33 startup hiring resources from YC, a16z, Seedcamp & top operators - organized by topic. From first hires to exec recruiting.
Hiring is the thing that will make or break your startup - and yet most founders learn it on the fly. There's no shortage of advice out there, but the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.
So we put together a curated collection of the best hiring resources we've come across, all from people who've actually built and scaled startups. No fluff, no generic HR content - just the stuff that's actually useful when you're trying to build a team from scratch.
We've organized everything by topic so you can jump to what's relevant to you right now. The full collection lives in this Airtable if you want to bookmark it.
Making Your First Hires
The hardest hires are the first ones - you're selling a vision with no proof, competing against companies that can offer stability, and figuring out what you even need at the same time.
- How to hire your first engineer — Y Combinator
- How to get your first hire right — SeedLegals
- How to hire on a startup budget — SeedLegals
- How can you convince the best people to join your startup? — Julian Shapiro
Hiring Engineers
Engineering hiring gets its own section because it's where most early-stage founders spend the majority of their recruiting energy - and where the mistakes are most expensive.
- Building an engineering team — Y Combinator
- How to hire engineers: sourcing candidates — Seedcamp
- How to hire engineers: the interview process — Seedcamp
- The Complete Guide to hiring Software Developers — Deazy
Executive & Leadership Hiring
At some point, you need people who've done this before at scale. Getting executive hiring wrong is one of the most costly mistakes a growing startup can make.
- The Hard Things About Scaling: Executive Hiring — a16z (Ben Horowitz & Ali Ghodsi)
- Hiring a Chief Product Officer — a16z
- Hiring a Chief Revenue Officer — a16z
- Firing a Key Executive — a16z
- What does a CFO do and when should you hire one? — SeedLegals
Sales & Go-to-Market Hiring
Building a sales org is fundamentally different from building an engineering team. These cover how to find your first sales hires and scale the GTM function.
- Hiring Sales people — a16z
- Enterprise Startups: Advice on Hiring, Firing, Scaling, and Selling — a16z
- Scaling Your Go-to-Market Org — a16z
Scaling & Growth
Once you've found product-market fit, the challenge shifts from finding great individuals to building a machine that can hire reliably at speed.
- How to set up, hire, and scale a growth strategy and team — Y Combinator
- How to build and manage teams — Y Combinator
- Scaling your operational org — a16z
- The Startup Hiring Guide: Hiring for rapid growth from 5 to 50 — Workable
- How to find the right Corporate Talent for Your Startup — Startups of London
- Creating a hiring strategy for your startup — GoHire
Common Mistakes
It's easy to find advice on what to do. Harder to find honest accounts of what goes wrong.
- Don't make these hiring mistakes — Y Combinator (Group Partner Lounge)
- What firing an employee may say about you — Seedcamp
Legal & Compensation
Stock options, employment law, advisors - the stuff that's not exciting but will bite you if you ignore it.
- Options, options, options — Seedcamp
- UK employees working abroad: what employment laws apply? — SeedLegals
- Hiring advisors: how much equity should I give? — SeedLegals
The Full Playbook: Startup Hiring 101
Steve Bartel (co-founder & CEO of Gem) put together a comprehensive series that walks through the entire hiring process from a founder's perspective - from treating recruiting as sales to closing candidates.
- Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide
- Recruiting is sales
- Finding & reaching out to great candidates
- The initial sell conversation
- Nurturing passive talent from your network
- How to interview
- Selling & closing
Other Resources
If you want to hire a PR agency to boost your employer brand:
- When does it make sense to hire a PR agency? — Seedcamp
Bookmark the Full Collection
All 33 resources are available in this Airtable - filterable by topic, source, and category. We'll keep adding to it as we find more.
If you're hiring right now and want hands-on help, Clera matches top talent with VC-backed startups across 700+ roles. We handle the sourcing so you can focus on building.
