Startup Hiring: How to Hire Employees for Startups
A startup needs multi-faceted problem-solvers.
However, if you hire the wrong person, the success of your entire venture could be at risk.
One of the first challenges in startup hiring is recruiting the right people for your firm. It’s critical to craft a hiring strategy for a startup, as the first employees often fill more prominent roles and are charged with laying the foundations for the business.
Although who you hire depends on your business’s specific needs, any employee you recruit should be flexible, passionate, and trustworthy. Hire people who can take on diverse responsibilities until you can expand further.
A significant focus in startup roles is strengthening your internal relationships (between employees) and external connections (between other companies and customers or clients).
How to hire employees for startups?
While hiring strategies for startups may differ from company to company, they typically include the following steps:
- Identify a need. Especially at a startup, you don’t hire an employee without having a clear need. Determine what role is most important to fill.
- Craft a job description. Once you have a title, a list of responsibilities, and skill gaps to close, carefully write a job description to attract suitable candidates.
- Source candidates. Publish your job description & advert to job portals, recruitment sites, & social media networks. Also, consider referrals & peer-to-peer networks as a method of sourcing candidates.
- Review & screen. Review applications & resumés and start filtering your list to the top candidates you want to consider for the open role.
- Hold interviews. Conduct interviews with shortlisted candidates. Determine in advance the number of rounds of interviews you plan on holding.
- Check references. If you don’t already have references from your candidate(s), request & check them as a final measure.
- Make an offer. Extend an offer to the top candidate. This letter should include the position’s salary, benefits, and start date.
- Onboard the new employee. The onboarding process is often overlooked but can make or break the employee experience. Provide proper orientation & training for your new employee.
We have written a comprehensive 10-step guide on the best recruitment strategy for making intelligent hires swiftly & successfully here.
Read further to understand certain crucial elements to keep in mind as a growing startup enterprise.
The perfect founding team
There’s an art to creating the perfect founding team.
Your startup may have great potential, but nothing can derail things faster than its “people problems.”
65% of companies fail due to issues within the startup’s management team. More than anything else, startups live & die by the people that bring them to life.
Ideas can pivot and evolve as you grow, funding is challenging but manageable, and there will always be a deluge of competitors in the market. But the team that brings it all together forms the company’s DNA.
Metrics to consider
You need to consider two key metrics when defining or refining your hiring process.
- Cost Per Hire is the cost of filling up each position & is critical in hiring. It includes the cost of recruitment tools, job posting expenses, and other employment avenues.
- Time To Hire is also an essential metric in hiring. It is the time taken from applying for a job to the candidate taking the job offer.
Both of these metrics are correlated. The longer it takes for you to hire an applicant, the higher your cost per hire will be since you are also continuously paying for recruitment tools & other overhead expenses.
Use recruitment marketing
Attracting high-calibre talent can be difficult when you’re a new and unknown startup. This is particularly true if you’re bootstrapping or haven’t yet raised your first round of funding.
You’ll have to work especially hard to sell your company, vision, and culture to potential employees. Think about why people should work with you.
Recruitment marketing is communicating your employer branding through content & messaging. It can include social media, video messages, blogs, and anything else that builds up your brand.
Your brand may be relatively unknown. Use recruitment marketing to change that & every potential employee will look at your firm as a desirable place to work.
You can do that by:
- highlighting your positive company culture on your website with articles or videos
- profiling a superstar employee on your social platforms
- filming a video showing ’a day in the life of..’ your employees doing what they love
Full time vs. part-time
Not every problem in your company needs to be solved by a full-time employee, especially when you’re strapped for cash.
The reality of a startup is that your needs often aren’t full-time. Especially in support functions, sometimes you need access to strategic expertise but don’t need them full-time.
So think about solving with part-time scenarios, paying for a few days for an expert’s time, or engaging an advisor.
Do it yourself vs. hire an agency
If the hiring process already sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. While some startups opt to conduct the entire hiring process internally, many benefit from partnering with a recruiting agency.
Startups often lack the expertise, experience, and resources to perform the hiring process properly. Not to mention, most startups don’t have recruiters on staff. On the other hand, recruiting agencies have established hiring infrastructures and networks, allowing them to operate on behalf of the startup and deliver stronger candidates much faster.
Leverage the expertise of a recruiting agency
If you want to give your startup a recruiting advantage, consider partnering with a top recruiting company like Anzy Global. We offer permanent hiring, contract staffing, and executive hiring services. We leverage the power of relationships and referrals to find the best talent in the tech industry across all levels.
Whether it’s identifying your hiring needs or finding the right talent for your startup, the experts at Anzy Global can help. Book a free, no-obligation 30-min consultation to get started.
