Have you ever taken some time to think about how technology has made hiring a lot easier? When I think about how much technology has enhanced the hiring game, it makes me thankful to be alive right now. How hard must it have been for recruiters in the past? Certainly, the internet is helpful, but imagine how it must have looked before the phone. Even doing the most basic recruiting tasks would have been an absolute nightmare. The world benefits from technology and us recruiters aren’t different.

Even as we give thanks for all the technology we use so frequently, it’s worth taking some time to think about why we adopt new technologies, how those new technologies affect us, and whether or not every new technology is worth embracing.

In my experience, when you really sit down and dissect what technology does for recruiters, the real secret of technology is not that it changes the game but that it changes the playing field. When all the chips are played, technology doesn’t so much change the ‘rules of recruiting’ it just lets us use these rules to play a bigger game with faster moves. Communications technology, especially, has a wonderful shrinking effect on the world around us and that’s the main power of technology that us recruiters have to really pay attention to. From the humble phone to more complex hiring platforms, the central benefit they provide to recruiters is the same; they extend our reach and, sometimes, make us faster.

That being said, technology cannot really change the fundamental nature of hiring. That’s not the fault of technologies, it’s just that the nature of recruiting is couched in something truly fundamental. At the end of the day, recruiting will always be about finding the connection between talented individuals and teams that need them. The humanness of that project can be aided by technology without ever truly being ‘changed’ by it.

So, new technology is something to embrace, but only when it works to further that fundamental nature of recruiting. You should definitely be skeptical of companies that offer you everything you’ve ever dreamed and have a new program as their messiah; technology isn’t a miracle worker like that. What technology does do is offer new and improved ways for recruiters and hiring managers to be more awesome at their jobs. Social media lets them put their job offers out to larger crowds, recruiting platforms let them filter and search through candidates so that they can find promising candidates, and better communication technologies let hiring managers break the ties of geography and extend their reach further than their predecessors could have hoped.

In the past, it was an endeavor to just source talent from another city. With products like Skype, LinkedIn, and TalentCube, you are able to source talent across states or even countries, if that’s what you want. All of this increased speed and scale lets recruiters and hiring managers play the talent game on a field larger than ever before and it allows them to find that love connection in talent that they otherwise might have missed. So for helping us with our job, let’s give technology a hug.

When I think of smart people, I tend to think of physicists. Between the Einsteins, Feynemens, and Degrasse-Tysons of the world, the ranks of incredibly smart people is filled with physicists. So can thinking like a physicist teach you anything about entrepreneurship? It can; a lot, actually.

For those of you tensing up at the thought of the complicated mathematics involved with being a physicist, don’t worry. We aren’t going to be talking about using string theory to predict new markets, I’m just going to tell you about how the underlying method of thinking in physics can help you to better understand challenges facing your startup.

Because physics is about understanding the nature of the universe and the universe is filled with billions upon trillions of different variables, the secret to thinking like a physicist is to learn how to peel away the trivial little details of a situation until you arrive at the atomic core of the problem; the part of a problem that you cannot change or remove without the situation itself disappearing. This type of thinking is about determining the basic premises of a concept, the First Principles if you will and so, intuitively enough, it’s called First Principles thinking.

The opposite of first principles thinking is thinking from analogy. When you think from analogy, you look at how things have been done and are done right now and find very small tweaks to make a slightly new model work. While this type of thinking can sometimes work out alright, it relies on you having faith that the existing assumptions about how things are done are correct; they seldom if ever are.

That’s where the really useful part of First Principles Thinking comes in; when you and your company look for the core of your particular business problem, you can start to build solutions from scratch and can sometimes apply new ideas and technology to create solutions that are novel, clever, or even revolutionary. When you find those new and innovative solutions to problems as an entrepreneur, that is where you find your competitive advantage. Larger firms can easily provide variations on an existing product, but entrepreneurs are the ones that can come up with an entirely new product.

Elon Musk is one entrepreneur to find tremendous success with First Principles Thinking describes the dangers of thinking from analogy like this.

“Nobody would wants a car because horses are great and we’re used to them and there’s grass all of the place that they can eat and there’s no gasoline.”

What Musk points out is how, sometimes, being an entrepreneur requires figuring out what additional infrastructure needs to come up to support your product whether it be as big as infrastructure to supply it fuel or a program to support your service. If you just think of the world as it is and how it has always been, if you rely on common knowledge, then you will find it very difficult to make innovative products.

Musk demonstrated this dramatically when he and his team at SpaceX utilized First Principles thinking to break from the NASA derived model for rocket production in favor of a new one that they set the rules for. It required them going back to the ground floor to look at new ways to source rocket parts but they discovered that they could build rockets for 2% of what common knowledge said they should cost; that, my friends, is what the makings of a revolution looks like.

