Safe Return Doubtful, Honor and Recognition in Event of Success
By Laura Ianuly
Founder and CEO, Ianuly Talent Accelerators
Of all the recruiting ads ever penned, the call to join Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition ranks among the most stirring and candid. It promised a “…hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success.”
Shackleton chose his crew very carefully, with each person bringing complementary skills, such as celestial navigation, carpentry, medical knowledge, cooking or seamanship. Yet as different as every one of his 27 crewmates were, they were united by a common goal and their unwavering determination to achieve it: crossing the entire Antarctic continent via the South Pole.
Apart from the physical danger, many modern entrepreneurs face the same fundamental challenge that Shackleton did: recruiting a team to pursue a goal that has never before been achieved, and which has a high probability of failure. In such cases, every single person a start-up hires matters immensely, as does overall team chemistry. One bad choice, and a small company can lose its most precious asset, time, or even fail altogether.
As a recruiting team with decades of collective experience, Ianuly Talent Accelerators has helped build successful teams at more than 100 start-ups. One reason we are so effective is that we believe in building long-term relationships with our clients, with candidates, and among and between those we recruit to build and grow each of our client companies.
Our approach to this flows from my experience. First was my role as the first Human Resources leader at DoubleClick, which I joined when we were just 87 employees in one office, and helped build to a team of 1,500 in 18 countries around the world – growth that led to its purchase by Google for $3.7 billion. Next was the year I spent at Integral Ad Science, building its team from 45 employees to more than 200. But it was only later in my career, when I launched my own recruiting firm, that I fully came to recognize the lessons these experiences had taught me.
First, you have to understand a business to identify the skillsets most important to build it.
Second, you have to know how to identify analogous industries, because if you’re building something truly novel, the requisite experience may have to come from unexpected places. This is particularly true when recruiting for the evolving e-commerce sector, as well as for the emerging and dynamic 5G arena.
Third, look for people who share your vision and values. You’re going to be spending a lot of time together, in close quarters, so make sure you like them.
Fourth, always lay a strong foundation for the enterprise you hope to become. This means establishing consistent standards, processes and procedures very early in a company’s history, especially for sourcing, evaluating, interviewing, compensating, hiring and onboarding candidates. What specific skills, as opposed to experience, are a priority? What personality characteristics reinforce the culture you seek to establish? What interview questions and techniques reveal these in meaningful ways, and how can founders avoid “gut decisions” that sometimes prove catastrophic?
Laying a successful foundation also requires an understanding of which departments and functions are likely to split (such as Sales and Customer Success), and which are likely to be combined (such as Engineering and Product Management), as a company grows.
The fact is, most entrepreneurs don’t envision their start-up hoping to remain a handful of people pulling all-nighters in a single room – they dream of becoming a national or even global success story. But that doesn’t just happen on its own. Sure, a little luck always helps. But luck favors the well prepared, especially those who are prepared to adapt as conditions change.
Famously, Shackleton never made it to Antarctica. The year he set sail turned out to be a particularly bad one for sea ice, which trapped his ship for nearly a year and slowly crushed it to splinters. Adapting to new and dire circumstances, Shackleton had his team load vital supplies onto the ship’s three small boats, and begin hauling them toward the nearest land. Aptly, his family motto was Fortitudine Vincimus – “By Endurance we Conquer.”
Eventually reaching Elephant Island – a desolate rock off the Antarctic peninsula – he left all but a handful of his crew there, then set out with five companions in best of their small boats to reach their only hope for rescue: a whaling station on South Georgia island, some 800 miles away. After 16 days of sailing through towering seas, with no room for navigational error, their 22-foot boat made landfall on South Georgia. The whalers, all tough seamen, were incredulous when a knot of gaunt strangers, dark from soot and frostbite, staggered into view.
“Who the hell are you?” the whaling captain demanded.
“My name is Shackleton,” the explorer said.
The captain’s eyes grew wide, as he realized who was standing before him.
It took several more months and multiple attempts, but Shackleton was eventually able to return to Elephant Island in a steamship and rescued the remaining members of his team. Many rightly attribute their survival to Shackleton’s wise and determined leadership. But what they usually overlook is that his successful leadership began with strong recruiting.
More than a century later, that same imperative – assembling the right crew – remains true for today’s entrepreneurs. Because when you’re all in the same small boat, everyone has to pull their own weight, no matter how rough the seas get. So choose your team wisely. With the right people, anything is possible.
