Preparing the First Hire
“You want us to hire? Start hiring now?”
Kim Siwon made a face he had never once shown, even while grinding through his insane schedule.
The club members who saw it all looked momentarily startled.
“W-What’s wrong? Is it because you think it’s a waste of money?”
“We can all take a little less of our share!”
“Is the budget still not enough?”
Kim Siwon shook his head slowly.
That only left everyone looking even more confused.
They had no idea why he was making that expression, or why he kept sighing like that.
“No, no. For now, let’s hire one person for business support.”
With that calm remark, his mouth barely lifting at the corners, everyone exchanged dazed looks.
The timing felt right for celebration, but concern was filling Kim Siwon’s eyes.
“Uh, but can you tell us why you look so miserable?” Seo Jeongwon couldn’t hold back his curiosity and tossed the question at him.
At that, everyone looked at Kim Siwon with bright, inquisitive faces.
Kim Siwon answered weakly, but firmly.
“Because hiring is going to be brutal.”
> Can you help me judge people when we interview them?
> An AI is good at handling the data it’s given. It’s not a mind reader.
> Could you at least play lie detector for me?
> What? I can’t even measure heart rate.
> AI interviews existed back then!
> Not in an era where they decided everything from start to finish.
I asked Badugi as if grasping at straws.
But Badugi was absolutely firm.
It could help analyze and apply market and target data, but reading an individual’s potential was another matter. That was Badugi’s opinion.
If the AI would screen someone out, then I would probably screen them out too.
“Ha. This is hard.”
“Can’t you just think of it as hiring part-timers? Why are you making such a big deal out of it?”
“There are plenty of bosses in the world suffering because of part-timers.”
Once again, no one was really sympathizing with my worries.
They were all just happy that their own workload was about to get lighter.
They didn’t seem to have considered that it might actually get heavier instead.
“If you’re really worried about handing out salaries, you could just give them founder stock options and bring in more people that way.”
“And if that goes wrong, we end up in court. Definitely not.”
“Everything’s a no with you guys, huh? And yet you’re getting investment talks from all over the place.”
“I’m saying this isn’t about money right now.”
Hiring was a harder stage than people thought.
For large companies, and for a startup like ours, too.
It was a stage where you had to judge someone you barely knew through one or two interviews and accept that you might spend a long time working with that person.
Hire the wrong person, and firing them would be difficult. Hire a non-regular employee, and it was hard to find the talent you actually wanted.
And bringing in another founding member carried too much risk.
“Don’t you know anyone decent around you?”
“Not really. I don’t have many friends.”
“Then we really do have to post a proper hiring notice.”
“Yeah. We’re going to the Startup Competition soon, and we’ll be applying for government support programs too. We definitely need help.”
Having to go through the hiring process again, something I knew I’d eventually have to face anyway, filled me with unease.
All the hardships from my previous life came back one by one, making my thoughts even more unsettled.
No-shows on interview day were basic stuff. One person even quit and erased an entire internal folder on the way out.
There had even been someone caught trying to embezzle company funds.
“Think positively for once! So, we’re posting the hiring notice?”
“Yeah. Got it.”
While I was still hesitating, Brother Seonghun had already finished drafting the hiring notice and was ready to post it.
Badugi was also urging me to get it up as quickly as possible.
That sounded less like encouragement and more like a curse.
“We’ve already been on a few broadcasts, so people are probably going to contact us a lot, right?”
“What do we use to filter them if too many people apply?”
“Wouldn’t someone with experience preparing paperwork for government support programs be best?”
“Ugh, I’m so nervous I don’t think I can be an interviewer.”
There was nothing more I could say to the members who were only thinking positively.
Those fantasies would collapse soon enough anyway, so there was no need for me to pour cold water on them.
“Post the notice on the university job center pages and all the student extracurricular activity boards, too.”
“Oh. Then won’t we spend way too much time reviewing applications?”
“It’ll be fine. For now, let’s all start making handover files.”
Everyone kept teasing me for my dead-serious reaction.
They said I was being too negative.
But it didn’t even take a full day for their lifted moods to come crashing down.
“Siwon.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you checked our hiring inbox?”
“Yeah. I did.”
Because for three whole days, not a single proper application had come in.
“We’ve already gotten two emails without even an attached resume.”
“The resumes that were attached are weird, too. It looks like they were scraped off some hiring website.”
“We even got calls from high school students saying they saw us on TV. They asked if they could work part-time.”
The number of applicants itself wasn’t tiny.
For a startup with fewer than ten people, getting over ten applications in just three days was actually decent.
Even so, there was no one worth hiring.
Not just no one worth hiring, but not a single person worth even considering for an interview.
“How does that make sense? Not even one person we could interview?”
“It’s tough. Being college students is probably working against us, too.”
“Do they think they can look down on us because we’re students?”
