Founder Hiring

A philosophy for hiring your first 100 people

Great companies are built by people who believe in what they’re building.

Founder Hiring is about finding the people who hear the dream and choose it. We call them Co-Builders. This is where the ideas, the research, and the founders who practice it come together: a notebook, a few nights a year in Chicago, and a phone that gets answered.

Read the Field Notes Come to a Founder Night

You don’t have to be hiring to belong here.

Vol. 1 Founder
Hiring
Field
Notes Find Your Circle

The foundation

Start with the Field Notes.

Twenty-five years and 38 founding teams taught us it’s not about finding A-players. It’s about finding your players: the ones with the mission-to-mindset match. The Field Notes are what we learned, written down with room for you to write back.

Read them straight through, or jump to the chapter you need this week. There’s a printed edition, too. Made in Chicago. Ask for one at a Founder Night.

Read the Field Notes
Start here Hiring Is a Two-Way Street Where the Wheel of Fit came from, and why the team member is choosing you too. Read the article Start here Founders: Unlock Your Team’s Potential by Understanding and Leaning into Self-Efficacy The research behind “startupyness.” It has a name, and you can build for it. Read on LinkedIn

Founder Nights

Founders, in real life.

Founder Hiring isn’t meant to live only on a website. Founder Nights are small, in-person gatherings where founders say what it’s really like to build something. In Chicago, in a bar, with the sound on.

Heat Check

Three to five founders. Increasingly hot wings. Real conversation at The Bird’s Nest in Lincoln Park. Nobody is selling anything, including us.

mild to regret
  • No panels.
  • No pitches.
  • No manufactured networking.
  • No cost.
Past nights, founder stories, and new formats land here as they happen.

The thinking

Ideas that shape how we build.

Not a blog feed. Collections, curated, in the order a founder needs them.

Finding Your Co-Builders

Building Teams That Thrive

A third collection, The Human Side of Building, opens when it has three pieces.

The research

Self-efficacy, a person’s belief that they can set a goal and reach it, is the foundation of what founders call “startupyness.”

For more than ten years, psychology students from the University of Illinois Chicago have sat in our office and studied what actually happens when a small company hires. Self-efficacy. Belonging. Motivation. Fit. The human factors that decide whether the first 100 people stay and build, or cycle through. Six papers from Psych 385 so far. Findings first; the papers themselves when the students and UIC say so.

What we study
Self-efficacyBelongingMotivationFitIntrapreneurshipProductive conflict
Where it comes from
UIC Psych 385More than ten years38 founding teams

Margin note for Mike: the one-sentence headline finding with a number comes from Ameer’s paper. This sentence holds the spot until it’s pulled.

The practice

Put Founder Hiring to work.

The Field Notes are the why. These are the how: things a founder can run inside the company this week.

Playbook Structuring the Interview Process Three to five hiring pillars, a scorecard, and a process you tell the candidate and then keep. Job descriptions are for HR. Open the playbook Playbook Sales Hiring From founder-led sales to a revenue engine. The five priorities, and the two hires to avoid. Open the playbook

The community

You don’t have to be hiring to belong.

Founder Hiring is for people who care deeply about what they’re building and the people building alongside them. Three real ways in. All of them end with a person.

Join the list

New Field Notes, new articles, Founder Night invites. Plain text, from Mike. Short and occasional.

Request a seat at a Founder Night

A short form, read personally. Tell us what you’re building. We’ll tell you when the next wings are.

Reach out to Mike

A real inbox, not a contact form. He reads it himself. If you’d rather talk, the number works too.

mike@redcircleinc.com 312-880-7330
“I don’t want to build relationships so I can sell recruiting. I want to build relationships with founders because I believe in what they’re building. And when recruiting is how I can help, that’s what I do.”
Mike Melendrez, who started Founder Hiring

Founder Hiring is a philosophy. These are the people who practice it.

Red Circle

Executive search for founder-led companies, based in Chicago since 2001. When a founder needs help finding Co-Builders, Red Circle puts the philosophy to work.

redcircleinc.com

Where it came from

It started in a notebook.

In 2001 I was on a train from London to Scotland with a notebook open on the table, trying to write down why recruiting felt wrong. Back then you marked the job you wanted with a red circle. That circle was a decision. It didn’t say “the most listings.” It said: this one.

I named the company after that mark. Twenty-five years and 38 founding teams later, it still means the same thing.

The founders who built the companies that lasted didn’t hire the best resumes. They found people who believed the problem was worth solving, who asked the questions founders ask, who got energized by the stage instead of overwhelmed by it. I started calling them Co-Builders because no other word fit.

I grew up on the East Side of Chicago. I sold encyclopedias door to door in rural Illinois and Iowa before I ever placed anyone. What I learned on those porches is the whole philosophy: everyone’s needs are different, and you don’t find out what they are from a form. You find out by sitting down and talking.

Founder Hiring is everything we learned about finding Co-Builders, written down so you don’t need us to use it. Take notes. Make it yours. Find your circle.

Mike Melendrez · Chicago