Looking to Recruit? 5 Start-up Recruitment Tips

As founders of a start-up, you will inevitably reach a stage where your team needs to grow, in order to meet the demands of your expanding business. But how do you go about building that winning team? A good place to start is to first identify your own roles and how you plan to delineate responsibilities, before actually embarking on a recruitment drive.

Get your ducks in a row…

Just as in sports, a successful organisation does not only house superstars who are all trying to further their own individual legacies. Instead, they have talented role players and managers who know how to get all of their personnel working together. This is why a founder’s roles and responsibilities should be clearly elucidated, as they play a vital role in decision making, external communications and recruiting. Even if yours is an equal partnership, this is still applicable. It’s impossible to sustain success if everyone is trying to do a share of each job. The first step in recruiting for a start-up is to identify the roles you need to hire for and who will do what.

Understand how the entire company works

It’s obvious that a start-up environment will have fewer employees initially. But, it’s important that each member understands how the entire business functions. Whilst most organisations employ people who only understand their individual job responsibilities, start-ups don’t operate that way. Hire people who understand every element of the business, and help the team recognise how their personal roles contribute to the enterprise’s goals.

In the words of Gordon Hinckley: “You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure.” Likewise, employees who help in laying brick after brick to build your organisation are the ones responsible in creating a strong structure. And if they fail to understand your business’s goals/objectives, then brace yourself to watch your building collapse.

Find people who share your passion

You already know that a start-up is never going to be a 9 to 5 job. The same applies to your employees who join the initial launch team. Everyone who gets involved has to be personally invested in the success of the company, even if they haven’t financially. The best way to hire someone who shares your passion is to offer some sort of stake in the company. Also, it’s critical that each person in the company feels passionately about making an impact. They must have a firm understanding of the problem the business is facing and the solution it is working toward. If not, then they are not ideally suited to working in a start-up environment.

Add apples in your basket that don’t rot…

One bad hire in a small team setting can completely disrupt the chemistry of the rest. As founders, you certainly have the ultimate say, but the entire group will have to work with the new hire in some capacity. Whenever you finalise a candidate, you should have more than one or two people from your team interview their potential new co-workers. They could have a different perspective or set of questions to ask, that were not immediately obvious to the founders themselves.

Keep going…

No matter how many times you fail, don’t stop. Bringing the team together is just one element. The best organisations keep engaging their employees and are frequently assessing what’s working and how they can improve the way they work together.

We can help you choose employees wisely. TalentSpa provides recruiting software and managed recruitment solutions to over 2500 organisations from business start-ups to FTSE 500 companies. Find out how our leading talent acquisition platform can help you to hire the right candidate for every role. Connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn to know more.