Are you a Startup founder and struggling to hire employees for your enterprise? Or
Do you just have an idea and planning to start up but do not know how to start looking at potential hires? Or Are you struggling to find the best talent available in the market?
If you are facing these issues, here are 5 time-tested tips to get your Startup up and running smoothly with great co-workers.
Personal branding of the founder
Talented employees who are open for opportunities in a Startup do not join the company for a typical career growth. They join the company for exponential and meteoric rise in their careers.
Assuming someone fresh out of a college has joined a Startup and once the company starts getting traction a fresher just coming out of college may become Vice president of Operations in couple of years. We all have seen such examples umpteen number of times. Isn’t it?
Potential Hires for start-ups connect with the founder first rather than the idea. They are looking for some common grounds with the founder and try to assess how it will be like to work for them.
Therefore, the Startup founder must have vision and mission about what he is trying to achieve, and it must be visible on Social Media platforms. The founder must have such a great conviction in the idea that it becomes contagious, and the idea sticks to whomever he talks to. Once the founder becomes visible and easily accessible on social media and articulates his vision and mission well, the potential hires get attracted to the potential of the Startup business rather than immediate perks which he might get in some other more established organizations.
And that is why it is essential for founders to build a personal brand on all the major social media platforms. It always helps in hiring great talent. An effective presence on social media makes the founder look and sound more authentic.
Hire and Make leaders
It is proven now with scientific studies that leadership is only 30% genetic and 70% learned. In the right environment and culture, leaders are made. For any Startup to succeed, “Catch them young”, should be the working principle, as it is the same for all the big and successful businesses.
Founder members of Startup should start the hiring process with an intent of hiring future leaders. This realization must be there that future leaders are being hired.
Acknowledging visible leadership quality, which can obviously be groomed will make the potential hires feel welcomed. It also gives a perception that the founder is looking not only for functional skills but vital skills also.
Know the position you are hiring for
The biggest challenge for any Startup is to manage uncertainties. Manoeuvring a Startup through all these uncertain, unpredictable events is an art of entrepreneurship. It is often noticed that entrepreneurs do not exactly know for which skill they should hire?
Before one start thinking about creating a job posting for a Startup, some of the questions worth asking –
a) Is this job role needed now or can it be pushed, let’s say, 6 months down the line?
b) Can this job be outsourced to a freelancer as it may have relevance only for, let’s say, 3 months.
c) Can this job Role be merged with another job Role and just have one unique position created?
d) What are the other things that this candidate can work on in future, if this type of work ceases to exist in the organization?
These are only some questions and obviously this is not an exhaustive list. One should look at all the areas which will have continuous stream of work in the organization and then combine some of these areas to create unique positions and hire against those positions only.
Work environment
Motivation for any employee to join a Startup would primarily be the environment in which he would be working. It should be of learning, growing, rewards culture, easy access to the founder members etc. While talking to potential hires these aspects of job must be clearly articulated.
Typically, in a Startup ecosystem, all the employees would be directly reporting to a founder at least for the initial stages. Hence, it is important that during the interview process the founder comes out as open-to-ideas person.
Have a small and closely knit team
Onus is on the founder to just look for a small number of like-minded people rather than build a big team which becomes unmanageable to start with.
Normally, energy and enthusiasm of new-age entrepreneurs are hard to match. It is always better to hire small and effective team rather than having a big and mediocre team.
In the beginning the Startup founders will need some “round pegs in the square holes” – as Steve Jobs famously said.
Once you get the idea off the ground then you can go for the kill and expand your team.