Hiring A Cto For Your Startup? Here Is How To Do It!

The most important tips on how to find a CTO for a startup. How to find the best Chief Technology Officer for product development and growth. HNR Tech offers such managed IT services as dedicated DevOps and QA teams and offshore IT support. Hire developers who will work with you on-site or offshore but will be officially employed by our company.

We take care of each other and foster a culture of inclusion and belonging. So it’s the midst of the dot-com boom (later to be known as the “dot-com bubble”). I’ve been in a CTO role at a couple early stage companies that turned out to really be a team lead/developer role. I’m meeting lots of startup founders who have some funding and really “need to find a CTO.” So, in 1997, I decided to shift gears and agreed to be a fractional CTO for 3 startup founders.

Where to hire a CTO

Toptal’s developers and architects have been both very professional and easy to work with. The solution they produced was fairly priced and top quality, reducing our time to launch. Ken is a highly skilled mobile app developer and software engineer with over twenty years of experience.

How To Hire A Remote Cto For Your Startup

It automatically means the highest level of hard and soft skills, ability to be a strong leader and performer. The CTO impacts the business growth as all the C-level managers in a startup. Book free personal consultation call about IT relocation, hiring developers or software development team in India. When the startup gets to be a large enterprise, there will very like be several internal employee subcultures.

They are happy with the offshore team’s results but can’t read code themselves. They thought they needed a CTO, but we found a technical advisor instead. The technical advisor reviews the offshore tech team’s code weekly and gives a high-level code assessment to the founders. So far, all is going well, and the technical advisor is giving the cofounder confidence that their offshore team is writing high-quality code. Hiring a fractional CTO comes with its own set of challenges.

Focus on your project and enjoy support from your dedicated account executive and expert talent matcher. We make sure that each engagement between you and your CTO begins with a trial period of up to two weeks. This means that you have time to confirm the engagement will be successful. If you’re completely satisfied with the results, we’ll bill you for the time and continue the engagement for as long as you’d like. If you’re not completely satisfied, you won’t be billed. From there, we can either part ways, or we can provide you with another expert who may be a better fit and with whom we will begin a second, no-risk trial.

It may cause disruption in work, big delays, or falling apart in the worst cases. Even if you make them work for your purpose, a person is likely to burn out and leave the project anyway. As we have already mentioned, CTOs work a lot with the teams, owners, and investors. It makes sense to search for someone who is both pleasant to work with and can organize teams and communication in the best possible way. Since it is the person who needs to always keep their knowledge fresh, it also makes sense to look for someone ready to learn.

Take part in HR processes and collaborate with the HR department wherever tech resources are concerned. Ensuring the company is equipped with the appropriate technological resources for both short and long-term purposes. Search different platforms and many platforms when looking for a CTO. Don’t think about saving time and just getting done with the responsibility as the position of a CTO is very important. Therefore, exploring different platforms searching for your perfect candidate is a wise decision. Someone with the ability and desire to quickly grow into a leader to address future needs.

We have a couple of initial conversations to assess the situation together. A good indicator of whether a CTO likes to keep their skills polished is looking at the additional certifications that they may have acquired throughout their professional careers. These certifications could be in the field of development, cybersecurity, cloud computing, database administration, and/or any other related fields.

Why Source A Fractional Cto?

Validating candidates is a complicated process, especially if you can’t validate them yourself. It happens when startup founders have no technical background and can’t check how reasonable a candidate’s words are from a technical standpoint. Main responsibilities of a chief technical officer in a tech startup Provide a technical solution to validate your business idea. Brainstorm potential technical solutions to implement your software product.

Make sure you extract knowledge from these mistakes and grow together with your CTO. Do not play the blaming game “The service is down – it’s your fault” – it’s not helpful, accept the responsibility together and move forward. So we’re looking for someone senior with enough experience to help you build the product from A to Z and lead the team in the future.

  • Your business benefits from this, and by teaming up with a fractional CTO, you’re positioning your organization to adapt to emerging technologies.
  • CTOs are unicorns who know tech as well as they do entrepreneurship.
  • You could give them an opportunity instead of going through the hassle of hiring someone new.
  • They should be able to communicate technical concepts clearly, and be closely aligned with the company vision.
  • We needed an experienced ASP.NET MVC architect to guide the development of our start-up app, and Toptal had three great candidates for us in less than a week.

Below are a few glimpses into the hyper-connected world we will help create. We invite you to explore the potential and power of limitless connectivity and what it means for our future world. Are you ready to apply for a new Chief Technology Officer role? Click on an employer to view their profile and find info on job openings near you, reported salaries, benefits, and more. Top companies are rated based on anonymous employee reviews and are displayed with the total number of employees who have reviewed this company, the average salary, and the number of job openings. This is exactly the kind of thing that we were hoping at TechEmpower when we came up with the benchmarks.