“Not so much look down on us as feel a psychological barrier about joining a company where the people in charge are younger than them.”
“Then what do we do?”
Unlike a few days ago, everyone wore grim faces.
“What else? We keep trying.”
I calmly sent the hiring plan I’d prepared into the group chat.
When the others saw it, they stared at me with puzzled expressions.
“What is this? Are we posting the hiring notice again?”
“No. We’re going to make people want to join our company.”
One by one, the others opened the attachment with doubtful looks on their faces.
Then, in turn, they looked up at me, visibly flustered.
“Do we really have to go this far?”
I smiled, but my answer was very firm.
“If we have to, then yes.”
Our hiring plan, which left everyone stunned, was simple.
We would make content about the TA Medical members.
“Not content about TA Medical itself, but content about us?”
“Right. Content that shows what kind of people we are, how we work, and what vision we have.”
“And we’d put that on the hiring site, plus set up official social media for the company culture?”
“Yeah.”
“Do we really have to go that far?”
At Ha Juwon’s words, I burst out laughing.
Not because I was hurt.
Because when I heard Badugi pitch the idea, that was exactly my reaction, too.
> ??? Do we really have to go that far?
> If we have to, then yes.
> Why?
> Why else? Because we need to create some kind of motive for people who currently have no reason to join TA.
After hearing that, I think my pride had taken a little hit.
I knew hiring would be hard, but did we really have to do this much?
It meant that, from the employer’s side, we had to prepare as hard as any ordinary job seeker.
But Badugi, regardless of my expression, explained our situation with ruthless objectivity.
> It’s not even been a month since you founded the company. You have no sales. You did get investment, but it’s basically angel level, and your CEO looks young. Who would want to come work for a company like that?
I couldn’t answer that speech bubble.
To me, our company and everyone in it were precious and remarkable, but from a third party’s perspective, that was probably exactly how we looked.
Even so, our company had placed in a fairly major capstone competition, and each member’s individual ability was genuinely outstanding.
Professor Shin Dongjin was also actively supporting us as an investor.
> Relax. We’re just turning the thoughts in your head into content.
As I sat there with a serious, disappointed look on my face, Badugi immediately changed the speech bubble.
Right. This was for the sake of our company.
If we wanted to appeal to job seekers, we really did need to show off our strengths as much as possible.
> Marketing and branding aren’t just for selling products. You know that, right?
[I just learned that. Yeah.]
> Luckily, we’ve already made a few broadcast appearances, and some decent PR articles have been circulating, so the concept won’t be hard to establish.
[Got it. Let’s do it.]
So Badugi and I spent a long time discussing hiring content.
What exact concept to use, how we wanted to be perceived publicly, what we needed to reinforce that image, and so on.
In the end, the direction we settled on was simple.
Free-spirited geniuses.
Of course, the moment everyone heard that concept, they all practically jumped in place.
Not because they hated it, but because it felt awkward.
“Free-spirited geniuses?! That wording is seriously cringey.”
“It’s just a concept we need to recognize among ourselves.”
“We don’t actually have to say it out loud, right?”
“Aaaah, fine, genius Siwon.”
Cringey or not, there was no helping it.
A startup of elite people, each a genius in their own field, doing their jobs well and shouldering responsibility within freedom.
We had to carry the message that said, “Wouldn’t it be great to work alongside people like this?” while also shouting to the hiring market, “These dependable experts are the ones building our product!”
“But will people really be curious about each of us individually?”
“Even if they don’t remember every person in deep detail, we can still leave them with the impression of ‘Oh, so that’s what kind of people they are.’”
“Then we might as well just go with a super-elite genius image. Geniuses who work their asses off.”
“You probably wouldn’t want to apply to a place like that.”
Fortunately, every member of our team really was outstanding.
I’d only attracted more attention because my background was unusual. In reality, none of us was someone you could ignore anywhere else.
Even Brother Seonghun, as a transfer student, was an engineering nerd who had swept the top prizes in national corporate contests.
“We’re outsourcing the photos and video, right? I know a freelancer who works in video.”
“Yeah. Do you know anyone for card news production or hiring notice design?”
“I’ll handle that. Let’s make a logo, too. Just writing the TA letters in white all the time is boring.”
“Good. Let’s do everything.”
I asked everyone in the club to write down ten of their own strengths and things they were proud of.
I wanted to build the content around that material.
And sure enough, interesting things came pouring out.
“I have 100,000 followers on my design-related social media account. Should I put that in? Feels kind of borderline.”
“Of course you should. Mine is more borderline. I’ve just been living my life solving online coding quizzes.”
“What are you talking about? You placed in world-level quiz competitions. That’s absolutely something to brag about. I only placed in domestic contests.”
“Don’t be modest. You swept all the major domestic corporate competitions like Saseong and LJ when you were twenty.”
Thankfully, all the bragging everyone called awkward turned out not to be awkward at all.