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A few months ago, we had posted an article about five ways to identity the wrong hire at your startup. This time, we wanted to share some of the recruiting practices we follow at our company to find the right talent for our startup.
Describe your culture; not just the role
Forget about those boring job descriptions that just outline the roles and responsibilities – if you want to hire the best, you need to give them your best.
Be creative, funny and sincere with your job description. Tell new hires why working at your company would be downright awesome and make sure you tell them what your vision is for the company.
If they are not excited about the vision and being a part of a company culture that’s open, transparent, uber-busy , they are not the right fit for your company.
Go on a date before you commit
Yea, that’s obvious and sound relationship advice that even applies to recruiting new hires for your company.
If you are thinking of hiring somebody, give them a small project to work on first. In this way, you can get a sense of their work ethic, competency and most importantly, their ability to hustle to get the job done while keeping you in the loop. You’d be surprised at how many potential recruits drop the ball in the follow up or check-in phase of a sample project!
And the same applies to your potential hire – they can figure out what a ‘day-in-the-life-of’ would look like if they decided to come on board full time.
Hire as a team
Your new hire isn’t going to work in isolation, even if he or she is working remotely. So, if you are hiring somebody new, make sure that the immediate team’s involved in that decision. They have to work together, so it’s important that they get along.
Introduce your potential hire to his immediate team when they start on the short project. This gives both sides a chance to actually work together before committing to anything long-term.
If it doesn’t work out for any reason, no harm, no foul and certainly, no bad hire.
These three steps have helped us create a rock star team at our startup, but here’s nine articles that give you more advice, insight and tips on how to navigate the murky waters of startup recruiting.
- Recruiting Best Practices from Today’s Hottest Startups – Startups come up with the best tactics when it comes to recruiting for their companies. This article shares what some of the hottest startups are doing to qualify top talent.
- How to Recruit Rockstar Talent? – Great tip! Courting a rockstar and having trouble closing the deal? Get your investor to talk to them.
- Life as a Startup Founder-Recruiter: Our first key hires – Love this article because the founder actually breaks recruiting down into a step-by-step hiring workflow you can apply to your company.
- HOW TO: Recruit All-Star Employees on a Startup Budget – “Dinner with the spouse” – I hadn’t thought of this one as a recruiting tactic, but we do this with Wagepoint hires as well, albeit post-recruitment. Even then, it’s a great way to make your new hire feel welcomed and confident about their decision to work with you.
- Tech Recruiting is Ruthless! Here’s how tiny startups can bait the perfect engineer – the advice in this post is so practical and comes from a recruiter with seven years of high tech recruiting experience.
- Want To Successfully Recruit For Your Startup In 2013? – The best engineering talent is drawn to… #1 on the list: “Small (10 people or fewer) companies with compelling founders and executives”
- Three Ways to Recruit Talent for a Hungry Startup – “Have a clear and compelling mission” – without one, you can’t really expect to inspire top talent to work for you.
- 10 Steps to Successfully Sourcing and Recruiting Startup Talent – LinkedIn keeps coming up as a great source to find candidates, but this author recommends a couple of good sources and a list of all the things you can do to hire the right fit.
- Powerful Recruiting Approaches for Startup Firms – this one’s interesting because it looks at how traditional recruiting methods can be adapted for startups.
