How to Recruit Like a Boss

Every successful startup reaches a point where they must grow — and fast. The problem is your company may not have the brand familiarity and budget of your well-known competitors to attract top talent.

So how do you build a pool of qualified, enthusiastic candidates without spending a ton of money on outreach and recruiting efforts?

Here are some strategies that work for us.

Articulate a Clear Vision for Your Startup

If you want to draw people to your startup (and retain them!), your company needs to have a mission and vision that people can get behind. Your job is to make sure everyone knows that vision — from your current staff to your interviewees.

It’s easy to only focus on past experience and skills when hiring for a role. Skills are important, but if potential hires don’t believe in your company mission or agree with your values, they won’t be there long.

Your company needs to have a mission and vision that people can get behind.

Be clear about what your mission is and give examples of how your team embodies your company values.

For example, Kin sells homeowners insurance, but that’s what we do. What we believe is that homeowners deserve better. Insurance shouldn’t be cryptic, overwhelming, and expensive — it should be intuitive, easy, and affordable. That’s why our customers are the center of our universe — we consider their needs and expectations in everything we do. We’re innovating in an industry largely untouched by tech, and we want the best and brightest minds to imagine what insurance would look like if it actually served the customer.

That’s not lip service, either. We give our team largely free rein to see what they dream up.

Creating a careers page for your website can help spell out your mission for your team and your candidates, too. We won’t be mad if our careers page inspires you.

Create a Genuinely Great Place to Work

As a startup, you have to compete with the deep pockets of legacy competitors when it comes to salaries and benefits. That’s why it’s essential that you beat them at every turn on environment and work-life balance. (Pro-tip: fostering a good work-life balance at your startup reduces employee stress and burnout, which helps you not only attract top talent, but also retain it.)

Ask your current team what makes working at your company unlike any other place they’ve worked before. For example, at Kin, we hear over and over again how much our employees value our culture of respecting good ideas — we realize they can come from anyone in any department. They feel good ideas are incentivized, recognized, and rewarded. And so we make sure our candidates know that about our culture, too.

A good work-life balance reduces employee stress and burnout.

Also consider the perks you offer aside from the standard benefit package. Unlimited vacation? Continued education? Career fast-tracks? It’s hard to put a monetary value on these perks, but they sure do get the attention of job hunters.

Go Where Your Ideal Candidates Are

Recruiting can’t be an exercise you only do when you have an open position. Companies and leaders must always keep an eye out for great talent.

If we’re being honest, your best candidates almost always already have a gig. But that doesn’t mean they won’t pay attention if you have a promising position and company.

So how do you get in front of these folks?

Go where they are. If you’re trying to hire more diverse candidates, go to women and minority-focused business and networking events. If you’re trying to find enthusiastic developers, frequent your city’s tech hubs and incubators.

The folks who go to these events are engaged in their field — and that enthusiasm can get a lot of mileage in a startup environment.

Get All Hands on Deck for Recruiting

A senior leader or a recruiter should not be the only ones responsible for recruiting. You never know which employee has a talented friend or someone in their network who may be the perfect fit for the role you’re trying to fill.

So involve everyone in your recruiting efforts. Engage department leaders and strong employees who can articulate your company culture and represent your brand.

Involve department leaders and enthusiastic employees in your recruiting efforts.

You may even offer your team a referral bonus (upon hire) to motivate them to get the word out to qualified candidates in their network.

Stay Organized

If you follow our pointers and make recruiting a year-round effort, you need to stay organized and streamline what you can. After all, when good candidates come your way, you want to move quickly through the interview process so you don’t inadvertently lose them to other offers.

Carve out some time to create a process for interviews, document it, and train everyone on it. Keep in mind that as you grow, you may need to change things up, but it keeps everyone on the same page if you have an established process to start from.

Your process should define which company and department leaders should be in attendance for each phase of the interviews. It should also establish interviewer roles and targeted questions that elicit honest answers about experience and necessary skills.

A bad hire costs at least 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.

Because a bad hire is expensive (get this: the US Department of Labor estimates it’s at least 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings), you may want to consider testing for the right skills, too. For example, you can ask for past work samples, but new assignments can show how well your candidate meets your criteria and creatively problem solves.

These five tips can help you fill roles with top talent. Just remember — keep your eyes open. You never know where your next great hire will come from.