Creating a hiring plan for your climate startup

Next to your product, your people are your most important asset. And, if you want the best people to come on board to your climate business, you’ll have to convince them that your company is the right place for them. That means steering them through a well-defined, transparent, and positive hiring process. So, how can you set the stage for this outcome before you post your first job ad? 

Brendan Andersen is the founder and CEO of Climate People, a climate recruitment agency. We sat down with him to talk about defining your organization’s values, building a hiring pipeline, and why the first interview matters most.

What comes first: raising or hiring?

If you’re trying to hire before you’ve raised capital, the role will likely be salary-light and equity-heavy. This will have a slight impact on your cap table, and only a sliver of the talent pool will likely be interested in this compensation dynamic. So, while you should absolutely start building a hiring plan and reaching out to potential candidates, it will be very tough to actually bring people on board at this point unless they’re co-founders or fractional advisors.

Nailing down your hiring philosophy

1. Evaluate your gaps
Your starting point when it comes to hiring is to look at the gaps in your business. First, evaluate your founding team. Here, there are four boxes you want to check: entrepreneurial spirit, technical vision, scrappy execution, and veteran presence. These qualities don’t all need to be fulfilled by four different people but should be present among your founding team as a whole. If you’re missing anything here, try to fill the gaps through fractional resources, mentors, advisers, or project-based employees instead of adding in more headcount at this level.

To figure out the other roles you need to hire for, start from your 3 to 5 year plan for your business and work backwards - what are the specific actions that need to happen to pull this plan off, and what skills do you need within your business to carry those out? Then, crosscheck whether you already have these skills - and the capacity to act on them - or need to bring in people with this expertise. You’ll definitely need to hire specialists, especially as you scale, but where you can, hire people who are powerful generalists - problem-solver types who are capable of handling a broad variety of tasks.

2. Hire for values as well as skills
At an early stage, finding people that align with your mission is crucial, because with every person you hire, your company culture becomes set in stone. So, before you start hiring, take the time to articulate what you want that culture to be, and come up with a set of organizational values. 

If you articulate them properly, these values will attract like-minded people and influence positive employee behavior - say, by reinforcing qualities like accountability and honesty. Plus, when times get tough, people who are culturally aligned will be more likely to stick with it, because they truly believe in your mission.

Note that your shared values need to go deeper than just a passion for climate impact - your employees should be passionate about your specific solution and company. And most importantly, they can’t just be words that you stick on your website for marketing purposes - they need to be real.

3. Seniority level
When you’re hiring your first 10 employees, you want to avoid title inflation as much as possible - even if it’s a new functional area, or you’re hiring someone who was previously a director at another company. Save executive-level titles for the founders and keep your organization as flat as possible. If you want to hire people with a slightly higher title, go for Head of X or Lead Y. Wait until they have 4 or 5 people working underneath them before you start worrying about bumping their title up. 

Executing your hiring plan

1. Your hiring pipeline 
There are four main ways to build your talent pipeline:

• Leveraging your network
• Job postings
• Direct sourcing, i.e. pounding the pavement looking for your ideal candidate
• Partnering with a recruitment firm that understands the space, like Climate People

All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages (cost, time, complexity, etc), so be sure to evaluate carefully and try to make a decision via an apples-to-apples process.  Also, don’t forget, in order to find the best person for the job regardless of the source, be sure to put everyone through the same rigorous, unbiased process. 

2. Don’t overlook diversity
Be intentional about diversifying your team as early as possible. If you rely too heavily on your network when looking for talent without exploring other avenues, you might end up with a pretty homogeneous-looking team, and it’ll be very difficult to correct course down the line. Check out our previous Insight on this here.

3. Make sure everyone’s on the same page
Everyone who has decision-making powers around hiring needs to be on the same wavelength when it comes to the values and attributes you’re looking for. It reflects poorly on your organization if a candidate interviews with different people, and each of you has completely different criteria and expectations for them.

4. Be efficient without compromising integrity
The hiring process shouldn’t go so fast that you rush into hiring the wrong person, or so slow that you lose the best people because you can't get them in the door quick enough. The key is to plan a tight, well-defined process before you start hiring, and hold yourself accountable to it. Be transparent with candidates and set expectations upfront about what each step will look like, and how long it will take. 

5. The first interview
First impressions matter, so your first screening interview is the most important one you’ll do. You’re trying to close the candidate throughout the entire process, not just at the last minute, so you need to create a positive experience from the get-go. 

In this interview, you’ll outline who your company is, what you do, what the job is, and why the job is pivotal to the company’s mission. Then, turn the tables and ask the interviewee what they want to do. Their answer will tell you two things - first, how to sell to them, because you’ll find out what they care about, and second, whether their expectations and abilities match up with the role. You can then ask some questions to learn more about their skills and identify whether you want to move them forward. Always leave time at the end for them to ask questions of their own - the quality of these questions will tell you a lot about the person.

Making the offer

1. Clear up any doubts
Before you make a job offer to a candidate, give them the chance to voice any questions and concerns they have, and make sure you address these so there’s nothing holding them back.

2. Reach out to their references
One trick is to get the candidates references before the final interview, and speak to them while you’re formulating your decision - if you do the reference calls well, the person you're checking references with will likely go back to the candidate and encourage them to take the job. 

3. The compensation conversation
It’s a good idea to be open about what you can offer in your job ad, and to discuss compensation early on in the process. Make your offer live - don’t email it - and give the candidate three options to choose from. They can either go with a high salary and low equity, an offer that's a midpoint of both, or an offer that's low salary and high equity. This lets the candidate feel like there’s room for negotiation, while keeping within the constraints of your budget. For more on this topic, check out our last Insight with Brendan.

Brendan Andersen is the Founder of Climate People, a climate recruitment agency focused on delivering top talent for transformational climate companies. Prior to founding Climate People, Brendan spent over 20 years leading boutique and national tech staffing firms. Growing up in Vermont as an outdoors enthusiast, he was looking for a way to combine his professional experience in recruiting with his passion for protecting the planet. Mobilizing a workforce transition to work on climate has become his dream job. He lives in the suburbs of Boston, MA with his wife and business partner, Gina and their two kids. Outside of his climate work he is passionate about fitness and youth sports. He was a Founding Board member for Framingham Youth Basketball and has coached basketball, baseball and softball for over 8 years.

Climate People is a top-notch climate technology recruitment and advisory firm with a bold vision to transform the economy by placing exceptional, mission-driven individuals in Climate Tech careers. We recruit across all climate verticals and are experienced in C-level, leadership, and senior individual contributor recruitment across engineering, science, deep tech, commercial, business, finance, and policy functions.