During the hyper-growth stage, a startup’s biggest competitive edge is their talent. Decisive hires, whether from within the organization or from a larger, outside network, enable founders the ability to topgrade their management layers as they scale their startup.
Throughout the hiring process, scorecards are a helpful mechanism for making decisive hires by determining whether a candidate is the right fit based on the current stage of your company. They can act as a sounding board to ensure your managers can level up to the role of director, and to guarantee that your directors are compatible with your scaling startup’s needs.
Manager vs. Director
Essential attributes to look for in a manager
A key asset to growing startups, managers often collaborate cross-functionally to projects tasked to them by the executive leadership team. They work to continuously improve their ability to develop strategic plans through clear communication that drive alignment across the entire organization - often seeking advice from directors or executives in order to perfect this process.
When hiring for a manager, look for candidates that can:
- Refine their upstream communication at the executive and board level.
- Build basic plans once associated ROI has been built by a director.
- Understand business context as far as it extends to their function.
- Hire candidates with oversight from directors and hiring managers.
- Act as an individual contributor but has the ability to take on team lead and project lead duties when needed.
Essential attributes to look for in a director
Understanding how to build and operate teams at fast growing startups, directors are influential leaders who can autonomously scale an organization. Directors leverage their team’s operating ability and strategically build plans, requiring minor executive refinement in order to reach their team’s full potential. Seamlessly collaborating with every function and department to effectively drive outcomes, directors understand practical business planning, basic ROI of internal headcount and resource investments. From this data, they can create basic business proposals, proactively solve problems and identify opportunities to drive outcomes.
Whether your candidates are coming from a network outside of your organization or from within, consider directors that:
- Drive alignment across the company through clear and consistent communication with mid-level and executive level teams within the organization.
- Apprehend high level business context across the entire organization.
- Autonomously hire candidates with minimal error or oversight.
- Can demonstrate progressive career advancement, including project and team leadership.
- Strategically problem solve while also leading and executing plans focused on KPI outcomes.
Implement our scorecards into your hiring strategy
Sourcing candidates that will act as a catalyst for growth is critical as your startup scales. Post-interview candidate reviews can evoke challenging conversations between leadership and hiring managers. When it comes to building out your hiring strategy, Hunt Club’s team of experts created downloadable scorecards to simplify interviews and ease the selection process.
