly the challenges we were facing in the business.
Also, each week I worked hard, especially as we got more and more busy, to have one on one meetings with each of the senior executives on the team. This is probably one of the most difficult things to maintain, as we were all busy and traveling hundreds of thousands of miles each year. If I could not meet in person due to travel, then this often times became a phone call.
Lastly, each week we had a one-hour all hands meeting for the entire company. People in the field would call in and everyone in the office would meet in a big conference room. This was an opportunity to introduce new people that joined the company, share any other people news, to review our wildly important goals such as sales, customer success and then often to discuss a special topic on an aspect of the business. The meetings were very interactive with lots of questions and discussions. Informally, I would also spend time each week simply walking the halls and talking with people.
The other big communications opportunities typically happened on a quarterly basis. Each quarter, we flew the whole company to San Francisco for training. As part of that we had everyone together for an all hands meeting in which I presented how well we had done in the quarter, what the top challenges for the company were, and tried to generally get the team engaged about our future. This ended up being a 2 hour session with lots of Q&A which often including the rest of the executive team. This was one of the best opportunities to make sure everyone knew what were the 3-5 wildly important goals and how well we were doing.
Like a great drummer which keeps the beat, a good leader keeps the rhythm of the company by setting a tempo of regular communications.
When in Doubt
Now, I am not suggesting all communications is about sitting in a room singing Kumbaya. As a matter of fact, one of the most important times for face to communications is in dealing with difficult situations and conflict. Let’s face it, it’s uncomfortable to tell someone you are frustrated, disappointed, unhappy, or even downright angry. And so today, it is amazing how often people revert to either doing nothing or sending the dreaded “flamagram”. It is much easier to tell someone bad news or deal with conflict over email because you don’t have to look them in the eye and deal with their reaction. Yet, as a leader, you should avoid this at all costs. And if you see others engaged in using email to deal with conflict that typically only causes more conflict, encourage people to move to a face to face communications.
What about the rest of my job?
Now if you add up all this time, communications takes up 25-40% of your work week. Does this seems like a lot? It is, but at the end of the day, if you are leading a team, your job is just that, to lead. And to lead you need followers. The best way to get followers? Tell them where you are going and ask them to join you in the journey. And remember to not just email, text, IM, or twitter your updates. Take the time talk.
And if you like this post, talk with your friends about it or tell them about it by twittering or using any other one of the links below. And feel free to leave a comment or two.
Lastly, with all that said, you can still sign up for my email list to get updates on future posts. And yes, you can follow me on twitter too.
Drummer photo by Bill Gracey
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Startup 121: Lessons for the Recession from Rice Krispies
The past few months have been, how shall I say, pretty crappy and have caused lots of cut backs for most startups (and companies of every size). Mostly, this has meant laying people off, cutting expenses, and generally “battening down the hatches to weather the storm”.
I randomly had several conversations with people on the topic of what a startup (or any organization) should do in times like these and some basic things came up each time:
- Measure to manage
- Mix it up
- Take calculated risks
Measure to Manage
Today, months into this recession, no one would argue that the economic outlook is negative. However, often times forecasting is challenging to say the least and usually only accurate in hindsight. I used to joke with our Board whenever I presented a financial plan that the only thing I could guarantee was that we would miss the numbers. That did not mean the results would be worse, but that I was positive we would not hit the plan to the penny. We would be roughly right, which in the words of Kenyes, is better than precisely wrong.
By Darren Hester
It turns that we were in good company as the record for long term forecasting of macro economic indicators by the “experts” is actually only roughly right in the near term and not so predictive in the long term. Just like a startup’s financial plan.
The Federal Reserve released a paper at the very beginning of the recession (coincidence? conspiracy? hmmm…), which analyzed historical accuracy of past economic forecasts such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP see wikipedia).
OK, I admit, it’s little nerdy thinking that others would be interested in Average Root Mean Squared Forecast Errors but…
The report basically shows that most forecasts of growth are only good one or two quarters out, and beyond that, “…uncertainty about the economic outlook is considerable.” So if it’s hard to forecast a problem, what should a startup do?
