| We scaled a 2 men (my partner and me) 15 year old profitable (no investors) company to 12 people and we never were in a market position to scale much more but we are good (much better than the average) hiring. We started with a combination of a few developers (indeed we started with one!) and one QA or tester to check the work done by developers. Even if the developers are excellent, having QA in place unload work from the developers, increase the delivery quality, and save you a lot of time. I think this is a basic framework. Setup development, testing and/or staging, and production environments, so if you don't want to give a lot of control, at least you can deploy and configure stuff once it is working in the staging phase and be more confident about a new release or configuration. We always hired for a 30-hour work week, obviously we want people who will stay until the critical problems are solved but we try to keep longer hours work at a bare minimum. Our first hires were oriented to some specific technology plus a flexibility to use technologies outside their comfort zone. For example, a C/C++ expert who could do part of the work in Visual Basic because it was the right technology for the project, or people who can move from Node to Python easily, and at the end of the day are not mad if they choose React or Angular. Like everyone else, we want to hire the best and trustworthy professionals via people we already worked with. If we can't hire the best we look for people with an excellent predisposition, a more than average intelligence, and very good communication. Communication is key, if they found a problem that is really difficult to solve we want to know this as soon as possible and will discuss it with part of the team to help as a group. We don't like heroes who engage in very difficult problems without giving us a warning. We have a few remote employees who really know how to work remotely. We would never start growing with remote employees, except if you know them very well and can be on-site too. Beyond this, our hiring process is simple and mainly based on experience/work-portfolio. No puzzles. Disclaimer: Since my business is not based in US there can be many differences in the way we handle similar issues. |