Carvajal - Hire smart from the start: the entrepreneurs guide to finding, catching, and keeping the best talent for your company

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The ability to consistently hire the right people is the difference between building a truly great company and just a good one. This book is the how-to manual for doing exactly that. It will save you hundreds of hours of trying to figure it out yourself. Im recommending it to all of our clients.

GINO WICKMAN, author of Traction and creator of EOS

Hiring the right senior executives is critical to the success of a fast-growing enterprise. Top talent attracts top talent and separates the best startups from the rest of the pack. If you dream of starting or growing a business, this is an essential book to learn how to execute the most important roles of a leaderrecruiting and creating the culture.

JULES MALTZ, General Partner, IVP

Too many companies hire without a blueprint. However, winging it and making such important decisions with your gut is a recipe for disaster. Dave Carvajal provides a thoughtful guidebook for making one of the most critical decisions a company can makegetting the right people on board.

NIR EYAL, bestselling author of Hooked:
How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Dave Carvajal is a proven luminary in talent and team development. His Hire Smart from the Start is a go-to roadmap for any company seeking to build a team that contributes to fostering strong culture, evangelizing the broader business, and delivering results.

JOHN FRANKEL, founding partner of ff Venture Capital

After 25 years of venture capital investing and supporting entrepreneurs, this is what I know for certain: If you hire wrongyou lose time and money. This is a learned art, so it helps to have a Sherpa like Dave Carvajal guide you through the mountain pass.

JEANNE M. SULLIVAN, co-founder of StarVest Partners

This is a well-written, useful, and practical guide for all leaders who aspire to grow their businesses. By making recruiting and culture their competitive strategic advantage, entrepreneurs and seasoned leaders can implement the lessons and process in Hire Smart from the Start to compete, recruit, and secure the greatest talent.

NICK BEIM, Partner, Venrock

Dave Carvajal is exceptional at understanding how to recruit teams (players) that embrace and embody a companys vision, toward creating high-performance teams. Hire Smart from the Start lays the groundwork for achieving your mission with the right values and people.

JULIE ALLEGRO, founder and Managing Director, FYRFLY Venture Partners, and founder and Co-Chair, V Foundation Wine Celebration

A leading company is more than a well-differentiated product with a brilliant strategy. Success comes from strong leadership and a highly talented team. This book provides all the right principles to ensure that your company achieves ultimate success through your most valuable resource: people.

PAUL CAINE, founder, PC Ventures, LLC; Executive Chairman of the Board of Telaria (formerly Tremor Video); former Global Chief Revenue & Client Partnerships Officer of Bloomberg

The Entrepreneurs Guide to Finding,
Catching, and Keeping the Best Talent for
Your Company

DAVE CARVAJAL

THIS BOOK WAS BORN when AMACOMs Stephen Power showed great faith in me and my subject. So thanks to Stephen, as well as to AMACOMs Ellen Kadin for her compassion and editorial insight and to her entire team of power rangers without whom this book would not be possible.

For his patience, courage to both listen and argue without judgment, and his mastery of the craft I would also like to thank Bruce Wexler.

The more I learn, the more I realize I have yet to learn and am so eternally appreciative of the entire list of mentors, coaches, clients, friends, and top 1% of A+ executive leaders all of whom remind me every single day that in business and in life, leadership and love are the highest calling for the life that is inside of us. This list includes but is not limited to Tony Robbins, Keith Cunningham, Richard Johnson, Martin Babinec, Thilo Semmelbauer, Mary Lou Song, Aditi Javeri Gokhale, Irv Grousbeck, Liza Landsman, Peter Diamandis, Joe Williams, and Dan Sullivan.

To Barb, Liam, Ryan, and Clover: For your encouragement, support, occasional earful, and most of all for endowing me with the richness of all that is beautiful in life, I am grateful.

And, of course, for the divine intelligence that connects us all, I am so grateful.

WHEN DAVE CARVAJAL TALKS about recruiting for more than just technical chops, he reminds me how Ive tried to look beyond the job specs. While spending nearly a decade as an executive at Microsoft and later as the founder of the not-for-profit, Room to Read, Ive searched for candidates who were passionate about what we were trying to accomplish. This was my sine qua non for filling any job.

Obviously, the two organizations are quite different: Microsoft a titan of the technology world, and Room to Read, a little-known startup promoting literacy and gender equality across the developing world. Yet despite the differences in purpose and size, I recruited the same type of people for bothpeople who communicated their zeal for and excitement about our goals.

Were Microsoft candidates amped up about building a great technology company? Were Room to Read candidates juiced about educating kids and helping millions of children who had lost the lottery of life and risked never gaining even a basic education? Who were vulnerable to being caught up in terrorism, human trafficking, and other horrors if they were denied access to education?

I needed to see that spark in their eyes and hear the enthusiasm and commitment in their voices. If I saw it and heard it, they were as good as hired. If they lacked it, it didnt matter how skilled they were; they werent going to receive a job offer from me.

When Dave writes about the benefits of recruiting people whose mission mirrors that of the founder(s) and whose values fit the culture, I know exactly what hes talking about.

For entrepreneurs, be they startup or not-for-profit founders, overcoming obstacles is crucial for success. The obstacles can run the gamutcompeting against better-known not-for-profits for donations or convincing a prospective customer to give you their business rather than a bigger competitor. Ive found that when I didnt hire people whose passion and gumption resembled my own, they struggled to overcome obstacles. They gave up, or settled for compromises.

But when they were as stubborn and committed as I was, they found ways to hurdle obstaclesor barrel right through themin order to reach an objective.

Thats why I listen for very specific stories from job candidates. It might be a story about how education helped their grandmother break free from the poverty cycle. Or how when they were a kid, they walked into the school library and the books they discovered were a portal to the world that changed their lives. Or how a teacher helped them achieve something they thought was impossible.