<aside> đź’ˇ Caveat, this is mainly about building passionate missionary teams and a bit less about building nice lifestyle places to work. Lessons for both sides though.
</aside>
Why does someone work somewhere? Money, mission, and friends. That’s it.
Why would someone work for your company? Because your “job offering” is a great product. And that’s exactly how you need to think about it.
I learned how to hire from recruiting a few hundred people for a handful of my own startups and watching friends hire for theirs. Theres a general frame of the game that I want to outline here. Here are the main pillars.
Like everything else in life, an applicant’s decision to apply, then interview, then maybe work for you is a decision. How do you make people make the decisions that you want? You give them as easy a decision as possible in your favor. Make your good aka your product aka your job offering as desirable as possible.
This means different things for different people, but 99% of a career product (job) is money, mission, and friends. Money and compensation is played out and documented well around the world so I won’t bore you with that. The other two, however, are the levers you can pull to really achieve outsized returns in attracting your dream team.
Practically, design your job offer as the best possible job someone can have. So much so that they would be stupid to say no. You know what kind of workplace/team you like (autonomy, high pace, etc.) so design your company culture to be a place people would be stupid to say no to.
Do something people care about. Write about it in a way people will care about. Then you won’t have any trouble convincing anyone that what you’re doing is worth their life. The recruiters at SpaceX or Moderna have an idiotically easy job.