I hate to disagree with another Shoestring blogger, But …

Posted by Dave Slutzkin [CEO of Flippa] on March 4, 2013 in Say Something! · 4 Comments

I hate to disagree with another Shoestring blogger, but Natasha Hawker is wrong.

I have a lot of respect for Natasha, but when she wrote yesterday about [the importance of position descriptions] (https://www.shoestring.com.au/2013/02/employees-what-the-pd-and-i-dont-mean-sex-education/), she was giving bad advice to startups.

Sure, if you’re a massive company with seventeen levels of management and an HR department then you can afford to write ten page documents about how many coffee breaks each person is allowed. But for a startup, that’s not just a waste of time, it’s actually counter-productive.

See, in a startup, your first few employees – say five or ten – are hired for flexibility. You need them to be go-getters who are focused on making the business better, not straight-laced process fanatics who know exactly what their duties are and what they aren’t.

Here’s how it goes. You take the leap and start your business. It begins to get a bit of traction and you’re ready to hire someone – but what role fits in best? Do you hire in marketing, in business development or in customer support? The “position description” driven process says you choose one of these areas and find the best person for it. And then that person does that job and that job only.

But what if you hire a customer support gun and there aren’t enough tickets coming in? Or what if the business pivots to become more B2B? The customer support person will just be sitting there while you continue to jump from task to task. You’ll ask them to pitch in and help, and because they’ve got a nice PD that says exactly what they can and can’t do, they refer to that and say “not my problem”

What you actually want to do is to hire someone who’s really flexible and willing to try anything. Even if they haven’t got perfect skills up front, that flexibility will pay off many times over. The company will pivot, staffing needs will change, people will be hired or fired and throughout it all your flexible employee is switching around with the best interests of the company at heart.

Natasha’s argument was that your team won’t know what to do if it isn’t written down. Respectfully, that’s crap. If your team don’t know what’s expected of them, that’s because you’re not communicating well enough. Writing down something that’s true at a brief point in time won’t help that, because situations change fast in startup land and you need to keep communicating the company goals. This is a daily thing, weekly at the outside. A position description can’t possibly keep up with that.

So, absolutely, make sure people know what’s expected of them. But when you’re hiring, look for smart all-rounders who are willing to work hard. And if they ask for the formal job description up front, end the interview then and there.

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  • claire.s

    i concur wholeheartedly! The idea that people won’t know what’s expected of them without writing it all down, is archaic and not flexible enough for the startup environment. It likely reflects you’re getting it wrong from the start… hiring the wrong people, the wrong way and managing them all wrong. Fwiw, if I’d spent more time hiring what the company needed in terms of the stage of it’s growth (and getting someone flexible), rather than what position I would have been filling were the company larger, it would have completely reshaped where my company is today. Nice post Dave!

  • Dan Norris

    Ha agreed.

  • Scott C

    I have been this early employee and while you are on the money in regards to flexibility (when us it ranged from accounting to PR to customer service) without communication there will be significant issues. Both the employee and the manager need to be on the same page. Often having a rough guide written down will enable some distinctions and will highlight the grey areas where everyone pitches in. At least that was our attitude, this is what you do, this is what I do, anything else we all do.

    Secondary point: Anyone in a startup saying ‘not my job’ is the wrong fit.

  • Natasha Anne Hawker

    To start with, thank you Dave Slutkin for reading and responding to my blog – we need people to read, debate, discuss and hopefully take away some knowledge or an alternative way of looking at an issue.

    I totally agree with you when you say that communication is key – I would go so far as critical – we need to hire people that are flexible, adaptable and all rounders. I would also agree that you need people who are happy to just do what needs to be done, to get the task done no matter how menial.

    My concern is that you have taken my article very literally. I find that many of the issues that I deal with in businesses (whether corporate or start-ups) result from misunderstanding and miscommunication. A position description does not have to be a big, formal, corporate document, but by not documenting your desired outcomes and expectations for an individual, you are relying on the effective sharing, receiving and retaining of verbal information. Statistics have proven that we only retain minimum amounts of what we are told after a period of time elapses.

    Having a PD does not have to stunt a positive culture, innovation, bias for action and thinking outside the norm. In fact, it could look to positively encourage and reward these behaviours. What I am suggesting is that it is helpful to provide a clear illustration of what tasks are required – also noting that this will evolve and change over time. Let’s face it, as a business owner you may not always be available to check in with.

    I expect most start ups want to grow and therefore scale quickly. Knowing what everyone in the business does (and doesn’t do), could help when you are looking to resource at pace. Jack Delosa and Stuart Cook are always talking about systemisation, systemisation, systemisation. Are you going to be available to write all the ads from scratch or would it make more sense to flick through a few existing PDs as a starting point?

    To me the PD is the black and white and the grey is the conversation and I spend a lot of time dealing with the impacts of the grey.

    I am passionate about helping start ups – I don’t want to be a barrier but I do want to protect them. Remembering that regardless of whether you are a start up, SME or corporate you fall under the same ER legislation and PDs can assist with this, should you be accused of ‘unfair, harsh or an unjust behaviour’. Not having been effectively informed of what your role is and then being fired for not doing what is expected could be deemed as ‘unfair’.

    I think take what makes sense from the corporate world and apply it in a way that assists Start Ups.

    You mentioned that if ‘someone asks for a formal position description up front, end it there and then’. In all my years of interviewing, I have rarely been asked for a PD at interview but I have been asked questions like what will I do, what do the other team do, what would you expect from me, what are the business goals and what does success look like? This I would suggest is a hire behaviour.

    Maybe it is as simple as, in my business ‘I need people who can do this and that possess these behaviours’ remembering as your business moves out of start up phase these people may or may not be the best people for your business moving forward.




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