5 Start-Up Recruiting Tips
Here are 5 tips I came up with for Recruiting at start-ups!
Feel to comment and make changes.
1. Recruiting Is Marketing
More often than not the best employees are the ones that find you, not the ones you go out and look for. The problem a lot of startups have is, how do I get more people to find me? Simple - think of it as a marketing exercise.
How do you get people to buy your product? Explain it’s benefits on your website and then make sure people can find out about it.
How do you get people hire good people? Explain what it’s like to work for you (in real language, no HR speak), what you look for in people and then make sure people find out about it.
I’ve done this in a few ways. I have always clearly explained we (the client) is looking for in every employee.
Quite a few people who came to work for my clients said the actual job was better than they expected - which is a lovely thing to say but really meant that we didn’t do a good job of marketing ourselves to potential employees.
The aim is to simply show people what the office looks like, what their co-workers do, what blogs we write, what events they can expect during a year - to make them feel comfortable and keen to work here. If you’re doing cool things to keep employees be sure that people can find them when they’re investigating your company.
2. Trust Your Team
You’ve hired smart people already right? You think your team is the best on the planet. So put them in front of candidates! Don’t hide them in a back room. Too many people have their HR people do most of the interviewing.
I’ve had at least two or three new hires mention to me that one of the reasons they decided to come work for one client was because they felt they wanted to work with the guys across the table in their interview. I want people go back to their existing job after an interview, look around at their co-workers and thing “You know what? I could learn from them. I should go work there.”
3. You Don’t Win With Money
I’d like to politely disagree with all those entrepreneurs I meet who think that the simple way to hire a good team is to throw money at the problem.
In choosing a place to work people look at the company, the role, the people, the environment and the money. Pretty much in that order, but it’s important to keep balance among all the variables.
As long as the money is competitive (and this is key), the other factors should decide the final outcome. Money doesn’t win people over, money prevents you from losing them. It gets you in the game. People value their time and while you might be able to ‘buy it’ with an outrageous salary that’s a temporary measure. They’ll eventually realise that doing a boring job 12 hours a day for huge money isn’t the way they want to spend their life. It’s not a way to build a company, it’s a short term band aid strategy.
You don’t win people with a lot of money and I’d say you don’t want to. People who chose a job purely on the larger salary are probably people you don’t want on your team anyway. That said, the corollary here is that you can definitely lose people with money. If you’re not paying what the market is or your firm just pays really low salaries, people will go elsewhere. It’s all about balance.
4. Make Space For Smart People
Sometimes people come along who don’t fit into any existing role. Say things like “if you want to come and work for us, but we don’t have a job ad that matches your skills - send your resume along anyway and we’ll see what we can do.” Some of my best hires have come this way.
At the same time, don’t be afraid to redirect a candidate if you feel they’re interviewing for the wrong job. I’ve created a number of roles on the spot when I met someone, because they were smart, I wanted them on my clients team and I felt they could fill a need they had.
5. Know When To Walk Away
The hire-or-don’t-hire decision is critical. Why is this decision so important? The damage a wrong choice can do to morale, to your product, to your company should never be overstated. It’s a little like poker, the most important and hardest skill to learn is when to fold a hand not when to bet. Not hiring a few good people is far better in the long term than hiring a few bad ones. Err on the side of caution.
Over time, we’ve developed some rules of thumb internally that help us evaluate this choice.
Try to develop rules that work for your organisation. Look at your best people, what do they have in common? Why are they the best? Is it because of the way they perform their job or is it something broader, the things they contribute to the company as a whole?
Quickie Bonus Tip: No Keyword Hiring
This mostly applies to developers. Don’t hire based on keywords in a resume. Some of the best people we’ve hired wouldn’t pass a keyword test. Too many companies look for “JMS”, “EJB 3″ and “J2EE” and assume someone is a good developer. We don’t look for people who know technologies, we try to look for people who are good at learning new technologies.