Finding the First Principles for your business’s situation can be extremely challenging. As useful as First Principle Thinking is, it is something you have to discipline your brain to do. As smart as we are, humans still learn naturally from imitation; monkey see, monkey do sets us up to think from from analogy and that is the bane of novelty.

There’s a philosophical purity to first principles thinking that carries over into your business. When you and your team work to find the underlying truths of your particular situation, you’re tearing away the mistakes that you never knew everybody else made and replacing them with your own cleverness. Take some time to sit down with your team and ask yourself what the First Principles of your product is; you may be surprised what you find.

One mistake people who are just getting into recruiting make is not communicating the precise needs of their client in their job posts. Every job post is a silent first impression that your company makes with its prospective candidates. It’s a way for people to know not only the tasks they will be performing but also a first glimpse of your client’s culture and how it thinks about its employees.

The first step to improving your job postings is to practice good habits around communicating what a new hire will be expected to do. This may sound like the most obvious thing in the world but it is actually a skill that you need to be thoughtful and careful about exercising. At every company there are aspects of daily life that sink into the background and stop being part of your consideration. There are tasks everybody does, idiosyncrasies of your workspace that everybody deals with, and other little quirks of function that you don’t think about. These might serve to attract or discourage applicants. When writing a new position, work your way through what an average day will look like for them. Starting with them walking in the door and ending with them walking out. Ask yourself, “What will someone at this company deal with?” This will help you organize the kinds of tasks a prospective hire will need to have including the training, skills, and personality. This will help you have a better idea of what to look for while the prospects will have a better idea of whether or not they will be a good fit for the company.

The next step to writing a good job posting follows directly off of the first. In addition to detailing what the standard tasks that a hire might have to go through in a normal day, start to ask yourself or your client what the ideal hire would look like. Naturally, this means that you need to look at the kind of skills that your prospects should have if they want to be hired but you should also go deeper than that. Ask yourself what the environment is like and consider what personalities would mesh well with it. Does the team work in cubicles? That works for some people but not others. Is there an open office layout in a shared startup incubator? Again, that’s something you should mention before a poor, introverted prospect arrives for an interview. Different work environments have different merits and you should always consider who would work best in them. This can help you build a list of qualities that an ideal hire should have. Do not feel beholden to follow this list to the letter when pursuing your hire, but keep it in mind when interviewing and when examining cover letters and resumes.

Finally, be conscientious about the language that you use when writing a job posting. Every job posting is a first hint about the culture of your company. Is the company formal or casual? Are there rigid roles or do people wear a lot of different hats? Is the company small or large? Depending on the way you phrase things, you may be communicating either a good hint about the company or giving a false impression of the corporate culture that might attract people who may not be the best fit for the general personality of your company. Before you post a job opening, look over how you’ve written it. Did you use slang? Did you use contractions? Did you use jargon? Using slang and contractions can make your message read less formally and more conversationally while using less jargon and more technical terms can make you seem more formal and strict. Neither of these approaches are wrong, but they give different impressions of your company and attract different applicants.

Hiring will always be a challenge and finding the top talent among a sea of sub-optimal hires will always be easier said than done. By making sure that your job posting properly communicates the needs of your client, you can work to stack the hiring deck in your favor. Job postings are one of those unsung heroes of the hiring process that people never really think about, but if you put effort into your first impressions it can really help your hiring process.

When you create a tool, you have some responsibility to make sure that people aren’t accidentally using it incorrectly, in ways that harm themselves or their businesses. That’s why I’m writing this post that warns recruiters and hiring managers about the dangers of becoming too reliant on filters in hiring platforms.

Tools, like my company’s, make hiring faster and more effective, but they can also let hiring managers who aren’t careful lock themselves in a gated community. I’m talking about relying too much on using filters. Filters are one of those tempting tools that a hiring manager can use to put their job onto autopilot. After all, why bother wading through applicants that don’t meet the letter of your search, why are they even applying? There’s a very simple reason every hiring manager should be looking to hire people who fall just short of their requirements, that’s where some prime talent is. When you use the functions on hiring platforms to filter, you run the risk of removing candidates that don’t fall into the letter of your filter but might also be good matches for your company.

The danger of wishing for the moon and the stars when you’re looking for a passive candidate on an online platform is that those qualities don’t always translate to raw numbers. The perfect person for your senior manager position might not be someone with previous experience as a senior manager, they might be someone with experience as a junior manager who’s looking to move up in the world. Heck, depending on what’s available, if you’re a small startup and hire somebody who has that half decade of experience as a senior manager into your job, they may think that they’re “too good” for your startup company. When you hire someone who feels like their position is beneath them, that’s going to be reflected in their work right up to the day that they leave you in a lurch and run for what they think are greener pastures. If you think training a fresh hire is expensive, wait until you see how much a turnover of a “dream hire” costs you.

