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24 Hiring Tips for Entrepreneurs

3 min read●Updated Oct 2026

Hiring is the lever that decides whether scaling feels like momentum or chaos. These 24 tips come from a riff by Joe Polish, shared by the Genius Network Team, and they're some of the most quotable, practical hiring advice we've come across. We're keeping them in Joe's own words.

The 24 Tips

  1. If you are an ADHD entrepreneur, make sure you have people around you who have a surplus of attention.
  2. Be clear about what you want and what you don't want.
  3. You can't train integrity. They either have it, or they don't.
  4. Hire slow and fire fast.
  5. Birds of a feather flock together. If you know a total badass, ask them who they know like them.
  6. The best people I've ever gotten have been through word of mouth and through referrals.
  7. If you want the best people to hear about you, you have to have something worth talking about.
  8. Do a Kolbe Assessment on yourself first to find your mode of operation (M.O.). Then, use Kolbe for hiring.
  9. If your Kolbe results say you initiate with Quick Start, make sure you have people with high Follow Thru around you who can execute.
  10. You can always train skills, but not necessarily attitude. Attitudinal alignment is crucial.
  11. If you're a marketing company, don't put anyone in an important position if they don't have experience with marketing. And, more importantly, have a deep respect for marketing.
  12. Treat your hiring like marketing. Utilize all the direct response elements and thinking involved with marketing.
  13. Rock stars aren't out there looking for a job; they are already somewhere. The best people don't need a job. Have a compelling offer to be attractive to them.
  14. Create a control piece for hiring people into your company.
  15. Resumes can include references, which are better than nothing. However, they can be mostly lies in print. Have people send you a letter or video instead.
  16. Look for Innovation Managers; not Project Managers.
  17. Surround yourself with awesome people who genuinely care about your clients.
  18. Years ago I interviewed a hiring expert named Barry Shamis. He had a great line he shared with me: "An employee is a behavioral rental agreement." When people hire you and/or your company, you are a behavioral rental agreement too.
  19. My dear friend Dan Sullivan says, "Don't look at employees as a cost; they are an investment." Yes, there can be bad investments, but it is still an investment.
  20. If the person you hire doesn't make you money, save you money and/or reduce your stress, re-evaluate the investment.
  21. Dan Sullivan says, "If you have enough money to solve a problem, you don't have a problem." So if you can cut a check to solve your hiring problem, do it.
  22. Make a 'Not To Do' List. Then, if anything on that list is important enough, hire someone to do it. As Peter Drucker said, "There is nothing so useless as doing that which should not be done at all."
  23. Liberate yourself from doing activities you may be good at, but drives you nuts.
  24. If you are no good at hiring people, find the right person to handle hiring for you.

Full-Time or Fractional?

Hiring well is one decision; knowing whether to hire full-time or fractional is another. Read our guide on when to hire a fractional executive over a full-time employee to decide which fits your stage, or Talk to our Team to book a free 30-minute Scalability Audit and we'll help you figure out the right first hire.

These 24 tips are a Joe Polish riff, brought to you by the Genius Network Team.

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