How To Find The Right Startup Talents🎤🎸🤘🏽

Finding the right talents to onboard into a company is never easy. Even more difficult is trying to get these talents to join your pre-series A startup.

While it may be easier to think startups should sell their story to attract candidates with competitive salaries and benefits while providing them an environment that will keep them happy.

But they don’t always play out that way. In reality, you have to realize that hiring is marketing. Therefore it takes a lot more than just tweeting and posting your jobs on social media. 

In this article, you will discover some of the most important things you should consider when securing top-quality employees for your early-stage startup.

Identify Your Key Positions

Decide whether or not you want experienced candidates who can build and lead teams that can set you up to introduce younger talent to diversify and bring in new ideas and ways of thinking.

Or think about less experienced candidates with grit and passion that align with the t-shaped skills/model that aligns very well with what startups need.

The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one's own.

—Wikipedia

In a startup, time is of the essence, so it is necessary to consider the following before making that decision. Both approaches have their own pros and cons.

Experienced folks are more expensive and sometimes harder to attract but will hit the ground running, focus on the right things, and move fast.

Inexperienced folks are more affordable and hopefully hungrier, but they might spin their wheels on too many things and not achieve anything substantial.

Strategies To Attract The Right Talents

Finding the right candidates for the job may be difficult but never impossible. Startups, too, can attract the best candidates out there, but it requires strategic positioning. They include;

1. Selling your mission and startup story

Stories sell!

Your pre-series A startup story is no exception. All it needs is for it to be compelling to attract top talent.

What’s your mission? According to a Forbes article.

A mission isn’t solely for selling your company to consumers. The mission is also a highly effective recruiting tool

Mission-driven workers are 54% more likely to stay for five years at a company and 30% more likely to grow into high performers than those who arrive at work with only their paycheck as the motivator.

Mission statements vary considerably from company to company. The following examples are the mission statements of some of the trending companies as of 2021 according to an article taken from Investopedia:

• Chipotle (CMG): To provide "food with integrity."

• Walmart (WMT): We save people money so they can live better.

• Tesla (TSLA): To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

There are many ways to convey your story depending on your business model, but you need to have a good reason why people should work for you.

2. Appeal to their emotion

How about your compensation and benefits package? Incentives can be a powerful tool.

You need to stand out from the crowd if you want to attract top talent. Are employees able to work remotely? If so, how much of an “average” day will be spent at the office versus working outside of it? What other perks might employees enjoy, such as 401k bonuses, a career path, unlimited time off, learning stipends or equity in the company?

Consider employee amenities such as transportation benefits (compensating employees who use their vehicle for work), parking, on-site outdoor spaces, free food and drinks, etc.

While these may seem minor to a seasoned employee of a large company, the little things count. If your organization is small or growing fast, then putting in that extra effort makes all the difference.

3. Create the work culture around them

How about the culture at your startup? What does success look like in your organization? How do you define it, and how does that translate into day-to-day operations?

Company leadership sets the tone for workplace culture through their policies, benefits and mission.

Designing a healthy workplace culture that aligns employee behaviours and company policies with your company's overall goals is important. The well-being of your employees has to be prioritized, too, as their collective attitudes, beliefs and behaviours make up the work atmosphere that plays a pivotal role in the growth of your business.

Try not to create strict rules on how employees should think or operate. Instead, look for ways to make the environment fun, engaging and promotes open communication where feedback can be given and received, ideas can be shared and collaborative efforts to solve problems are encouraged.

Happy employees will spread word of mouth about the culture at the company they work for.

4. Know where to find these talents

What other hiring strategies have been most successful?

Using tools like AngelList, Startuply, The Muse, Indeed or  LinkedIn to find passive candidates who may not be actively looking for a new job can be very productive. Make sure your social media accounts are up-to-date and regularly provide useful information for users. This will help increase the chances of someone clicking through and seeing how they might fit into your organization. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. You don’t have to always follow the pack or best practices.

Check out Carl Ferreira’s  post on out the box hiring https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carl-ferreira_salesfam-sales-talent-activity-6869323459965571073-P5Oy/ 

5. Hiring is everyone’s job, not just recruiters 

Hiring is almost like branding; it is everyone’s business in the organization. Hiring is not just the recruiter’s responsibility. Everyone has a role to play in it. The CEO’s responsibility is to cultivate a culture of always-on network building and talent pool pipeline creation. 

There's also huge value and reduced costs in leveraging your employee networks as referrals because they are more likely to convert and the cost of referrals even when incentivised are far cheaper than a recruitment agencies finders fee.

Be Transparent  About Startup Culture

Employees will appreciate that they are more often hired with an idea in mind of what they can contribute within six months. There is usually higher accountability. On the other hand, there is also less interpersonal interaction between departments because of long hours and high workloads. An early-stage startup’s culture tends to be very self-driven and self-motivated. 

Don’t be afraid to say it like it is, working at a startup is tough, rather qualify your candidates early on, the cost of a bad hire can set you back many months. 

According to Apollotechnical, the average cost of a bad hire is up to 30% of the employee's first-year earnings according to the U.S. Department of Labor. However, one report from the CEO of Link humans put the average cost as high as $240,000 in expenses. The costs broken down relate to hiring, retention, and pay.

Interviewing Founders on Best Practices for Hiring Talent

Most times, thinking outside the box is all that is needed to find the right candidates. Interviewing startup founders could be your best bet of finding out the best practices to find the right candidate. Some factors to consider include;

1. Knowing candidates committed to continuous self-education and improving themselves.

2. Have a strong sense of understanding what’s required for success. Hire individuals who are flexible enough to be able to handle change.

3. Consider candidates’ personalities, aptitude, grit and values rather than their resumes, degrees or the organizations they have worked for in the past.

Create an Interview Process 

The interview process is a multi-stage process for hiring new employees. The interview process typically includes writing a job description, posting a job, scheduling interviews, conducting interviews before hiring.

Treat your interview process like you would a sales funnel to understand where you are doing well and where you can improve. 

If it's not documented it's not measurable. 

Onboarding and Retention 

Onboarding new hires at an organization should be a strategic process and last at least one year to ensure high retention. How employers handle the first few days and months of a new employee’s experience is crucial. Before implementing a formal onboarding program, employers should answer some key questions to attain team and upper management buy-in. Some questions that need to be known include;

When will onboarding start?

• What impression do you want new employees to walk away with at the end of the first day?

• What role will HR play in the onboarding process? What about direct managers? Co-workers?

• What kind of goals do you want to set for new employees?

Startups Aren’t For Everyone

Organizations that are being founded today are different from others of the past, both culturally and technologically. For example, startups are using agile methodologies, cloud platforms, big data, and analytics tools. In the book “The Lean Start-up” by Eric Ries, he argues that an entrepreneur should not hire for a fixed purpose but rather use lean techniques to test whether the market actually wants what you are building.

Startups should look for talent that can adapt to change or have startup DNA  rather than just looking for people who have been there and done that. See my article on “Not all advice it equal”

Founders should be clear about what they are looking for in candidates and note the qualities that are important versus those that are not as important.

Conclusion

Early startups may encounter difficulties acquiring and onboarding talents to join the team, but it is not an impossible task. Knowing what positions need filling and how to find the talents to take up the positions is an important process. Getting talents into the company is only the beginning. There has to be a welcoming and supportive work culture that supports their creativity and what they bring to the table, else, they may be gone quicker than they came.