Early stage startup planning to hire: don’t just jump into it.

In January 2018, a friend started a small business of kids’ footwear — BuckledUp — with a small investment, and very soon his products got a great response; the orders started rising exponentially. Over last one year, the volume has grown so much that it is now difficult to manage it with the current set up & team size.

The team is excited about the growth and is planning to do several things — building social media presence, increasing sales, improving the quality of the product, and so on & so forth. But to do all these, they need more people in team. They have even started hiring people; recently they closed 2 positions — a full time employee for Digital Marketing & an intern for content writing.

The team was very excited sharing the growth story with me. When I asked what exactly these two new members would be doing, they had a very vague idea that what exactly these two new members would be doing. When I further queried if the hiring was well prioritized (shouldn’t you first be hiring people to take care of influx of the orders). It’s alright with the intern — because internship will end — but what happens with the full-time employee?

After discussion the team agreed that the whole thing could have been better planned. I feel many start-ups make this mistake (I am taking liberty of saying many startups, because I have come across many cases on Internshala) of not carefully planning first and jumping straight to hiring new members.

We should understand that hiring is an extremely important task (and a very difficult one, too*) and it requires a careful planning, right from understanding where do we need more people to different work that the new hire would be responsible for to the manager she would report into.

So, do we do it? Before you proceed to hire, you should ask three fundamental question –

For which role to hire — When your startup is growing leaps & bounds, you should focus on hiring for teams where you absolutely need people to keep progress. If you’re sales is growing fast & you are struggling with logistics & operations, you should first hire people for logistics & operations, not for marketing.

Let’s take an example to understand this better — let’s say one member is responsible for managing business development & customer service and because of rise in queries from customers she has to compromise the business development (sales getting compromised is not good), this is the time you consider hiring an additional member to take care of customer service. What if there are not enough work in customer service yet? Good, the new member can assist in business development until there is enough work in customer service.

What the new hire would work on — Before you go out for headhunting, you should have a clear understanding of work that the new team member would be doing. The way I suggest you should do it is — note down all the work that are there & put hours to each of these works; this exercise would help you understand what & how much work is there.

Let’s further discuss the previous example — you can understand how many queries you receive in a day & how much time does it take to resolve them; say it takes about 4 hrs every day. Then you can define that the new member would be responsible for responding to queries & assist in business development effort. It would only help if you specify what work in business development — work research, lead generation, etc.

Who would be the mentor & reporting manager — This should be clearly defined. Also, you should try to keep that one person has only one reporting manager & mentor — this makes things a lot smooth & easier. In past, every time I have tried to one person to two different teams, it has caused problems. Assigning one person to one team helps the new member prioritise her work well & eliminates any chances of misunderstanding clashes between two managers (because every manager’s work is important for her).

Think about a situation where you’re reporting into two different bosses & they both give you important work to do. It will become difficult for you to prioritise.

Once you’ve clarity on the above points, you’re ready to proceed for hiring.

*How difficult? 23% of the startups fail because they fail to build the right team. And as founding CEO/team, this is going to be one of the most difficult (& expensive) tasks of your journey to build you startup.