Hiring for a Startup? 3 Key Strategies to Apply

November 11, 2014 at 11:59 AM by Kathleen de Lara

startup hiringEnd-of-year hiring budgets are hot and cold. You’re either prepped to face the all-too familiar hiring freeze, the less than ideal allowance from the team’s talent heads, or on the flip side, the nice surprise of being told, “Here’s some dough – roll in it and go make some hires.”

If you’re hiring for a startup endowed with either proposition, however, these factors remain partially or altogether true: Your resources are limited, you’re strapped for hiring time, you don’t have enough bandwidth to screen dozens of candidates quickly enough, or maybe the talent you are coming across just aren’t the types who can wear the number of hats necessary to grow the company.   

Where do you begin? As Jon Bischke said,

“There are no magic bullets. If you want to recruit an incredible team, it's going to be a lot of work. It's one of the reasons that talent acquisitions are often so expensive. If world-class talent was easy to come by do you think that talent acquisitions would often fetch eight-figure (or even nine-figure) amounts?”

We sat with Loni Spratt to get her take on the common hiring dilemma. Here’s what the Entelo recruiter and customer success director recommends for anyone hiring startup talent.

Hire smart people who are versatile self-starters with a proven track record. Previous start-up experience? Even better.

And you may be surprised at how much at last bit actually matters. From measuring factors like culture fit and job satisfaction, to work and management styles, onboarding candidates who have never worked for a startup can be challenging especially if their expectations may not necessarily be aligned with what the company can offer.

In a startup, for example, working in an open office environment may work well for some employees and not so well for others. On another front, working at a startup has its unconventional work culture “quirks” so to speak, like taking on projects without a lot of direction, being part of a team that doesn’t have a formal organizational structure, and every now and then, being able to work occasional nights and weekends if large projects call for extra time and hands, not to mention acknowledging that for the most part, the 9-5, 40 hour work week doesn’t apply.

If candidates lack previous startup experience, don’t be so quick to write them off as a bad fit for the role. Try asking these types of questions to gauge their match:

  1. Ask candidates about their experience working with smaller teams. Have they ever volunteered for a nonprofit? Have they managed or worked on teams that learned how to succeed without a larger, overarching management structure?

  2. What are their impressions of working for a startup? What are the downsides? If they mention things like lack of job stability, potential for getting distracted in an open work environment, and having to be on call on some weekends and evenings, they get it. If not, measure their reaction and body language after listing a few of these factors and explaining the realities of working for a startup. You can usually tell (read: see) when someone doesn’t agree with what you’re saying.

As a recruiter, however, getting candidates engaged with your role also means making sure they understand that some of these realities are circumstantial. Some candidates are shocked to hear their CEO might text them on a Sunday to finish up a last-minute project, for example, but that’s not something that happens week-to-week. Wearing many hats at a startup can entail filling in missing pieces as needed with the goal of, well, simply getting stuff done.

In the spirit of GSD, these are indicators of a candidate who could be a good fit for the company.

  • Started a service company, club, or organization. (10 years out of college? Still counts.)

  • Have worked with previous startups, small companies, or within small teams

  • Have experience volunteering or working for a nonprofit

  • Launched their own companies

  • Have a portfolio of their past and/or current side projects

  • Share their future goals and expectations, especially with an entrepreneurial, inspired tone. (You know it when you see it. It’s that glimmer in the eyes.)

Alternatively, candidates who share their unsuccessful endeavors can also share insight to what they learned from their failures, and what improvements and new skills they now know to take into their future ventures.

With that said, it’s important to align candidates’ expectations of a role with the employee experience.

Hiding the realities that blatantly separate startup company culture, and let’s say, corporate company culture can create misconceptions between your employer brand, and employee and candidate experiences. Whether you’re bring in talent with or without previous startup experience, new hires need to know what they’re getting themselves into. Replacing a hire who ends up not being a good fit for the team uses extra time and resources that could have been invested in a more long-term employee.

Remember that work length doesn’t matter as much as relevant work experience.

You’ve probably heard about all the hat-wearing that goes on in working for a startup. Being employed by a bootstrap company requires being able and willing to multitask, to take on a mix of varying projects, to learn new skills and tools to supplement the team, and to be at the front of duties that may not exactly be part of the primary job description. Use career progression as a factor of success – A candidate with one to two years of experience and a promotion at a company has proven more career development than a candidate whose held the same job position and title for six years at a company.

The startup company culture requires employees who are resilient, versatile, and perseverant. A candidate with relevant work experience weighs more heavily than one who has worked in the industry for a longer period of time. It’s a testament to their capacity for continuous learning in a workforce that follows the work hard, play hard mantra with an understanding that there’s also a chance to fail quickly.

Hiring talent for a startup can be tricky, especially when a number of your competitors are likely looking at the same talent. Find candidates who can adapt to your company now and where it will be, who can hit the ground running, and who are smart, quick learners, or as Loni likes to call them, “figure-it-out-able talent,” to grow a team already prepped to take on anything thrown at them…while wearing all those hats.    

Don’t forget to join us for our tech talent webinar series! In this four-part event, we’ll share the essentials of hiring top engineers, designers, and data scientists for your team and take you through a step-by-step guide on how to recruit on today’s leading tech networks.

how to recruit top tech talent

comments