Video Transcription
Joe Mullings 00:03
Good morning. Thanks for showing up early this morning. I wanted to chat with you about talent selection. Our firm has been building startups for 32 years. I'll go into the pure numbers in a couple of minutes. But one of the things that we can all greatly improve upon is the way that we select our talent. Invariably, in the med tech industry, especially startups, we've got to get a balance of chaos and order together and a different flex at a different time. Unfortunately, a lot of times, firms will interview exclusively on resume, previous experience, and previous products. While they're all interesting, we've all experienced when somebody is not able to move in and out, especially in a startup, out of a chaotic and more into an orderly environment. So our firm, as mentioned, 32 years in, med device, leading search firm in the world, more than 9,000 successful placements, 900 companies, about 850 of them startups, and about 180,000 followers on social, and that ends up being a large currency for our clients on the startup side. But there are three characteristics primarily that should be front and center when you're selecting talent for your organization. One is pure IQ horsepower, straight-up intellectual horsepower. You get the problems quicker. You cycle through things quicker. You can't fix stupid. You just can't, no matter how hard you try. The second is conscientiousness. This is the planning side. This is the preparation side. This is the scheduling side, and then the openness. This is creativity, trying something new, having the mental agility and embracing the mental agility to come in and look at problems. So you want to create your meetings when you're interviewing people. And I call them meetings on purpose because it needs to be a two-way dialog. You want to check on the ability to handle adversity, the agility in their thinking off scheduling them, changing things on purpose, on interview scheduling, seeing how well prepared they come in, and then changing the dynamic of the interview process when you already have an agenda and a schedule on it with intention, and then sharing with people that this is a two-way street, that these are the important things that they want to see, that you, as a hiring manager, want to see in the interview process. Why? Because everything in a startup is chaotic by design, and we're resource constrained all the time. And since we're resource constrained all the time, we've got to make do with what we've got. And if you've got somebody on one end too far who's overly orderly, they are going to screw you up. And if you've got somebody who is constantly thinking way too high up and you can't pull them down, that's going to screw you up as well. So within openness and order or chaos and order, one part of it has to live within the other. So how do you do that? Let's go down our list on order. Organized adheres to a plan, rules, and breaking tradition does not like to bend the status quo. That's big, strategic all the way through. On the chaos side, and again, chaos is not a negative word. It's actually an intentional quality within a startup. If it's controlled chaos, it's the opposite of order. It's not knowing; it's intuition. Why? Because here are the four major dynamics we have to deal with in a startup. And we need the persons in our firm and a resource-constrained firm to be able to go way out to the edge, where chaos lives, where creativity lives, where newness lives, and whether pursuing financing. Here, if you don't think this is chaotic, I don't know what chaos is. This meeting, as you seek financing, is chaotic as you seek to go after the FDA. It's chaotic because you don't know exactly how you're going to pursue it right now; everything is open, and then market dynamics are changing, so you've got to have the person who can deal with that perceived adversity and stability and then have the ability to come back and pull it straight to center, because none of these ultimately, in the end, are negotiable when it comes to your venture partners, your PE partners, the FDA, or the people who are buying your product out in the market. And if you're not interviewing for that, you're going to miss it; you're going to find it out entirely too late, because somebody who's overly structured is way too rigid. The need to control everything suppresses everything. Does this sound like quality control? I'm sorry if it does. They suppress everything. And then eventually that Apple Car, whether it's a government, a company, or a group, becomes so suppressed, somebody flips the table on it and becomes chaotic. But it's not an intentional chaos, which is what burns and buries most companies. So what we want to see is just like a good comedian when you go to a show, you want to see the performance. You want to see a balancing act. You want to see them go off script, knowing that they're scripted. You want to see them contend with the chaos and the heckler of the moment in the audience and control the whole room. You want to know that they were prepared but didn't seem prepared. You know, you want to know that they were planned for everything, because the people that you select in a resource-constrained environment especially sets up creation and success in your startup. Thank you.
