The core values of a successful company are much more than a marketing ploy to show customers; they’re a definition of what the company stands for and what its mission is, and you need to hire people who reflect these values.
Initially, starting a new company often requires you to wear a lot of different hats. However, once a startup starts to grow, making it successful becomes a team effort.
Hiring the right people for your new startup is just as essential as having a great product or idea. At the end of the day, it’s people that make a company successful.
If you are launching a new startup, follow these tips to ensure that you hire a team of people that will help you build something spectacular.
Outline Your Company’s Core Values
Carefully define what you want your company to be, what you want the atmosphere at the office to be like, and what the ultimate mission of your company is. Once you’ve defined these core values, look for people who reflect them and who will get excited about moving the mission of your company forward.
Develop Job Specifications
Before you hire a single employee, you need to develop a list of specific positions that your company needs to fill. Think carefully about each of these positions and the role that they will play in growing the company. Determine which positions are most important for your company, and focus on filling those first with talented candidates.
By developing a list of specific employees that your company needs to find, you can narrow the focus of your search as well as better understand the type of employees that you ultimately want to find.
Focus on Behavior in Your Interview Process
While it’s vitally important that the employees you hire for your startup have the right skills on-paper, it’s equally important that their attitude and behavior is in-line with the mission of your company as well.
Working at a new startup is not a job for the faint of heart or those who get frustrated easily. Every position within your new company is likely going to come with a set of challenges and obstacles that must be overcome, and you need to hire people who will respond to these challenges in a positive way.
A few samples of behavioral questions you could ask the candidates you interview include:
– What is your greatest accomplishment in your career?
– What goals did you set for yourself at your last place of employment?
– What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced and how did you respond to it?
– What made you the most angry at your last place of employment?
– How do you prioritize your day-to-day work?
Asking questions such as these will help you get a feel for how a candidate is going to behave in the workplace and respond to the challenges that come along with making a new startup successful. In the end, these factors are often even more important than the skills an employee brings to the table.
Consider Freelancers as Well as Employees
Many modern startups make use of hiring freelancers online just as much as they do traditional employees, and, depending on the position and its role within the company, there are a lot of benefits to hiring a talented freelancer.
Many positions within a new startup will not require enough day-to-day work to justify hiring a full-time employee. For example, if all you need is a logo designed, a website designed, and occasional help designing graphics for your ads, it doesn’t make sense for your company to hire a full-time graphic designer. Instead, you can rely on a freelance graphic designer to complete projects on an as-needed basis.
Best of all, many freelancers have experience working with a wide range of large companies and new startups alike, and that experience can often offer a lot of value to your company.
Don’t Drag Your Feet
Once you’ve found a great candidate that you would like to extend an offer to, it’s essential that you move quickly. The best candidates will likely have the interest of several other companies besides your own; if you don’t move quickly, you risk losing them to the competition.
You should certainly take the time to thoroughly evaluate your options before you make a hire. However, once you’ve decided that you would like to extend an offer to a candidate, act fast. When it comes to hiring great employees, it’s often the early bird that gets the worm.
Find the Right Places to Recruit
Giant career sites aren’t always the best places for new startups to search for employees. The competition for the best candidates on sites such as these is often simply too stiff. Instead, narrow your search to more niche career sites and approach candidates directly using platforms such as LinkedIn. If your company has a website that receives a decent amount of traffic, create a careers page on the site that details the positions you have open and invites interested candidates to contact you.
Work to expand your connections however you can, and always be on the lookout for talent. Even if you form a connection with someone you might not need to hire right away, you should always be watching for talented individuals you can reach out to in the future when the need for their services comes up.
Conclusion
New startups often live and die by the people that they hire. No matter how great you are at overseeing every role within your company, there comes a point in every company’s growth where the founders have to turn over the reigns to talented employees who are able to manage their positions tasks and responsibilities on their own.
With this being the case, choosing the right people to hire for your startup is one of the most important decisions that you will make for your company. Take your time, put in the work, and find a group of talented, hardworking people who will help you build the company of your dreams.
