Finding the first engineers to join your early-stage company is challenging. Here is what I recommend to founders:

🙌 Culture first

An explicit, written-down team/company culture will help both sides to quickly asses if it’s a match and it sets the stage for the joint journey early on. Share it as part of your job description and talk about it in the interviews. This can start with overarching values and go down to specifics like ways of working, everyday communication, and your feedback culture. Be specific and make it a recurring practice to review it with your team.

🤩 A vivid tech vision

You may not yet have any real product but you can already describe and maybe even quantify your technical ambitions. Is it your vision to build a new core technology such as a lightning-fast computational model or is it about an unparallel end-user experience? How will it be faster/easier/better than existing tech? This helps to spark excitement and to attract talents from the right technical background.

👾 Product thinking

Look out for engineers who want to be part of product discovery beyond the technical aspects. Make sure they enjoy participating in user/customer interviews and product workshops. This will reduce the risk of your technical bets before building them, increase your team alignment, and make full use of everybody’s experience. It’s too early to have engineers on board who only want to code for the sake of coding.

💜 Trust over performance

Sure, you don’t want to start your company with junior engineers but at the same time, pure technical experience isn’t everything. First of all, you need folks who are interested in positive relationships based on trust. It will open up crucial conversations, allow critical thinking, and foster a healthy team culture. Don’t compromise it as this will inevitably lead to better decisions.

💪 Personal growth

Invest in people’s growth, even with a small team. Offer regular 1:1s with your teammates, take time to understand their ambitions and career goals, and coach them to become better at their roles. This might feel counterintuitive when your main focus is to get off the starting blocks. But it’s your team that makes the difference. The more you support them, the faster they will get the company moving.

💸 Shares

And, of course, shares are a great and proven way to excite and retain key players, even though their value is still quite abstract in early-stage companies. Make it a priority to explain the details to your team and to show its potential long-term value with tangible examples.

Be opinionated about these points and express them. They will make you unique, form the core of your company and consequently attract the engineers you need.