From knowing who to hire next, to ethical and legal concerns, to how to interview the best candidates, to how to evaluate them once they’re hired – startups have their work cut out for them when it comes to hiring. If you can afford to hire a trained professional, someone who’s skilled in evaluative testing, do so. But if not, you need to learn as much as you can about how to hire the right people. Here’s our contribution to your endeavor. Sponsor How Does a Startup Know Who to Hire Next? First it must be said that each startup has different needs. But in general, a startup that’s still in pursuit of funding requires a sales-oriented team, whereas a startup with funding sources that have begun to stabilize can focus its team on more specific objectives. In general, Anthony Cerminaro of AllBusiness says that the classic hiring stage starts with hiring someone to build a prototype. Then a manger is hired to turn the prototype into a product. Then a business manager is hired to coordinate business opportunities for the product. Then a lawyer is hired. Finally, someone is hired to focus on overall business development. What Kind of People Are You Looking For? To find the answer to that question, you need to understand the work ethic of each generation. Yesterday Ypulse interviewed the president of LifeCourse, Neil Howe. With a background in history, demographics and economics, Howe offer this advice: “If you want visionary leadership, if you need to redefine your corporate culture, go to your Boomers. If you need to apply incentives in a creative out-of-the-box way, if you need that cost-cutting, reality shock therapy done to your department, get your X’ers to do it. But if you want a group of people to come together in a team and to design a system and a protocol to get everything working effectively in an organized fashion, if you want to improve the morale of the group, get your Millennials to do it.” Ethical and Legal Requirements Laws protect us from discrimination based on age, race, gender, religious and political beliefs. These laws are not as easy to follow as you might think. But some of the most common hiring advice given to startups is to treat your job candidates with respect. As blogger Rands in Repose says : “…a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.” Finding this on a resume and from references, and from face-to-face meetings is not easy. The atmosphere around you is critical. Essential Ingredients of a Successful Interview TechStartups suggests that the ultimate disrespect is to interview someone in public. A quiet office or home is an essential atmosphere to put your potential new star employee at ease. If you are using a computer during the interview don’t peer out at them from behind it. Set the interview space up so you can easily look at the screen together. Don’t surprise them with a room full of partners staring them down. If they’ll be meeting other partners let them know ahead of time who these people are and how they can learn more about them prior to the interview. Do your homework on how to interview. This means no generalized questions, no storytelling or memorized presentations about what your company does. Get detailed and specific right away. Demonstrate to them the type of professional rapport you’ll be expecting in the workplace. Who’s Best and How Do You Get Them Started? Have you ever been told by someone that they don’t like the business side but they love the work they do? Don’t hire those people! People who are enthusiastic about the business side are far more cognizant of how teamwork and problem solving affects the bottom line. An additional quality is someone called a “Driver.” Online product marketing guru Eben Pagan explains how a Driver doesn’t slack off on their work if their boss is too busy to give them a crucial answer. The Driver keeps pursuing the boss rather than using the lack of response as an excuse to slack off. As Pagan explains in the video below, if you want to know if you hired a Driver give them their first task, tell them who to work with and then let them get the work done with as little supervision as possible. At the end of each day ask them to take five minutes to send you a very brief email describing how their day went. And again, don’t supervise them or send them in-depth guidance in a reply – just take a step back and see how they respond to the real world. Pagan explains that shifting from high expectations to neutral will reveal if you have a real Driver. In the long run, no one is served by keeping an employee around who can’t relate to the drive for success that you are putting into your startup. Do you have more hiring tips. Or do you have horror stories about hiring or being hired by a startup? Let us know in the comments. Image from Wiki Commons . Discuss

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Portland, Oregon mobile service provider Urban Airship announced today that it now offers push notifications as a service – with a multi-media payload. The white label technology, called AirMail , sends users of iPhone, BlackBerry and soon Android phones a push notification that when clicked launches not just an app, but specific content like images, videos or text inside that app. Developers who put the AirMail library into their apps will also receive full analytics showing how many recipients opened the messages, how long they spent viewing the content and more. AirMail is available only as a developer preview today but a preview video can be viewed below. Sponsor The downside to using services like UrbanAirship is always dependence on 3rd party service providers. This newest feature is probably the startup’s most intimate integration yet from a technology perspective, but development required is non-trivial and the resulting functionality is likely to be a real boon to publishers. If you’ve got multi-media in an iPhone app, this is a way for it to reach out and grab (with push) your users and keep them engaged. Discuss