The main point I’m trying to get at is this: widen your range and look to hire for potential instead of just experience. Don’t be satisfied with one search, filter but don’t let filtering be your be all end all. If you think you need someone with six years of experience, broaden the search lower. A long career of experience doesn’t always translate into better performance at your company, especially if they feel underemployed. When you’re using a hiring platform, try every possible combination of filters rather than all at once. See who has the experience you need, who has the skills you need, then weigh your options according to what your company needs and whether they would make a good fit.

Hiring platforms are really fantastic and none of the criticisms I’ve made here take away from that. A good hiring platform in the hands of a good hiring manager can speed up hiring, increase the range of candidates available, and help a company grow at speed that matches their means and needs. But, like any tool, they have a potential to be misused. So keep in mind the potential that some optimal candidates may be just outside of your search, then take a second to loosen the filter and see if you’re missing that golden hire.

Thanks to the internet, the world is smaller than ever. You as a business aren’t bound by geography when it comes to outsourcing your company’s tasks. Whether it’s grabbing a content writer from one state over or grabbing a programmer from two countries over, reaching abroad is now easier than ever. Online hiring tools, like Talent Cube, are able help you find people who fit your company’s needs not just in your area, but around the country.

Even though this opens up a literal world of new hiring opportunities, the process is not without its challenges: things may be easier, but they still aren’t easy. Running a company with employees across the country means wrestling with conflicting schedules, different timezones, and all sorts of other inconveniences. This is all part-and-parcel with the process; the challenges that having remote employees brings is something you will have to weigh against your company’s unique situation in order to decide whether it’s right for you.

If you make the choice that many other companies have made and reach outside of your geographic area for help, these four tools for managing remote workers might help you out.

1. Trello

I found out about Trello not too long ago and now I can’t live without it. Trello is a fantastic workflow organizer that works with the shifting status of the business world. Trello lets you place cards for tasks into different columns for different phases of work. Even better, it lets you attach employees onto the cards so that who’s responsible for what is always crystal clear and everybody receives updates when their projects change and update.

2. Skype

This one is basically obligatory. In spite of some issues with bugginess since their acquisition by Microsoft, Skype is still one of the best and most ubiquitous applications for making voice and video calls over the internet. This endorsement comes with one big caveat; Skype is only better if you actually use its calling features.

3. Slack

If your company has frequent conference calls or video meetings, Skype is still probably your best bet. However, if your situation works with only text communication, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor by switching over to Slack.

Slack is all of the text functionality of Skype with an eye turned towards ubiquitous access and convenience. Groups on Slack can host multiple parallel conversations to help with organizing your thoughts and keeping the conversation relevant to all its participants.

4. Dropbox

Here’s another obligatory one. A common problem with organizing remote teams is making sure everybody has access to the same files. To date, dropbox is the best and most convenient cloud storage service I’ve found. Simple and robust, Dropbox is one of the best tools for managing remote workers available.

So you’ve decided to join the startup game? Welcome to the party. If you’re just out of the world of huge firms and tech giants, you may find some of the ins and outs of the smaller startup world could take a bit of getting used to. To help you avoid some of the rough spots on the road to success, here are some startup tips for beginners.

Build a great team

Teams are one of the biggest factors in making a successful startup, full stop. Startups are, by their nature, very small when compared to their tech giant competitors. This means that bad blood on a team can be one of the most destructive factors in a startup environment and that having a team full of people who are eager to work can lead to much greater successes than might otherwise be possible. Take your time when you pick your teammates and make them count. Turnover and strife are expensive things in the startup game and your best bet is to avoid them outright.

And communicate with them

Make sure entire team knows your goals and expectations and that everyone has the skills and drive to reach those goals. When you are in doubt about anything with your team and their workflow, communicate that concern. The business world can easily attract yes-men and people who hold their crucial thoughts to themselves rather than risk offending those around them. Understand that nobody can read anybody’s mind and that success comes from being in an environment where everybody feels comfortable communicating problems and good ideas while they can still be fixed and implemented.

Make yourself into a moving target

Part of being a startup is recognizing that you will need to be mobile, agile, and flexible. You and your employees will have to assume roles and responsibilities outside of your job titles and your business will have to constantly endeavor to improve. This is, once again, where communication is important. By communicating with your team, you can find areas in need of improvement before the product goes to market and by listening to customer feedback, you can improve your product while also building trust with your customers.

