Your startup is expanding? This is great news, congratulations. This means you are moving from the garage into an office and will need to start staffing with high-quality talent that can help grow your business. Here are some startup staffing tips that will help you hire the right people.
Look For Talent
Talent is different than skills. When hiring people you want the best of the best, a true talent community. Talent doesn’t always show just from a CV with a list of qualifications or past education. Talent and innovation come hand and hand so look for candidates that have created things or have hobbies which require critical thinking. Skills can be taught, but teaching talent is much harder. You can spend a few afternoons showing an employee how to use a new piece of software but it is much more difficult showing them how to lead their field of innovate.
Look For Passion
Startups require a lot of hard work, not only from the founder but from every team member. That is why it is important to find passionate team members when staffing your startup. Every member of your small team will be crucial so you need them to want to be there, a talented and nimble startup does not have room for anyone who is just there for a paycheck; you need to have people that want to see your company succeed (you should also incentivize for this.) One way to see passion is to look in the fine print of applicants CVs. It’s not enough that they know how to program or design, look for other activities that demonstrate these passions. Perhaps they are part of meet-up or creative collectives, this demonstrates a desire beyond the workplace to improve and practice their craft.
Social Skills
Whether you are a tech start-up, retail, or manufactoring; the most passionate and talented staff will be of no use if they can’t work well with others. That is why social skills are so critical. You need a diverse team of talent that can all work together to overcome ever-changing obstacles and challenges. This can be one of the hardest things to determine based solely on CV and interviews, so you may have to dig deeper. Ask the applicant to describe how they were able to overcome challenges with the help of a team, or talk to previous team members from past jobs and ask how the candidate interacted. The people involved in the first round startup staffing can end up being the top-level employees once you make it big, so be sure you are hiring people who are up to the task and can socialize.
We hope these startup staffing tips are useful when building the next big phase of your new company. It’s an exciting and fast paced time to be a startup so remember have fun, do good work, and good luck!