How Early-Stage Startups can Attract Top Talent
This is part two of an eight-part series, exploring the ins and outs of growing your startup team. From attracting talent to developing an interview process, get ready for a complete crash-course in building your early-stage startup team.
Click to read all eight parts as a complete post, or download as a PDF.
For early-stage startups, moving beyond your first handful of employees will require careful planning. The success of your startup depends on your ability to build a team of great people. But when you’re a small team working on a product that only a handful of people have heard of, convincing top talent to join you is no easy feat.
The first step is attracting talent: creating a company that appeals to top-quality applicants, getting your job advert in front of the right people, and getting them excited about the work your startup is doing. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to ensure you’re attracting top talent for your next job vacancy.
1) BUILD AN ATTRACTIVE COMPANY
Your first few employees are likely to come from your founders’ extended network, and in this case the hiring process is likely to be much more flexible than with subsequent hires. In these early days, before you worry about getting job descriptions spot-on, or sharing your job adverts in the right place, you need to focus on building a company that people want to work for.
That doesn’t mean you need to invest in expensive employee perks or slick offices (though by the time you’re hiring your first employees, it will look better if you’re not working out of your garage or spare bedroom). Instead, it means sorting out your identity as an employer: nailing down your company’s cultural values and making the most of your social presence.
COMPANY VALUES
Your company values are one of the most important facets of your identity as a company and an employer. It’s essential to define these early, and to share them publicly on your website and blog to help prospective employees get to know you.
One stand-out example of a startup who’s done this is Buffer, whose Open blog is an ongoing embodiment of their key values of transparency and openness. Similarly, here at Cobloom we have our Insider blog, where we share real-life examples of how our company values of continued learning, data-driven decision-making and self-improvement affect the work we do, the way we hire and how we make decisions.
Defining and sharing your company values is a great starting point from which you can start to evaluate prospective employees based on culture fit — something which is essential for building a close-knit startup team.
ONLINE PRESENCE
One of the biggest challenges of building a startup team from scratch is that in the beginning you’re a complete unknown, so it’s essential that you make a conscious effort to build an online presence and identity.
The first company I ever worked for had no website, no blog, no social media presence — nothing. In hindsight, that was a major red flag: I started work there with no idea at all about the company, its values or company culture, and it didn’t take me long to realise I was a poor-fit.
While it’s unlikely your startup will be in the same situation, it’s worth taking a strategic approach to your website content and social media activity to create a consistent identity and presence across different platforms.
COMPENSATION PACKAGES
Competitive pay is essential for attracting talented employees, and it’s even more important for employee retention.
In the early stages of your startup, it’s likely your employees will be underpaid, relative to the market rate for their skills and the work they’re doing, as you won’t have the cash available. It’s crucial that you bear this in mind, and work to bring employee salaries up to market rate as soon as it’s feasible to do so. However, in many cases this doesn’t happen until you’ve secured your first round of funding.
Additionally, it’s common for early employees to be granted equity in the startup, as part of their compensation package:
Offering equity is a good way to attract right-fit potential employees: many will be happy to sacrifice a portion of their salary and tolerate being “underpaid” for a while, in exchange for the ownership and long-term reward that equity provides.
A Note on Salary Negotiation
When you’re thinking about compensation packages, you may want to consider implementing a no-salary-negotiation policy — for all candidates, across all roles.
Salary negotiation is a big contributor to the gender pay gap: men are more likely than women to negotiate their starting salaries, but even when women do negotiate their salaries, they’re viewed less favourably than their male colleagues and are deemed “aggressive” and “not team players”.
With the lack of diversity in tech being such a widespread, ongoing issue, getting rid of salary negotiations across the board can be a good starting point for creating a startup with equality as one of its core values.
2) REACHING CANDIDATES
As a startup founder, you should always be recruiting. Even if you don’t have the workload or resources to actually grow your team right now, it’s essential that you are nurturing relationships and building connections for when a specific hiring need arises.
Building an attractive company will help convince potential employees that they want to join your startup, and will attract inbound leads who are interested in your product, team and company culture. However, when it comes to hiring the best people, you can’t wait for them to find you: you need to look for them, too.
NETWORKING
If anonymity is one of your biggest hiring challenges, there’s a relatively easy fix. As well as sorting out your online presence, it’s just as important to dedicate time to networking in the real world.
Attending conferences, talks or tech meetups are great ways to grow your network. You might even meet your next hire there.
SOURCING
Think of networking as a passive way to reach potential candidates; in contrast, sourcing is the active way.
If you have a good idea of the role you’re going to be hiring for next, you may want to invest some time in identifying good-fit applicants within your extended network, and reaching out to them directly.
Active outreach isn’t just something for you and your co-founders to do, either. Your early employees are likely to all have strong networks of their own — talented people know other talented people. Share next-hire requirements with your team, and encourage them to reach out to any of their contacts who they think would be a good fit for the role.
ATTRACTING THE BEST-FIT EMPLOYEES
When it comes to startup hiring, quality beats quantity, every single time. You don’t want to attract anyone and everyone, and spend hours sifting through countless resumes and applications. Therefore, it’s essential that you have a clear idea of what a good-fit employee will look like, before you begin networking in earnest.
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