Scaling Teams by David Loftesness Alexander Grosse

Author:David Loftesness, Alexander Grosse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Published: 2016-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Acqui-Hire Anti-Patterns

The most important concerns in an acqui-hire are actually the same as when hiring the normal way. You have to ask: Are the potential employees motivated to work in your company? And are they a good fit in terms of talents, skills, culture, and values?

When an acquisition like this fails, it’s often because these basic assumptions were not carefully considered. Leaders at the acquiring a company may have been too focused on closing a deal, or investors in the acquired company were overly eager to facilitate a “face-saving” exit.2

Here we list a few anti-patterns we have seen so far:

Interviewing only the founders

By not putting all the acquired employees through your standard interview process (assuming you acquire the company for more than just one or two specific people), you risk bringing on employees that don’t match your team’s talent standards. This will lead to costly performance and morale issues down the line, undermining the value of the acquisition.

Assuming interest

A comprehensive interview process can also confirm that the acquired team (beyond the founders) actually wants to work within your company, and make sure that the values and cultures of the two teams are compatible. When a large company acquires a much smaller one there are often many cultural differences, but if the teams share the same values you have a much higher chance that the acquired team can adjust to the new culture. For a deeper discussion of values and culture, see [Link to Come].

Assuming founder retention

It’s very common for the founders of an acquired company to leave as soon as they reasonably can. Entrepreneurs often don’t like being employees, and are eager to start working on their next venture. So if the founders are a key reason for making the acquisition, make sure you consider the best way to retain them, whether through vesting cliffs, retention bonuses, or a motivating work assignment.

Bait and switch

You or someone in corporate development paint an unrealistic picture of life at the new company (“We will absolutely use your technology!”), leading to a morale hit after on-boarding. This happens when an acquisition is presented as a products-and-services acquisition, but is in reality an acqui-hire. Don’t oversell the new situation.

Dispersing the acquired team without announcement

The acquired team, which is accustomed to working together and expects to remain that way, instead gets distributed without preparation into many existing teams of the acquiring company. This means new jobs for everyone—potentially jobs they did not interview for. This creates a high likelihood of turnover.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.