3 Reasons to Give New-Hire Veto Rights to each Employee

I was speaking with a founder earlier this week and he explained to me that one of his largest problems is that there is only one of him. To get his first few clients on board he essentially needed to sell himself each time and this is obviously not scalable. Now he’s trying to figure out how to automate this process so that he’s not the single point of failure.

This isn’t a new problem. Many founders before him have had to wrestle with this problem and he’s done it in the correct order — manually going through the process to understand the problem before automating.

This is a natural evolution of most startups.

At Makers Academy we’ve taken a similar approach and we’re always on the lookout for ways that we can build a machine that doesn’t bottle-neck decisions with the founders. If we’re able to build a business that doesn’t require us to run — we’ve been successful.

One of the ways we’ve decided to do this is to give every full-time employee veto rights for each new hire. We’re meticulous about our hiring process because as a small and fast-growing startup, our team is our most important asset. The final stage of the interview process is to meet in a social setting with each existing employee and if a single team-member thinks that the candidate isn’t a good fit — we don’t make an offer.

This principle provides us with a variety of benefits:

1. As founders, we are no longer the single point of failure. By including everyone in this decision we can leverage the values, abilities and skills of each team-member.
2. It raises the level of loyalty, responsibility and camaraderie of the team as a whole.
3. Each new employee immediately feels welcome and motivated as they know each individual actively believes in their ability to contribute and wants them there.

We’re aware that this process only scales up to a certain point, but the benefits in the short term far outweigh the cost of changing the process down the road.

Does anyone have experience with new hire veto rights? We’d love to hear your feedback.

Originally published at blog.makersacademy.com on April 8, 2013.