Focus on accessibility

Being a startup can sometimes feel like being a face in a crowd. Without the benefits of being a household name or having a huge marketing budget to draw on, it can sometimes feel like your business just blends in. One major way to alleviate this problem is to focus yourself on accessibility. Make your business and what it provides accessible on as many platforms as possible, especially mobile and make your product synergize well with complementary services on the market. This will help customers and investors to notice you and take interest in what you’re providing.

Know your weaknesses

No matter how good your startup is, it has places where it could be better. It’s simply a sad reality of the world that every business has, at least, one weakness. This is not something to be ashamed of and it is absolutely not something to ignore. Identify your company’s weaknesses quickly and research ways to compensate for them. Chances are yours problem isn’t a new one and someone else has found a way to address it. Learn from their successes and mistakes and apply them to your own challenges.

Notice how most of the top articles on Google are about the most common interview questions and what the kind of answers employers like to hear in response? Everybody knows how crucial interviews are to the hiring process and they’re constantly seeking an edge in that competition. That’s why there are volumes of books about doing well on your interview, blogs about ways to answer interview question, and tons of additional content about what employers like and dislike. That should demonstrate a very important point; people are trying to game their interviews and, as far as I can tell, it’s working. Even without resorting to lying or embellishing, it is trivially easy to learn how to speak and answer questions in a way that inspires confidence in a prospective employer.

I mentioned earlier that interviews can have positives; they let hiring managers get a feel for an applicant’s personality and group interviews can give a first glimpse of how a prospective hire will fit into a team. But businesses rely on interviews too much. Interviews should be one tool in the arsenal of a company hunting for talent and any company that sees them as the be all, end all for the hiring process is doing themselves a disservice. What’s the alternative to interviews then? I’m glad you asked.

One way to get a better look at your prospective pick’s promise is to test them. Now, the word ‘test’ conjures all sorts of unpleasant mental images about sitting in a quiet room filling in bubbles on a multiple-choice scan-sheet. Fear not! While that type of testing can be useful to some businesses, it is not the type of testing I am talking about. When I say you should test your employees, I mean you should assess their ability to directly perform the kind of tasks your company runs on.

If you are hiring a salesperson, ask them how they would pitch you the product; If you are hiring a programmer, ask them to submit their portfolio. If you are handling your testing in-house, you will have to be flexible based on what your company needs and what time and resources it can spare for testing.

Of course, if you are willing to look outside of your company for assistance, TalentCube can handle the testing for you so that your team can remain focused on their projects instead of on concocting ways to measure a prospective hire’s talent. If your team is small and busy, I highly recommend this option.

A word of warning; testing is helpful, but it isn’t not a magic bullet. One of my main qualms with interviews is that businesses treat them as a be all end all. That mentality is poisonous no matter what sort of hiring assessment a company applies it to. None of the methods I will suggest for replacing interviews are meant to take over as the alpha and omega of talent assessment; there simply is no one talent assessment method that you can rely upon as the last word. Using a combination approach is best and TalentCube offers just the platform.

Alright ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’re ready to retread some ground we haven’t seen since the days of watching saturday morning cartoons. Hold on for a second and let me tell you how one of the lessons from those halcyon days of sugary cereal and poorly made cartoons can help you make your business more effective; it’s time to talk about the power of friendship.

Friendship is a strong word with a lot of different meanings. On one end, you have your facebook friends; the kind of people that are actually acquaintances but you call friends because… why not? On the other side of the scale you have your siblings in all but genetics, the rare few people that complete you in a way second only to your significant other. Let me be clear about this; your team does not need to be the latter. In fact, it’s probably best to aim for something between the two extremes. Your teammates don’t need to be starting fantasy football leagues and grabbing drinks everyday after work.

When I say the power of friendship, I’m specifically talking about the power of professional camaraderie. Recent studies suggest that teams function better when the people on them like each other. This is the kind of research that falls into the academic tradition of learning so much about so little, but it’s still worth paying attention to because it suggests something important: teams full of people that actually like each other and who build rapport end up having higher productivity.

Contrary to much of what traditional interviews and resumes would have you believe, employees aren’t just a packet of skills attached to a beige, inoffensive automaton. There is a whole person attached to that resume of skills, and when you hire you had better pay attention to that. When you hire somebody, especially for a small startup, you will be bringing that whole person into your space and sharing eight hours of your day with them.

So how do you find people with compatible personalities for your team? Tough to say. There are quite a few ways to actually go about the process and it can pay to keep a flexible repertoire of techniques to apply to finding out whether a prospective hire (more on that in future blogs). My main bit of advice is that, if you have a team small enough for this, that you bring the whole team in on the interviewing process and ask them for their opinions on each candidate. Different variations on this idea of getting your team into the hiring process all have their own advantages and drawbacks based on the situation.