Beyond the CV: The qualities to look for when growing your unicorn

Building a high-performing startup team involves much more than simply finding candidates who look good on paper.

Fast-growing businesses need adaptable staff members with an entrepreneurial spirit. But identifying the person with the right qualities and values, as well as the right skills, is a tough ask for any first-time founder.

When Unicorn Founder Leigh Jasper was making the first big hires in his construction technology business, Aconex, he was always looking for a few key attributes beyond the skills listed in the job description.

When he talked to potential candidates, he was on the lookout for their intelligence and problem-solving skills, their humility and their curiosity.

Hiring people with these qualities helped propel Aconex, which was founded in 2000, onto the Australian Stock Exchange and into global markets.

By 2018, the business had attracted the attention of cloud giant Oracle, which acquired Aconex for $1.6 billion in Australia’s largest ever M&A transaction at the time.

Hiring beyond your comfort zone

Asking candidates to show evidence of their problem-solving skills also made it easier for Jasper and his co-founder, Rob Phillpot, to make decisions when they were hiring for roles that lay outside of their own expertise.

Finding staff who were curious and engaged in the company’s journey was more important to the team than bringing on staff who had specific experience in the construction technology industry.

“I think if you’re a smart person you’ll learn the industry. I think I’d much rather get a smart entrepreneurial person to join the business, and they’ll work it out,” he says.

Searching for candidates who were humble enough to admit past mistakes and open to learning new things was also critical in a business that was growing as fast as Aconex.

“Somebody who is curious and wants to learn, they tend to be the people who grow quickly.”

Taking your time 

Things might move fast in the world of scale-ups, but you can’t rush the hiring process.

Jasper says the costs of getting the wrong person into a role can have flow-on effects right across your business, especially if they’re a bad cultural fit.

“It can really set you back… Often it’s not just that someone is doing their job incorrectly, but they will distract everyone else as well” he says.

Hiring someone without the right skills can slow down product rollouts and ultimately kill the effectiveness of their segment of the business, Jasper reflects.

But there are also cases where senior staff can be technically proficient yet fail to gel with the rest of the team. This can often have bigger impacts on the focus and morale of the overall business, slowing down teams who are otherwise successful.

When this happens, it can detract from the productivity of even your best workers, Jasper says.

“We have made hiring mistakes in the past where we hired people who may have been great performers, but they were not very collegiate – they didn’t play for the team.”

“When people are a bad fit culturally, it creates friction within the business. It is important to move them on quickly.”

Almost every founder will make mistakes on their hiring journey, but one way to minimise the risks is to have time on your side when making decisions.

Planning recruitment early and spending time getting to know candidates in different settings can stop you from compromising, Jasper says.

“The risk is that you want to hire someone, but you leave it too long and you don’t get started early enough. Then you scramble and you’re late on hiring, so you rush it and make a bad decision.”

When founders take their time with hiring, they also have a better chance of working out whether someone will be a good fit for the business, beyond the skills listed on their CV.

Jasper says he prefers to meet prospective candidates a number of times and spend time getting to know what drives them.

“As much as possible, I just want to see what makes that person tick – are they ambitious, but humble? Are they a good problem solver? Are they curious?” he says.

Taking this approach can help you distinguish who has both the skills to add to your business and is ready to join a fast-growing scale-up culture.

Scale the startup summit

Because good hiring takes time, founders who need to grow their teams in 2025 should be working on their recruitment blueprints now.

“If I was wanting to hire someone for mid-year, I would be thinking about it now, tapping your networks and having a few conversations” Jasper says.

“Be really purposeful about your hiring and get in front of it.”

Victorian founders will soon have a chance to build out their executive hiring strategies alongside recruitment experts as part of LaunchVic’s Basecamp program.

This executive education program will give fast-growing startups access to mentorship and advice from industry experts to help them build the high-performing teams they need to tackle expansion.

BASECAMP