Challenges Of Finding A Cto

And a different study by Growmotely revealed that 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full-time. Ask new hires for feedback on the hiring process; they can help you improve certain steps and give you a more objective perspective. Develop a business plan estimating skill sets needed, costs involved, timeline and deliverables. https://globalcloudteam.com/ “The best ones know that a lot of the people they talk with are not technologists, so they need to be able to escape that world of technology and present a clear model to everyone else,” he says. Berray suggests bringing in the applicant again for a first-round of interviews with the CEO and possibly the chair of the board.

Our mission is to make your businesses smart and cost-effective. Unlike some of the other C’s in the C-suite, the CTO’s job spans from strategy to tactics. The CTO takes company goals and then maps out the practical steps and methodologies along the path leading to those goals. From finance and operations to development and user experience, the CTO has to find or create the optimal tools so that information workers can do their jobs. This situation sometimes occurs because early in the life of a startup, the bulk of the work is development – so it’s natural to hire or outsource for development.

I know many amazing senior-level web developers who specifically do not want the CTO role, because they want to be coding most of the time. Finding a technical advisor will likely be easier than finding a CTO, because you aren’t asking someone to quit their job to come work for you. Rather, you are asking them to keep their job and take on an advisory role that takes a few hours per week. Some startups can go a long time without a CTO, while others need one early on.

While a CTO’s salary is expensive, the expertise and experience they provide can be invaluable to your company. Additionally, as a strong leader, a CTO should be visionary and innovative. He or she should not be afraid to test new things and explore a variety of options. Continue to read to learn more about hiring a CTO, and how one can take your company to the next level. But the IT industry is one of the hardest as the talent shortage keeps increasing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that by 2026, the shortage of IT engineers in the US would exceed 1.2M.

Where to hire a CTO

Work with your new CTO for a trial period , ensuring they’re the right fit before starting the engagement. We needed some short-term work in Scala, and Toptal found us a great developer within 24 hours. This simply would not have been possible via any other platform.

The Seven Steps To Hiring Your Startup Cto

They can vet CTO candidates, do interviews, and review job descriptions. At my last two startups, I was the first engineering hire, and I know dozens of others technical co-founders and CTOs in Chicago alone. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as putting together a list of interview questions and posting a job listing. After having conversations with several of my CTO friends, I put this list of tips together for non-technical founders looking to attract a technical co-founder or CTO. As with all hiring, do not be hasty in bringing on a technical leader. Seek counsel and talk to people who have been there before.

Find a new Chief Technology Officer job at a company hiring near you. Explore our list of top-rated companies, and find an employer hiring Chief Technology Officer remote roles and local positions near you. We go for hourly model when only the general idea and project requirements are available.

Where to hire a CTO

Show numbers and ready plans rather than one big idea with unclear boundaries. Tell them about exciting obstacles they will have to overcome, what they can learn and what problems they have to deal with. It is even better if you are working with the technologies of the future. CTOs are more likely to put their ideas to life in well-established companies with a steady income. Therefore, it is not enough to just find a good CTO, you have to fight for them .

Is Vice President Of Engineering Higher Than A Cto?

Since the CTO is often responsibly for developing new ideas and innovations, hiring a creative chief technology officer can be a huge asset to your executive team. In addition, a CTO with a creative mind will have an easier time determining how new technology can benefit your organization. Keep in mind that your CTO will be on top of the tech department and make critical decisions that will directly impact your company. You can’t hire anyone that says they have the experience and skills. While certifications and degrees don’t always translate into experience, it’s valuable to look for someone who is constantly upgrading their knowledge. More than that, specifically for this role, look for someone with a proven track of helping other startups grow.

Targeting Your Job Search

Often you are bringing on relatively more junior resources. The plane needs to keep flying and we need to change a wing. Quite often the current resources are a great part of the longer-term picture, but they cto duties lack some of the skills now required of them. Of course, to be more accurate, the work I did was staggered out. The biggest chunk of work as a fractional CTO is at the start, and then it settles down.

Michael is a top architect, engineer, developer, and entrepreneur with a proven ability to develop efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant server solutions for complex problems. He has extensive experience and skills with all levels of software and architecture. If you have no opportunity to hire a CTO, you should consider alternative ways like fulfilling both roles, outsourcing, or inviting an experienced senior to the role in the early stages. You will still have to figure out how to work with them remotely and deal with cultural barriers and other rules of remote development, but it is the best possible option for startups.

Do I Need A Cto?

Since you are a start-up, you can not offer benefits and salaries so you have to find other ways to win them over. Lastly, they are leaders who can put together a team that will be dedicated and passionate. If you’re located in different time zones, you’ll need to set a schedule for calls. Below you can find the table with CTO’s responsibilities depending on the persona type.

It’s common to distinguish two types of CTO — operational lead and technical lead. Founded in 2011, we’ve been providing full-cycle mobile and web development services to clients from various industries. You will likely find that some things aren’t currently specifically “tested” in any interview activity. This tells you that you must create an interview activity to evaluate this skill. End every meeting asking if there are other engineers you could talk to who might know about your startup’s problem space. You will have to strip that title and hire someone more appropriate for the evolving duties when the time comes.

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