Why does hiring eccentrics work?

When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a reliable team is crucial to an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabel Johansen sits down with Isaiah Granit, CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that has grown from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has swelled to 75 people, and Granit has tactical advice on how the company can find hidden talent in unexpected places.

With a founding team fresh out of college, Bland’s first employees were chosen based on their passion, not their lineage.

“We were looking for a very long time for our founding engineer. The person we ended up hiring, his work experience was a few months at an insurance company in Iowa. Before that, he was a manager at Taco Bell, and before that on the factory floor,” Granit told Build Mode, adding that the team found him through his GitHub account.

“The thing that caught my attention wasn’t his technique,” ​​Granet said. “We asked him, ‘What do you do for fun?’ and I never saw such a big smile on his face. ‘I love sending code,’ he said.”

After this appointment, Bland began to prioritize people obsessed with their passion, who were as young and rowdy as the company. From philosophy majors to beekeepers, Bland’s team is built on people outside the typical tech ecosystem.

“There are people who have worthless things on their resume, but they’re incredibly cool,” Granet said. “What this shows is this level of obsession, because it can be put on anything.”

As the company has grown in the past year, the leadership team has had to learn not only how to hire, but also how to keep the team motivated and happy. In the episode, Granit goes into detail about how Bland developed a fair pay structure and made sure all early employees understood their rights.

There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he said. Agile talent can be inexperienced, so the company often has to adapt to employees who may need time to develop into a role.

Bland predicts that if a company will invest in an employee, the employee will also invest in the company and work to improve. “If you don’t achieve results, we expect you to be in the office six days a week, 12 hours a day,” Granite said.

This recruitment method may also be difficult to scale, especially with Bland’s growth rate. Granit said that the co-founders collaborate greatly with the team to ensure they perform at the high level required.

A founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique recruiting methods and rapid growth indicate the benefit of finding the secret sauce to talent acquisition. “I think, honestly, for the most part, early-stage startup founders have to stick with their gut and everyone has to find their own style of hiring that works,” Granet said.

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Isabel Johansson is our host. Build mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development is led by Morgan Little. And special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.