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I see so many first-time technical founders waste a ton of time on tactics & strategies that simply don't work in the early days of building their founding team. A lot of people come from hypergrowth tech companies, and fall into the trap of trying to replicate the strategies they’ve seen work in the past (e.g., inbound applicants, events, campus recruiting…). But recruiting for a small startup couldn’t be more different than recruiting for a larger tech co. When it comes down to it, most tactics that work for larger companies aren’t going to work when hiring your early-stage team because you don’t yet have a talent brand. Cultivating a talent brand is a long-term investment, and you just don’t have the time or resources to do so as a tiny startup. Welcome to Startup Hiring 101: A Founder’s Guide, Part 9 - Other Sources of Candidates. TBH, this post is mostly about sources of candidates you shouldn’t spend time on as a small startup and why. Note: this only applies to startup founders building out their founding team (e.g., first 10-15 employees).  ❌ ‎Inbound Applicants & Career Site (with one exception)  ❌ ‎Meetups & Industry Events  ❌ ‎Campus Recruiting (except in one case) Why write a post about which sources *not* to focus on? The reason is, many startup founders may be coming from a larger company where these strategies *are* effective. Hopefully, it can help get founders focused on the things that matter most... rolling up their sleeves and spending time recruiting from their network. Check out the full blog post in the comments, which goes much deeper into why these sources don’t typically work for small startups, with a few small exceptions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This post is part of a larger series on how to hire your founding team for startup founders. The series is based on Startup Hiring 101: A Founder’s Guide, a comprehensive guide to startup hiring, including step-by-step instructions, example templates, and best practices. Our Free for Startups program and the Startup Hiring 101 guide (links in comments) are a bit of a passion project for me. My hope is that our startup program and this guide can help the next generation of founders build great founding teams in the same way that we built our founding team at Gem 🙏 🚀 #recruiting #startups #startuphiring101 #gem #freeforstartups