In today’s world, measuring things is actually easier than it has ever been – Page views, Click Throughs, Conversion Rates, Leads, Registrations, Trials, you name it. Startups are actually pretty good at using data and all should have a set of good metrics to manage their business (See previous post If you don’t know where you are doing, well you’re lost).
In a startup this is usually easier than for big companies, but on a business by business basis, this should be possible even in the largest of companies but is something most don’t do well or at all. And it’s another reason why startups kick corporate booty. Let’s face it, startups are, well, smarter.
Now, all that being said, metrics need to be leading indicators for what will likely happen in the future as opposed to only lagging indicators. At Vontu, since we were doing enterprise sales (i.e. 9 months average time from a first prospect meeting to closing a 6 or 7 figure deal), even after having some of our best quarterly sales results, which is a lagging indicator, we were worried about the future because leading indicators, such as product evaluations (or as we called them, risk assessments), were not tracking to our historical averages. Team attrition is another example of a lagging indicator of a problem, that is to say if people are leaving, the problem already exists.
Now it sounds like I am talking out of both sides of mouth. And I am. Even though the Fed is not good with long term forecasting, having 6 months of visibility is still better than none. To know you have a problem (or an opportunity as the case may be), one can not focus enough on leading indicator metrics. And if you did not have the right metrics in place at the start of this recession, consider putting them in place now as you will also be a step ahead in predicting when to accelerate investment as things improve.
Mix It Up
Most startups (and large companies) made big people changes over the past 6-9 months typically in the form of cost cutting and layoffs and sometimes quite significant layoffs both in numbers and percentages. While layoffs are big changes affecting the lives of many people yet help in improving the health of the company for the short term, they are not about dramatic changes in leadership for the long term.
In my opinion, down turns are as good a time as any to make dramatic people decision that you have either been dreading or avoiding for whatever reason. First, there is already so much disruption that throwing some more into the mix won’t make much of a difference. Secondly, it is somewhat easier to hire great people given the macro-economic turmoil and increased unemployment. And lastly, everyone on the team already knows who is not performing. You as a manager and leader are usually the last to acknowledge the problem, yet the team expects you to make these tough calls.
Expectations for business results are low today so take the time to make the big people changes and if things get a little messy in the short term, but it’s all relative to the ongoing mess which already exists. And who knows, they may actually be better too.
Take Calculated Risk
My friend Phil forwarded me the New Yorker article “Hanging Tough” by James Surowiecki about what strategy some companies followed during the Great Depression. An example used two competitive cereal makers, Post and Kellog, and how chose very different market responses. Post did the standard cost cutting, yet Kellogg invested in advertising and new products and as a result, “Snap, Crackle, Pop!”, Kellogg became the dominant player it is today. For the same reasons it is a good time to start a company today (less competition, easier to hire, leverage the inevitable economic upswing), companies should be thinking about investments to be made today as the economy is at its lowest point.
In general, if one keeps an eye on the long term, one should always be making investments. Unfortunately, as the New Yorker article suggests, uncertainty overtakes risk taking. This short term uncertainty causes people to focus on what they can control, e.g. costs, as opposed to making smart investments for the future.
Yet history has shown that even during the Great Depression, companies that made good investments did well. Even the stock market came back more quickly than people remember.
At a recent presentation by Professor Jeremy Siegel from Wharton, he had a slide which stated, “On average, for the seven largest gaps [in performance relative to trends] over the past 145 years, the market has rallied 24% in the following year, 21.4% per year over the next 3 years, and 18.4% per year over the next five years.”
As suggested in the New Yorker, while most people are “battening down the hatches”, you might want to invest as the others might actually just might miss the boat.
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Startup Life 102: Leadership
I recently posted Startup Life 101 which suggested that in order to succeed in having a successful life while in a startup, you need to have a plan and to set the right pace. This is akin to running a marathon or even better succeeding in the Tour De France.
