Top Tips For Building A Crack Start-up Team
Establish Your Employer brand
Your company might have a reputation in the market for your products and what you sell. But companies also have a reputation as employers.
Your employer brand refers to the perceptions that key stakeholders, and more specifically current and potential employees, have of your business. It is about how they view the company; from how you conduct yourselves in the market, through to what they think it would be like to work for your organisation.
An effective employer brand presents your organisation as a good employer and a great place to work. It’s not just about communicating your values, it’s about living them every day to build a powerful employer brand which can help you with recruitment and retention. This is particularly important when you need to recruit in high competition areas such as software developers.
Structure A Reward Policy
You’ve found the technical candidate you need. A CTO with all the right experience and the focus and attitude to match. But she earns £120k a year in a secure job at a big company. You can’t possibly commit to that. So how do you structure a package that will tempt her away? How much cash is reasonable? Is there any way to match the array of benefits — childcare assistance, savings programs — her current employer provides? In short, what kind of reward policy will attract, motivate, and retain this CTO whilst not pressurising the finances of your Start-up?
The obvious solution is to supplement salary with shares. But you need to make sure you document your policy for this and stick to it. Or it can get messy. Many Start-up founders set aside a colleague equity pool, from which they will grant shares to the right people. It’s up to you how large this equity pool is, but of course it’s essential to make sure you leave yourself with enough headroom for dilution in any future funding rounds.
Consider offering some of the softer benefits, too, as these can often be the things that mean more to people than cold, hard cash. At CircleLoop, we offer our team completely free refreshments, regular social events, chilled out dress code, private health-care, generous holiday allowance and a free day off on their birthday!
To help structure your benefits programme, consider a flexible benefits provider, such as Perkbox. This can be a cost-effective way to deliver personalised benefits to your team.
Consider Homeworking
There are two schools of thought when it comes to working from home. One side tends to think that people will get nothing done and the other side believes staff will be happier and more productive. Chances are, your answer probably depends on how you personally fare when working from home. Of course, in a Start-up environment, it’s important to get the team together as often as is realistically possible. But, as you start to grow and things start to become clearer, consider extending the possibility of more flexible working.
Recent studies have supported the idea that working from home can increase productivity and decrease stress. Research also suggests companies that encourage and support a work from home protocol actually save money in the long run; an added bonus on the employer side.
Homeworking can also mean you don’t need to invest in large office premises in the early stages, which is great for helping to reduce cash burn.
As the vast majority of essential business tech is now available in the cloud, homeworking, or in fact working wherever you like, is much more accessible and cost-effective to manage. Everything from your wireframing, file storage and project management tools, to your messaging and telephone system can be set-up inexpensively and in a matter of moments.
As a Start-up you’ll probably want to strike the right balance between spending time together as a team to work on your vision, and empowering flexibility to attract the best people and get the best out of them.
Recruiting & Attracting Talent
Ah. The big one. Attracting the best people to your start-up.
There’s no two-ways about it — unless you’re a company like Google, Virgin or Apple — hiring is hard. And for an early stage business with limited cash flow, hiring the wrong people can potentially break your start-up.
Research from Execu|Search shows almost 60% of job seekers have their pick of two or more job opportunities. So how can you stand out from the crowd?
You Are Your Brand
Your brand is something you do, not just something you say. Think about what you want to accomplish — commit — and follow through with it.
Be A Great Place To Work
Word of mouth is a great tool for finding great talent. If your current employees are happy with their work environment, they will talk to their friends about it. Think about low cost perks that you could offer to attract people — free refreshments, fruit, childcare vouchers, social events. They all help!
Speak At Events & Network
You can expand your quest for talent by taking the time to speak at events and meet-ups. Speaker slots are great opportunities to sell your company and vision to potential future employees.
Use LinkedIn and Other Social Media
This is an obvious one, but ever underestimate the power of an attractive and informative social media profile. LinkedIn is a great place to build your corporate and your employer brand. Facebook and Twitter are great places to grow your network.
Have A Vision And Spread The Word
In order to convince top talent to come and work for you, you need to build a company with a great mission and vision that excites them. Take the time to work this through, and then spread your message far and wide.
Hire Your Customers
Hiring your fans means hiring people who will take ownership within the company. Also, fans are great for word-of-mouth marketing. If they truly enjoy working for your start-up, they will tell their friends how great it is to work for you and eventually, these friends will want to work for you as well.
Offer Flexible Working
A flexible working policy is pretty much guaranteed to mean your start-up appeals to more people. Cloud-based technology such as Slack, Google, Trello, Sage & CircleLoop means that your prospective employees can work from anywhere whilst remaining completely connected to their colleagues and your business. Numerous studies have also shown that people who work flexibly around other commitments are likely to be significantly more productive and happier in their work.
Provide Opportunities To Develop
Talented people don’t want to waste their time working on boring stuff. They want to be challenged, so give people big, stimulating, ambitious goals and they will meet the challenge and thank you for it.
Consider Building A Freelance Network
For any business, a freelance network can be a good thing. But for a start-up it’s all but essential. Of course you want to attract top talent on a permanent basis, but that can be difficult and also expensive.
Freelancers, or Slashies, as they’re sometimes known, can be a great option for an early stage business with big ambitions. They tend to bring a raft of skills and experience with them, but you can pay them on an hourly, daily or project basis, rather than committing to a full time salary.
You can get freelancers in pretty much every field nowadays. And — you never know — they might like your company and your vision so much that they become permanent employees in the future!
Recommendations Are Gold Dust
We live in a review-driven world. Most of us won’t even stay one night in a hotel without checking trip advisor to see if the breakfast is good. So you’d better believe that jobseekers are going to look you up.
In fact, 76% of job seekers use research from multiple sources before applying, so be proactive about getting recommendations. Ask staff to volunteer positive quotes that you can include on the website, and in recruitment literature.
While you’re at it, don’t neglect job review sites. Glassdoor enables users to review companies they’ve worked for, and gets around 41 million visits per month.
The Right Recruiters Can Do A Job For You
And finally, don’t forget that third party Recruiters can do a job for you. There are thousands of Recruiters around the world — some good, some bad.
You will pay a finder’s fee if you work with a Recruiter (usually anywhere between 10% & 30% of your new hire’s basic year 1 salary), so it can get expensive. But partner with the right Recruiter with the right experience and contacts, and that initial cost can be well worth it to save time, hassle and potentially costly mistakes, especially with those super-competitive roles such as tech developers, data analysts and senior marketers.
