Monday 29th Oct 2018
Hiring Management for Your Startup: Top Tips
18 Jul 2018
A business is only as good as its employees, and arguably the most important among them are the senior managers. When it comes to startups, this can be even more critical, because it’s these people that often determine the shape of the company in the years to come. As a result, hiring managers can be tricky, and it’s often not as straightforward as bringing in other employees. Who are you looking for? How should you find them? How can you keep costs down?
In this article, we’re going to go through a few top tips for making sure that you hire the right staff, you do so effectively, and at good value.
Look for Experience
It can be tempting when setting up a startup to keep everything fresh and new. Graduates may have a lot of drive, excitement and ideas, but it’s not wise to rely on them for more senior positions. It’s great to have new ideas, but the best startups will mix this with solid experience. Always make sure that you’ve got one or two people who have plenty of experience in their positions, and know what it takes to effectively run a company, whether they’ve been in leadership or management positions in the past.
Pursue All Recruitment Avenues
The chances are that the best person for your job is already employed, and isn’t actively looking for a change of scenery. This means that you might need to be a little creative in order to get the right people into your team. Putting out a job advert really is only the bare minimum. You should be networking wherever possible to find the right people. Social media such as LinkedIn can be a big help here, as can events. Give people a reason to look toward your organisation, and you’ll be able to attract top talent. It’s always worth taking a little extra time to secure the right people than it is to rush people into position, and by doing some of the work yourself, you can also keep costs down. Recruitment is big business, and you can pay a considerable amount when hiring management.
Be Challenged
It’s never a good idea to hire only people who are likely to say yes to everything that you suggest. If you hire slightly outside your comfort zone, then you’ll end up with a more well-rounded organisation that’s prepared to deal with all manner of issues, can temper personalities and meets challenges with good, effective compromises. If you’re in the early days, invite candidates to criticise aspects of your business plan to see what they’ll be able to bring to the table. Remember that people can be fully committed to your cause and still see the weaknesses in it.
Don’t Go Overboard
Startups generally need to keep things compact if at all possible. There are a few reasons for this. The first and most obvious one is cost - startups are generally quite tight on cash, and you don’t want to put that at risk by hiring too many people. The other point is that startups need to be fairly agile and quick to make decisions in order to succeed. Too many decision makers can slow things down in the initial stages. Consider who you can’t survive without. Can any jobs or tasks be outsourced? Finance is often something that you can have taken care of outside your own business. Credit control for instance can be entirely outsourced under products such as invoice finance, and more specifically, factoring.