Pay well
Hiring the right people is crucial in executing our strategy well and achieving the mission. Although we don’t want to hire mercenaries, as a general role people value high pay, and a straightforward way to attract people to your company is to pay them more than they could earn elsewhere.
Each year, we benchmark against other startups at our stage in London and change salaries to ensure that we’re paying in the top 20th percentile.
Hire permanent employees slowly
As we rapidly scale Spill, we will constantly be learning new things about the market. We should stay as small and as nimble as possible to be able to take advantage of the learnings that come up for us.
In order to test new projects or fill a burning gap in the team, the default should be to hire consultants or freelancers. This allows us to ramp up on new projects with professionals in weeks, not months.
By keeping a small core team and working with freelancers and consultants, we have the flexibility to scale up and down as needed. When a project isn’t working out, we don’t have to solve the problem of what happens to the person doing that role. Sudden changes to the team can be disruptive and expensive, so this approach helps us avoid that. Hiring people on a short-term basis for specific projects means we get the skills we need, when we need them, without being locked into long-term commitments that may not fit the business in the future.
Make sure there’s dancing
Although we don’t like admitting it, as humans, we can be quite self interested. There have been countless worthy projects over the years that haven’t managed to get off the ground because they haven’t gotten the support they needed.
We need to be aware of that as we build Spill. We can’t just rely on the mission of the business to attract people to the project. Spill needs to be a fun place to work. To quote the anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution”.
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