Re-connecting with Stew Friedman from the Wharton school, who has a book
Startup Life 102 is about the importance of leadership. By that, I suggest that for people to have more successful lives requires leadership – leadership both in thinking about your team’s complete life and for yourself to become a leader in taking control of your own destiny.
Leadership
Leadership is somewhat of a loaded term. There are lots of different opinions on the definition of a leader. I subscribe to the definition of a leader as someone with followers. Yes, that’s it. A leader is quite simply someone with followers. It is not about a title, an organizational structure, a personality type, or anything other than the one common trait that every leader has – followers.
Truthfully, the cynical side of me said that “Total Leadership” was just a marketing ploy leveraging the term “leadership” to get people to buy into a time management philosophy. So what does leadership have to with thinking about someone’s complete life?
It turns out there are two important concepts (and probably more) which make Stew’s ideas about leadership. They are:
1) Managing with the end game in mind by having a plan for where you want to go and communicating it over and over again to all the important stakeholders.
2) Thinking individually and “situationally” about people and their needs in order to achieve those goals.
Having a plan
I’ve written about the importance of having a plan in “If you don’t know where you’re going, well, you’re lost” and won’t go into details here. However, one additional thought is the importance of having a plan for yourself – a key theme in Total Leadership. If you and your team or you and your boss are in agreement on the objectives, it makes the second idea of Situational Leadership much easier.
Situational leadership
So what is situational leadership? As the name implies, it is a style of leadership that takes into account the unique needs of a particular person (or of a situation) and acting in a way that is specific to them. This idea ranges from as simple as how you communicate with someone to how they work each day to their compensation and objectives. In other words, keep your HR manual to a minimum and stop the “one size fits all” thinking or worse, stop thinking about the team as a 1920 era production line.
The way to put this into practice is to start with a focus on goals and objectives – both for yourself and also for your team and each person on it. If you are clear with expectations of what people need to achieve, then you can give the team more flexibility in how they organize their days to get it done. By having flexibility, they can then optimize the other areas of their lives around these objectives.
A simple example is if someone wants to work from home one day a week. It should be ok as long as they achieve the objectives. This does not mean that you don’t need an office (though in some cases you don’t), but it means as a leader, you should be flexible and allow your teams to experiment with different ways to get work done to ensure they can be successful in other aspects of their lives.
And if you do, people will be more loyal, probably work harder, and the results will likely be better than you imagined. Let’s face it, the days of “command and control” leadership as well as the idea of workers finding a job and loyally toiling away through to retirement are long past. If you want to hire the best people, which is not easy, then think “situationally”, and you will inspire a more engaged team.
Leading Your Boss
How then do you lead if you are an individual contributor? Well, your one follower might just be yourself and simply being proactive in your life as opposed to being reactive to everyone else. And just because you report to someone, does not mean you cannot lead your boss. More of that should be happening each day. By having a plan for what is important to you in all aspects of your life, then having a dialog and leading your boss on how to optimize all aspects of your life including work is leadership.
Now some of you might be saying, well, that’s great but my boss is not so “enlightened” (or maybe you would use some other expletive). For example, how do you sit down and tell your boss that you are going to turn off your blackberry from 7pm until 7am each day? Well, first off if you have never asked for something, then you know you have no as the answer. So ask. Don’t be afraid. You might actually be positively surprised by their response. Secondly, focus on the objectives for what your boss expects of you and use that as the important measure and tell your boss how you will do it. Thirdly, experiment with different approaches to optimizing all the aspects of your life and how they will fit in with your work. Going back to the example of your blackberry being off from 7pm-7am, tell your boss that if there is ever an emergency, that she can call your cell phone or home number at any time. Otherwise, email will get reviewed first thing in the morning. And if you meet your objectives, then it is a success. And if you don’t meet your objectives, then experiment and try again.
The Hawthorne Effect
Think I am crazy? Ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect? It is a study done almost a century ago, which simply changed the lighting on a production line and focused on creating a cohesive team. The picture above is from that production line. You might be surprised that not only did raising the lighting levels improve productivity but so did lowering the lights! Why would lowering the lights improve productivity? Probably simply because it showed that management was showing interest (as silly as it sounds) in the team and not treating everyone like a “cog in the wheel”. Imagine if you did something that really mattered versus simply adjusting the lights? Elton Mayo, who conducted the studies said this:
So long as commerce specializes in business methods which take no account of human nature and social motives, so long may we expect strikes and sabotage to be the ordinary accompaniment of industry.
