What to Look For in Your Prospective Startup Employees
This is part three 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.
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Finding great employees for your startup can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Before you begin the hiring process it’s essential that you identify the top priorities for your new hire:
- What level of experience does the applicant need? Do you need a developer with 10 years’ experience, or will you consider new graduates?
- What skills are essential for the role?
- Do you need someone with in-depth knowledge in one specific area, or will someone with a broader range of knowledge and experience be a more valuable hire?
Fortunately, with careful consideration you can identify key traits to look for in prospective applicants, before you begin the hiring process. To help you establish your top priorities, we’ve identified five key areas to consider.
1) ATTITUDE VS SKILLS
On paper, it’s easy to assume that the most qualified candidate is your best option — the one with the most experience or a particular skill that you’re looking for. However, it’s important to realise that, in a small startup team, attitude can be just as important:
This is something that you won’t be able to directly identify from a resume alone, but is important to bear in mind when it comes to interviewing candidates.
2) POTENTIAL VS EXPERIENCE
Is it better to hire an experienced candidate, or one with less experience but more potential to learn and grow with your startup?
This is an important question to ask, and there’s no easy answer.
The ‘right’ mix of potential vs experience will depend on many things: your company culture; the role you’re recruiting for; your long-term growth plans for your startup; and the capabilities of your existing team. This will change each time you hire someone, too, as your startup team grows and develops.
3) CULTURE FIT
Like attitude, this isn’t something you can assess from looking at a resume. Culture fit, particularly for your earliest employees, is just as important as finding someone with the right skills. This is because your earliest employees are integral to building your company culture. The type of person you hire now, in terms of their attitude and values, will have a significant impact on the type of people you hire in years to come.
A NOTE ON ‘CULTURE FIT’ AND DIVERSITY
It’s important that you don’t confuse ‘hiring for culture fit’ for ‘hiring someone just like you’; this can contribute to a lack of diversity within your startup team and mean you’re missing out on the creativity, experience and knowledge of more diverse applicants.
4) SOFT SKILLS
Things like communication skills (both written and verbal), interpersonal skills, teamwork, creativity, adaptability and empathy are easy to overlook when you’re sifting through job applications and interviewing multiple people, but are just as important as the practical skills which are easier to demonstrate.
5) GENERALISTS VS SPECIALISTS
What will be the best option: hiring someone with a wealth of experience in one specific area, or someone else with a wider range of experience in a number of areas, but less in-depth knowledge?
The generalist vs specialist question is a difficult one. You may find that for your earliest employees, you are better off selecting employees who are generalists, with a wide skillset. However, as your startup grows and roles become more clearly defined you’ll need employees with specific skills, as it will become less important for all your employees to be able to ‘do it all’.
To this end, it’s becoming increasingly common for startups to look for ‘T-shaped’ employees as their earliest employees — that is, people with a broad range of experience in various areas, but a depth of experience in one.
YOUR ‘PERFECT CANDIDATE’ WILL CHANGE OVER TIME
Your first employee is likely to be a very different type of hire to your 10th, 20th or 50th. What you identify now as your priorities for your next hire won’t always be what’s best for your startup. Therefore it’s important to reassess your priorities regularly, to avoid falling into a trap of making cookie-cutter hires that are perfectly suited to what your startup needed six months ago, but don’t fill the skills/experience gap that you’ve got now.
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