Prof. Tristan L. Botelho and Melody Chang of Yale School of Management wrote an article for the Academy of Management titled The Perception and Evaluation of Founder Experience By Hiring Firms: A Field Experiment.
« How is founder experience perceived and thus evaluated during the initial stage of the hiring process? »
« We provide causal evidence in our context that former founders are disadvantaged in the initial stage of the hiring process, receiving fewer callbacks than non-founders. »
« Successful founders receive a significantly lower number of callbacks than failed founders. »
« On the one hand, scholars have highlighted several advantages of founder experience that may help former founders in the labor market. For example, resource constraints common in entrepreneurship result in founders developing a wide array of human capital… and entrepreneurs are more open to new experiences and have a higher self-efficacy in innovation relative to non-founders (see Kerr, Kerr, and Xu 2018 for a review of personality traits of entrepreneurs). »
« If recruiters perceive former founders as less likely to fit into and remain committed to wage employment, we should expect candidates with founder experience to be evaluated more negatively than non-founders. »
« If recruiters are more concerned about capability, we expect them to prefer successful founders relative to failed founders. Conversely, if founders are more concerned about fit and commitment, we expect them to prefer failed founders relative to successful founders. »
« While fit concerns were present for all former founders, it was clear that these concerns were stronger for former successful founders. »
« Our main results show that former successful founders received a callback rate of 10.9 percent. »
« Most importantly, founders—and especially former successful founders—should emphasize their ability to fit into and remain committed to the hiring firm. »
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