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In last week’s poll, we asked what companies will be at the top of cloud in the next few years. The answers demonstrate the current state of the market and the perceptions about who we see as leaders. We had more than 1,500 responses. Google had the most votes with 288. Amazon came in second with 202 votes and Microsoft came in third with a total of 148 votes. Sponsor This week we want to know if all this debate about the definition of cloud computing is really getting us nowhere: Does it Really Matter How Cloud Computing Is Defined? trends James Governor of RedMonk says the debate is like the ones we always see when we get hit with a new wave of technology. He quotes his colleague Michael Coté : :The other day I was reading some of his notes and came across this line of beautiful simplicity. a simple mapping: IaaS = servers, storage PaaS = middleware SaaS = applications There now, that wasn’t so hard was it? Now that is what I call a burger. The next time someone tries to take you through 30 slides explaining the cloud you can just nod sagely, and say… “ohhhh. you mean servers, middleware and apps. Yeah I get it.” Problems arise when there is no clear view about what cloud computing actually means. That’s the issue now facing U.S. federal agencies. From next.gov : “The federal government has pretty significant efforts going on, but one of the things we realized is that there were multiple flowers blooming and not a lot of guidance,” said Eugene Huang, government operations director for the National Broadband Task Force, a panel of FCC officials, consultants and technology experts. So, what do you think? Do we need to do a better job in defining cloud computing? Discuss

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The disruptive forces of Enterprise 2.0 may seem to provide the new players with a certain opportunity for companies looking at new ways to streamline but also scale productivity and innovation. But can these small companies really make any dent in the market when they face the giants that increasingly offer similar services? Sure, the new players innovate. But look at the size of the channel that a company like IBM has to market its services. A case in point is today’s announcement by IBM about the gains with LotusLive and new additions to Lotus Foundations . Sponsor Of course, to win, it takes high quality products, too. But IBM seems to have a contender with LotusLive. In January, IBM announced a big win with Panasonic . And today comes news that in the last two months, IBM has signed up 200 reseller partners to sell the LotusLive service. LotusLive is available as cloud-based or on-premise, which correlates to IBM’s hybrid approach. IBM is investing heavily in the cloud but Lotus Foundations plays an important strategic role as an on-premise offering. And as of today, Lotus Foundations will be packaged with its DB-2 Express database. There are no limits on the database size nor limits on the number of databases per server. We saw a demo of Lotus Foundations at Lotusphere in January. it is essentially an appliance that a small business can keep on-premise. The addition of the database means that a customer may use it with an internal application it uses. For example, a small retailer may use an application developed for its market sector. The new features to Lotus Foundations comes as Microsoft plans to discontinue its Windows Essential Business Server (EBS). In a blog post , Microsoft said the service will be discontinued as of July 1. The company cited the advent of cloud computing as a factor for discontinuing the service: Since the launch of EBS, several changes have occurred that drove our decision to streamline our server product portfolio. First, midsize businesses are rapidly turning to technologies such as management, virtualization and cloud computing as a means to cut costs, improve efficiency, and increase competitiveness. Smaller companies competing in the enterprise collaboration space do not have the channels like those from a company like IBM. They have to be a player in the earliest stages of the market in order to gain any traction. We see some examples of this with companies integrating with Sharepoint and Google Apps Marketplace. These smaller companies do disrupt the market but can only go so far when they face a competitor that commands a channel as deep as IBM’s. Discuss

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Investors get lots of emails. Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group wrote just this morning on how he wishes email were slower so he wouldn’t suffer from what he calls “Email Compulsive Disorder.” That being said, there are ways to write better messages when communicating with investors (or anyone who receives a lot of email daily) that will make the process simpler, quicker and will better your chances of hearing back from them. Sponsor Babak Nivi over at Venture Hacks wrote today on scheduling meetings with investors via email, and how he hopes the the back-and-forth can be simplified. Using dummy emails, Nivi shows that scheduling a meeting with busy, email-laden investors requires more to-the-point conversations; instead of vaguely proposing to meet “sometime next week,” be specific and outline your availability right now and in the near future. Nivi also suggests using services like Plancast to see if a potential investor will be in your area soon and use that to schedule a meetup. If not, get on the horn. Other ways to streamline this process include keeping your email short, but not colloquial (stay away from Internet abbreviations), and including some good news about your company that provides some context. These guidelines are great for entrepreneurs looking to communicate with investors, but the same rules can be used in other situations. To be honest, I am probably guilty of not being terribly specific when people want to chat with me on the phone; I let the email chatter go back and forth until a time is agreed on instead of asserting my availability. At the same time, startups and PR agencies could potentially learn some lessons from Nivi’s article when reaching out to media to share their story. Personally, I only like press releases when they accompany a short personal message. I get a lot of press releases sent to my inbox, but as 37signals ‘ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said in their new book Rework , press releases are like spam to journalists. We get tons of them every day, so chances are simply sending a press release won’t get you as far as taking a different approach. The emails I respond to most frequently have a short personal message. I get a few emails each week that not only talk directly to me, but will also mention something else I have written about in the past. It may seem gimmicky, but I’m more likely to read an email from someone who understands the topics I cover. Sometimes when emails pile up, I may not respond to some messages I may have genuinely been interested in because they got lost in the deluge. Now and then I rediscover and older email when the sender pings me by sending another message under the same conversation. This lets me review their first message and reassess, plus it tells me they actually care enough to send a friendly reminder, and that I’m not just another writer on their email list. If you know you’re emailing someone whose inbox bulges each day, do them a favor and keep your emails short and to-the-point. When scheduling meetings, be specific, not vague; it helps to keep the volume of emails down, and is less stressful in the long run. Discuss

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