Therefore, if your boss still believes in command and control management, well, maybe send them a link to my blog? In all seriousness, don’t give up, experiment and keep working to optimize your life. It may require baby steps, but lead for yourself, for your team, and for your boss and you all might just end up a little bit more successful and happy.
Let me know what you think with a comment. Also, feel free to subscribe to email or via RSS to get an update on future posts. I promise, no spam.
And don’t forget to turn up the lights.
Next up, the importance of love in a startup.
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Startup Life 101: The Marathon
Being successful in all aspects of your life – your work, your relationships, your community and your personal life – is not easy especially when working at a startup. Conventional wisdom is you have to work 18 hour days, 7 days a week to succeed. Yet maybe it’s not necessarily the best way to succeed?
http://flickr.com/photos/beforethecoffee/
What got me thinking about writing about this was re-connecting with a professor I knew from the Wharton school, Stewart Friedman. He recently wrote a book and teaches a class titled Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life
I will not do the concepts complete justice but the NY Times summarized his ideas as “Get a Life: 101”. Total Leadership is a process to optimize all parts of your life – yourself, your family, your work and your community – in order to be more successful and ideally more happy. You do this by clarifying and having a plan for what is important in all the domains of your life (self, family, work and community); you then engage with the people in all those domains and make sure they understand what’s important; and then experiment and figure out what are the ways to achieve the things that matter in all the domains in your life. You can read more about it on Stew’s blog too.
This past week I presented to one of his classes and this is the first of three posts about applying Total Leadership to startup life.
Marathon
An important first metaphor used by many and important for applying Total Leadership is that a startup is a marathon and not a sprint.
Now, I have never actually run a marathon. I actually only like to run if I am being chased. But I do like to ride my bike and I (surprise, surprise!) think startup life is a lot more like the Tour De France (surprise, surprise!). The Tour has multiple stages – all challenging in their own way. It’s a race of 2,000 to 2,500 miles happening over 21 days or “stages”. You start off “easy” riding more than 100 miles a day on flat roads that end in a short sprint, you have mountain stages that climb the highest peaks in the Alps and Pyrenees, you have an individual time trial during which each rider races against the clock, and many other hard rides. And it also happens to be a team sport. The diversity of challenges and duration certainly compare to a startup.
To win the Tour, one of the first keys to success is having a good plan. I recently wrote about planning in “If you don’t know where you are going, then you’re lost” and won’t repeat that post here. Suffice it to say that by first having a plan for what you need to achieve then, and only then, can you succeed in winning a Tour de France or having a successful life in a startup.
In addition to planning (and having a huge heart, strong legs and massive lungs!), another key ingredient for success in the Tour is setting the right pace.
And that’s startup life too. It’s important to work hard but not work all the time. It’s important to known when to work intensely to achieve a key milestone yet to relax and enjoy success. It’s important to have a pace for your work life that is maintainable and sustainable with the other aspects of your life. And to invest time in yourself and your family. Why? Because if you do not have the right pace and burn out, you will not likely make the best decisions, be the best teammate or team leader, and you will not be prepared to deal with the unplanned challenges that occur all the time. That is true for yourself and for how you act as a leader. By leading with an eye for the long term, you will ensure a more engaged team with lower attrition which makes it more likely the startup will be successful.
This does not mean that startup life is easy. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. But there are things you do which can make it better for yourself and as a leader.
Now many of you are saying it’s impossible! You have to work all the time to be successful in a startup! Rumor has it (Ok, it’s in a blog post on the NY Times) that President Obama played basketball or exercised almost every day on the campaign trail. And today as President he gets up in the morning, spends time with his kids, reads the newspaper and gets to the office (The Oval Office that is!) each morning around 9am. If the President can do that, then “yes you can” too. Oh and for all you Republicans out there, Ronald Reagan was known to do the same thing.
