Jul 08, 2021

How to Hire Employees for a Start-up Company

There’s nothing like the feeling of owning your very own start-up company, and then watching it grow big enough for you to start hiring new employees! But how do you know who the right employee is for your company, and how do you go about hiring them?

As your start-up company starts to grow beyond its founding team, hiring the right employee becomes crucial to the growth of your business. Every new hire becomes critical to the company culture and thus, it becomes extremely important to look at the hiring process in a very strategic and systematic way. However, there are also challenges associated with hiring new employees.

What are the hiring challenges for a start-up? Let’s take a look!

Your first new hire apart from the founding team can be a very exciting and significant milestone to the company. It’s essentially the moment you have finally arrived! But it also comes with a lot of pressure, as the first 5 or 10 hires will determine what kind of culture your company will have, and what the team capabilities and morale would look like for the foreseeable future.

Especially in a start-up company, employees work in smaller teams and hiring one wrong person may have a negative impact on the whole team, such as impacting productivity and company culture.

Another hiring challenge that you may face as a start-up company is that you are not as well-known as most established companies. This makes it a little harder to attract top quality candidates. This means that you must build a strong brand and sell your vision to the existing team and potential hires.

The third and perhaps biggest hiring challenge that a start-up company faces is that you’re perceived as a high-risk opportunity by prospective employees. Working at a start-up is very different from working with a well-established company, and most candidates are reluctant to leave a secure position to work at a less established company. But worry not, because we have some excellent hiring solutions for a start-up that will help you overcome those hiring challenges.

Let’s talk about some of our tried and tested tips for hiring the right employee.

Want to make sure that you’re hiring top quality candidates? Referrals are a great way to make sure that you get the best talent for your start-up company. An employee who has been hired through a referral has better chances of fitting into the start-up culture and staying for a longer term. Networking is king in this scenario! So, make use of those network connections and get cracking on creating a talent pool of amazing candidates!

When you’re posting a job description on your company website or on social media, remember to be clear and sell your start-up and its goals. Keep the description conversational and make sure that your descriptions are aspirational. Use ‘you’ or ‘we’ instead of keeping descriptions passive — and just plain boring to read through!

Instead of the same old three-or-four rounds of interviews, revamp your interview process so you can make an informed decision. A great way to check if a candidate has the right experience for the role is by giving them an assignment to complete. Do make sure that it’s not overly complicated, but this is a good way to ensure that you’re hiring the right employee with the skills that you need. Doing reference and background checks can also help you understand if the person you’re thinking of hiring is a good fit for your start-up.

Remember that the hiring process is a two-way street. If you expect your employees to have the right skills, then you need to ensure that you offer them a competitive compensation packages and plenty of opportunities for growth and learning. Good employees stay when they are valued, paid well, and are offered room to grow, so make sure that your start-up upholds those values.

Another great tip to hiring the right employee despite not being an established company would be to ensure that you have a strong online presence. Talk about your company online, have a blog and contribute guest content on relevant websites. Build your brand, talk about your brand story, and share the lessons you learned while establishing your start-up company. Trust us, talented candidates will be reading your stories, and this will inspire them to be a part of your journey and want to join your team.

Learning how to hire the right candidates also starts with hiring for potential and not just from a laundry list of skills or past track record. In a start-up company, it’s easier for the founding members to meet and gauge a new candidate’s potential during the interview compared to a bigger company where the candidate would likely not meet with the CEO. Look for an employee who shares similar values, missions, and interests as yours. Talk to them about what kind of work they have done in the past, and how that might align with your start-up goals.

Apart from having a stellar hiring process you should also design a strong onboarding process for your start-up company. You can do this by putting together a set of sessions ranging from your start-up culture and intent to the company history and the various strategies you follow. When you spell this out, it’s a great way to ensure that someone who is joining the company will also have a positive experience.

Don’t just hire people because they’re currently available and you need to fill a role quickly. Hiring decisions that are based on short-term goals will eventually be a waste of capital and will set the tone for future hires. Look for things you can’t train like empathy, manners, or ethics, which are vital to the success of a start-up company. Remember that you’re not just hiring to fill a role at your start-up company, you’re laying the foundation to building your company. Take the time to hire the right employee and the culture you have built will form the base to your future successes.