July 29, 2019
Why You Should Hire 'Athletes'
After we closed our round of Series A funding for 42Floors, we began working on hiring the right people. Because we got a lot of good press, we got inbound job requests from some impressive people. As we looked at the most impressive resumes, we kept seeing a trend: people who were incredibly good at one thing. But that’s actually a problem for us.
One of our early decisions was not to hire specialists, but generalists--we call them athletes, because they can play every position. These jacks-of-all-trades types are the best kind of early employee you can have at a start-up. They may not be the best at any one particular skill, but they have lots of good skills that can be applicable all over the company, and they are very adaptive. Athletes are employees who think and act like founders because they’re not so locked into one individual role that they lose track of the wider needs of the company. And in the early stages of a company when your needs are changing almost daily, you want employees who are not only flexible, but enjoy changes in their day-to-day jobs.
Here are a few tips we've learned about finding and hiring athletes: Read more>