In summary, one of the keys to practicing Total Leadership is that you live your startup life with a plan and with a sustainable, long term pace.
Next up will be a post on the importance of Leadership and why “Total Leadership” is not just a marketing ploy to get people to buy into what might seem like a simple time management philosophy.
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Nice resume, but can you juggle?
Hiring and engaging a great team is key to success for any organization. And hiring great people is simply difficult. It’s hard to get great people to show up for an interview, it’s hard to decide position requirements (both functional and relational competencies – see previous post), it’s hard to assess candidates, it’s hard to convince great people to join new teams, and on and on. Of course, the engaging part is tough too but more on that later.
Of the many hiring challenges, one that strikes me as easy to improve is answering the question, “can a candidate juggle?”
You are probably thinking that this post is about if someone can handle lots of things at once, and while that is often important, that’s not the big idea. Juggling is, according to wikipedia, “a physical human skill involving the movement of one or more objects, usually through the air, for entertainment.”
So what does juggling have to do with hiring? Well, if you’re running a circus and looking for a juggler, it’s everything. And more often than not, when interviewing too much time is spent talking versus seeing if someone can actually juggle.
Mike Wolfe, a co-founder at Vontu, suggested I read a book when we first started the company called Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Look left and right
How many times have you been interviewed or performed an interview during which one of the following occurs:
a) A chronological review of a resume
b) A “get to know one another” conversation with little content about the job
c) A rant about how bad a company is – including by the one doing the recruiting!
d) or Worse?
An interview should be about competencies. Competency interviews should focus both on the “left and right brain” of a candidate – as well as the candidates fit with your company’s culture.
Left brain interviews focus on technical competence. Can someone program? Can they prepare a balance sheet? Can they get customer meetings? Can someone juggle?
It is as important to interview for right brain skills. Right brain skills are about how well someone can think. Can they come up with new go to market strategies? Can they intuit an answer based on experience? Can they lead a group to get a job done?
The Audition
Left brain skills are a little more straightforward for which to develop a set of auditions. If you want to test someone’s programming abilities, give them a whiteboard and have them write some code. If you want to see if they can juggle, hand them three balls and let them juggle.
While right brain skills might be less quantitative, you can certainly test someone’s abilities here too. For example, to test for competitiveness, have someone answer, “What is a company you admire that is a leader in their market and what are all the things that make them successful.”
Usually candidates go on and on about what makes a company such as Apple successful with the iPod or Nike with basketball shoes. Each time the candidate finishes, ask again what else makes that company great. Ask this until they have nothing to add. And after they have thought up everything that makes them great, ask “Who is that company’s biggest competitor?”
And once they name a competitor ask “If you were CEO of the named competitor, what would you do to win and beat the market leader in the next three years?” That will test their competitive competency and how well they can think creatively.
Another example is in the importance of communications skills. If you believe in the importance of a person’s ability to communicate (and you should since in everyone’s job there is some level of interaction with others be it customers, other developers, future candidates, internal teams, etc), have them audition and present. At Vontu, one of the last steps in the hiring process was for the candidate to present to a group of their future co-workers. This was something suggested in Peopleware. Not only did we end up with a great group of communicators, but it was surprising how many candidates did not present well.
Coffee for Closers
Lastly, the key to a successful interview is that every candidate should leave each and every meeting wanting the job. Great people need to be sold and interviews can not be one way tests of a candidate. The company is a candidate itself – a candidate company for the person looking for a job. Make sure each interview gives time for the candidate to ask questions. Invest in making sure the candidate knows a lot about the company and why it’s a great company and a great place to work. Don’t forget that once you have decided that someone has the right competencies, you need them to accept your offer. Great people always have multiple options and ultimately once you give them an offer, they get the final decision to join or not.
While there is a lot more to think about in recruiting, getting these three things completed in any interview, will certainly help to get the best candidates and help to get them to join your team. As I’ve said before, It’s about the people, stupid. Let me know what you think.
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