Over a year ago, I hired my first full-time employee and we tag-teamed most of the projects together. However, now the volume of work was quickly becoming overwhelming and we needed support with documentation and SOPs to make our processes more scalable.
So over the course of four months, I brought on more teammates and built out a team of 10 contractors. Most joined part-time to “feel it out” and some transitioned to full-time. I hired in an unconventional way. I knew that there were talented people in the Notion community who would love to do what I do, so I connected with them through Slack, Fiverr, and Twitter.
Even though they were and still are contractors, I made emphasis on building the team and cultivating belonging and alignment toward a shared mission. It was especially difficult to do in a remote-first setting but I think for the most part we succeeded.
One of the unobvious but important parts was a consistent ritual of icebreakers. We attached that to our weekly team meeting. Before the meat of the meeting kicked off, we’d spent 10 minutes going around the Zoom room and sharing personal fun facts. We still do that. Here’s our current squad 👇
