Building and Maintaining Your Dream Team

Building a solid team at a company is tough. Maintaining it can be even tougher. In the startup world, where the work and opportunities seem neverending and there are not enough hours in the day, spending time on hiring is can be a huge burden outside of the day-to-day—you don’t know how long employees will stay, how invested they will be, and if they will go above and beyond like you do. 

I was the third full-time employee hired at cove, and we now have 13 and are in the process of hiring four. On average, for each full-time position, we do seven phone screens, four in-person interviews, and two social outings. I don’t really want to do the math, but that’s a lot of time spent on hiring, to say the least. That doesn’t even include the countless hours spent writing the job descriptions, posting, weeding through resumes, discussing candidates, prepping for arrival, and training and onboarding. Holy hell. However, at cove, we have made it a priority—people are the lifeblood of our organization.

Through the hiring process, cove’s team has learned a lot. It’s been a long road in a short amount of time,  but I could not be more pleased with the team we’ve built. I hope that some of what we’ve learned will be relevant and relatable to you.

Building a solid team…

Fit and competency are equally weighted.

Getting the right people on your team is imperative. cove believes competency and fit are equally important and are equally weighted in our hiring process. Experience is also key, but often falls last. A candidate can checkmark every single skill we require and desire, and have jaw-dropping experience, but if he/she isn’t a good fit for our team, then it’s a no. Is he going to stay late to help reach a deadline? Is she going to have a good attitude when sh*t hits the fan? If I have my head on my desk with 20 piles of paper stacked 3 feet high around me, is he going to ask to make sure I’m alive and see what he can do to help? If the answer is yes, then I want that person on my team. If there is a hesitation, then, well, I’m hesitating, too. A good fit for our team is someone who is self-motivated, enthusiastic, a critical thinker, a creative problem solver, and ready to do anything.

No one goes solo in a hiring decision. 

Use your team during the hiring process. Everyone brings different views and opinions to the table, and they should be taken into consideration. Sometimes it feels like there are too many hands in the hiring pot, but you know what? I’d rather that than going at it alone. This is especially important when it comes to fit. At cove, we all work so closely together that we need to trust, feel confident, and enjoy with whom we’re working.

Go on a social interview. 

The final round of interviews at cove is a social outing (read: bar) with the candidate. This is an opportunity for us to get to know the individual on a more personal level. Things we are evaluating is how you talk about yourself, what kind of information you’re sharing, and how you interact with us in a more casual environment. It also serves as an outlet for the candidate to get to know us. We’ve been on some social interviews where the candidate didn’t ask us a single thing about ourselves—don’t you want to know who you are potentially going to be working with? Don’t you want to know what we do for fun, how we wind down, how we manage a work-life balance? This is a crucial part of our interview process, and a step we’ve, regretfully, skipped before. I encourage you to try this if you don’t already. It’s amazing what you’ll discover about people when you change their environment.

Do you want to work for a startup or for cove? 

Like everyone else, we always ask candidates, “Why do you want to work at our company?” Oftentimes the answer is some form of this: “I want to work at a startup!” It would probably take 10 seconds to crush that dream when I show candidates the average number of hours I work each week and how many days I don’t have off each month, but then we would still be at three employees. Startup-seeking candidates: Knowing that you want to work at a startup is great, but why our startup? Why do you want to work at cove? What do you think is cool about our company and how do you align with that? We aren’t interested in hiring people who simply want to work at a startup. We want to hire people interested in working at cove and furthering our mission.

...maintaining a solid team.

While you’re hiring a team, it’s important to keep your current team happy and motivated. Here are a few ways we do that at cove.

Acts of kindness.

I’m so thankful for the opportunity to work with such kind and thoughtful individuals. It sounds cheesy, but it’s so important. cove locations stay open until 11pm most nights, and when your day starts at 8am, it can be rough. If my colleagues are still around when it’s time to start shutting down a location, they always sticks around to help. They always make time for my many questions (of which I have an unbelievable amount). They make me peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes, which includes two of my favorite things in life, and bring beer to our late night meetings. It’s the small things that keep us going.

Work-life balance. 

This is a hot topic these days, and our scale definitely tilts in the direction of work. To help that scale even out a bit more, we launched a company-supported wellness plan. It can be running three times a week, reading two books a month, learning a new language, or a myriad of other things. If we reach our goal, we get a bonus. I love that I work for a place that not only supports healthy habits, but one that saw a need and found a way to support that need. 

Believing and knowing your team feels valued. 

While working at a startup, it’s easy to become consumed with everything that’s on your plate. But be sure to make time for your team, so they not only feel valued, but truly believe they are valued. At a small, early-stage startup, everyone is crucial to achieving short- and long-term goals. Make sure managers do regular check-ins with their teams. At cove, our founder/ceo, Adam Segal, makes time for each individual as well. This ties into internal transparency, which is key to making everyone feel like they have stake in what’s going on. One of the exciting things about working for a startup is that there really is endless opportunity to grow and contribute to the growth and direction of the company. The impact of each individual is seen, and their efforts are far reaching. Make sure everyone knows this.

Blur the lines of hierarchy.

Hierarchy in a company is important and necessary. But in a small, quickly growing company, everyone wears a lot of hats. We each have our role and yes, some of us have ‘manager’ in our titles, but we all still do a little bit of everything. The full-time team works onsite host shifts, which means we stock the beverage center, wipe down tables, push in chairs. We open and close locations, which means we vacuum and clean toilets. All of us, including cove’s founder, go out and street team. It’s all hands on deck. We’re all in this together. This mentality goes a long way.