As we close out the year, hiring often takes a back seat for many companies. With holiday travel and festivities right around the corner, recruiting can slow as early as the week before Thanksgiving.
Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible to hire in the new year - you can do whatever you want! That being said, if you choose to resume hiring in January, here are some potential risks to be aware of:
New headcount is unleashed. Many organizations finished headcount planning year-end. Come January, hiring managers turn the hiring faucet on which can make it increasingly difficult to attract and engage top talent in what’s already a competitive landscape.
Closing can be challenging. Given the number of open positions in Q1, candidates will have several attractive opportunities to consider at one time which can push out hiring timelines further. Candidates may be on varying timelines and often aim to have multiple opportunities to evaluate before making a decision. This can lead them to prioritize completing final-round interviews with other companies before committing, even if your process concludes first.
Counteroffers, discretionary bonuses, and promotions are common. These offerings are always on the table year-round, to be fair, but we tend to see an uptick in these categories during this particular time of year. Meaty business initiatives and engineering milestones are being rolled out; current employers - already strapped for time, budget, and resources - are incentivized to retain current employees and these band-aid solutions are often leveraged as a placeholder to avoid solving the greater, underlying issue(s) at hand.
So, my advice is this: be mindful of these associated risks when deciding whether to move full-steam ahead with hiring in the upcoming weeks. Furthermore, here are three simple, yet impactful strategies to deploy in order to secure the talent you need in a short amount of time
1. Consistency is Key: Streamline Your Process
A streamlined interview process is essential for moving candidates swiftly through the pipeline. For startups, long, convoluted processes can cause candidates to drop off, especially when other companies may move faster. Proactively working with your interviewer panel to define each interview stage ensures each session serves a purpose all while keeping your process focused, consistent, and intentional. And perhaps just as importantly, it helps ensure that you are in a strong position to hire the candidates of your choice.
More interview sessions don’t always equal better insights. In fact, redundancy often leads to inefficiencies. In my experience, this commonly happens when interviewers don’t coordinate their focus areas ahead of time or fail to identify what core competencies need to be evaluated and assessed. Streamlining the interview process to ensure that each session adds unique value can help avoid this. Here’s an example structure to keep things fluid and efficient:
- Recruiter Screen
- Hiring Manager Interview
- Virtual Onsite
- Technical Coding
- Systems Design + Architecture
- Team Fit / Culture / Company Values
This focused approach saves time and keeps candidates engaged, which is especially important in a talent pool as competitive as web3. Remember, interviewing is a two-way street, and a streamlined process that also prioritizes candidate experience can make or break an individual’s decision to choose your company.
2. Reevaluate “Perfect” and Embrace High Potential
Holding out for the “perfect” candidate often means passing over strong, qualified talent. Consider what skills can be taught on the job versus what is absolutely essential from day one. In today’s market, I often see companies focus way too much on candidates with directly relevant experience, especially in technical roles. This is a common misconception that can lead to missed opportunities. If your expectations are too niche, you may struggle to find candidates who fit your needs, much less have room for growth.
During my time at Coinbase, I worked closely with managers and directors coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and experience — early-mid stage startups, FAANG, proprietary trading, etc — who were aligned in not making it a hard requirement for candidates to have prior crypto or trading experience for technical roles (Staff, Senior Staff, Principal + Software Engineering roles). Instead, we focused on candidates’ adaptability, problem-solving skills, and growth potential. Candidates with experience at reputable companies, large-scale technical expertise, and strong performance throughout the interview process were frequently just as well-equipped to succeed as those with specialized, industry-specific experience.
Consider these two options:
- Option A: Wait for the “perfect” candidate with exact prior experience. This may require more time, increasing budget, additional recruiting agency fees, and roll-out-the-red-carpet efforts to close the hire. (I’ve first-hand experienced situations where Option A was chosen. It may be difficult to capture or quantify throughout the interview process but hiring the textbook “perfect” candidate and seeing them actually deliver in practice day one can be disarming. Often times, hiring the celebrity candidate or most senior engineer resulted in their unwavering and strongly-held opinions around the direction of a certain project. This person’s inability to compromise creates tension amongst leadership teams and the trickle down effect will become a cancer spreading quickly throughout your company deteriorating its culture you’ve worked so hard to build and protect.)
- Option B: Hire a promising candidate who meets most of the requirements and has demonstrated the ability to adapt. Behavioral interview questions and technical references can reveal how they’ve navigated complex challenges and worked with different stakeholders. This approach often promotes candidates who bring fresh perspectives and thrive in scrappy or ambiguous environments—many hires we made at Coinbase who lacked prior crypto/trading experience went on to lead their own teams or started their own successful companies in the industry, contributing back to the ecosystem.
3. Be Prepared to Move Quickly with Offers
Discussing compensation up-front - my preference being as early as in the first conversation - is critical. Why?
To avoid any misalignment that could derail a promising hire at the last minute. In my experience, both sides benefit from setting expectations early, saving time, and helping avoid disappointment after lengthy interview rounds.
As year-end approaches, candidates may be weighing upcoming promotions, bonuses, or unvested equity at their current roles, so a competitive offer with clarity around salary, equity, and benefits is vital. Be prepared for a counteroffer from the candidate’s current employer and put forth a package that reflects the long-term opportunity your company offers.
It's worth mentioning, compensation expectations may change throughout the interview process. No — the candidate isn’t playing hardball (or maybe they are, more on that later :) but assume good intent and always default to giving them the benefit of the doubt. In my general experience, when candidates reach the final offer stages they tend to become more forthcoming and transparent regarding interview activity, competing offers and/or how they rank your company in comparison.
We're operating in a tight-knit community; we are constantly talking amongst ourselves and no one wants to burn any bridges on the road to accepting a new job offer. Rather than turning to old, inefficient ways of negotiating the best possible compensation package for themselves (ie: going with the 'highest bidder', playing companies against each other, creating fake offers, focusing solely on base salary, delaying accepting an offer, etc) candidates in this job market will likely be more upfront about what, if anything, it will take to accept your company's offer. This means it can take more than what was initially discussed comp-wise to close highly sought after candidates and get them over the finish line.
Finally, keep interviewing until your offer is signed. I’ve made it a practice to keep other strong candidates moving through the process until we had a fully accepted offer, recognizing that candidates are likely considering other opportunities. Candidates appreciate transparency if they know where they stand, and it can even build goodwill and interest.
Hiring as we near the holidays doesn’t have to be daunting. With these strategies, you can close out the year with a motivated team ready to roll. Good luck and don’t take yourself too seriously; stress is palpable and candidates can sense it from a mile away. Be transparent about upcoming work, establish success metrics early on and iterate along the way, and reward in-seat performance.
I’d like to know what parts of the above resonate with your team. If you’re a founder looking for additional recruiting support or raising a round, we’d like to hear from you. Find me on Linkedin or shoot a dm on X @mvn_anagram.