Attracting the right employees to your up-and-coming business is not always easy, especially if you do not have the right strategies, solutions and incentives in place to achieve this.
Barriers such as a lack of brand recognition, as well as having to compete with larger rivals with far more resources to throw at the issue of recruitment, can leave you struggling to fill critical roles.
That being said, there are some tactics to try and tools to use which will level the playing field somewhat, so here are just a few of the avenues available to your startup.
Work with external recruiters
More often than not, you might not have the time, energy, and in-house talent to take care of the recruitment process for you in the first place.
This is where outsourcing makes sense, and by working with the likes of MVP Match recruitment agency you can rely on the expertise of dedicated pros in this space to not just connect you with skilled team members, but also filter out applicants to save you effort and money.
Another advantage of working with an external agency is that you can take this approach for as long as you need, scaling up your recruitment efforts as your organization expands, all while minimizing the amount of commitment you have to make. So whatever trajectory your operations take, outsourcing will be there to assist.
Scour the web for freelancers
Another point to make about startup hiring strategies is that they do not necessarily need to focus on finding permanent team members from the get-go. Instead, it can be wise to work with freelancers to fulfill specific tasks in the short term, and only make a commitment to full-time hires when this becomes prudent further down the line.
A whole host of freelancer-specific sites have emerged in recent years, with brands like Upwork and Fiverr reliably connecting ambitious organizations with suitable candidates to fulfill duties on the basis of need.
What is more, if you do identify a talented freelancer through this route, then you could always tempt them to come on board full time once you have established the initial relationship. This is often better than trying to hook experienced specialists out of the blue before they have any awareness of your brand and your company values.
Track candidate information carefully
One thing which often stifles startup recruitment drives is a lack of organization when curating candidates and fielding applications for available positions.
If you promote the jobs you are offering on popular sites and you receive a lot of replies, this is all well and good. But if you don’t stay on top of the admin at this point, and you are committed to dealing with this in-house, then it can get overwhelming and the best prospects might slip through the cracks.
Preempting this by setting up a spreadsheet to store all of the contact info and credentials of applicants is a must. And you can go even further if you adopt specific software to deal with recruitment duties, although this does of course come with an added cost to bear, so make sure your budget can accommodate it.
Conduct interviews effectively
The next hurdle that startups must overcome when hiring new team members is that of wrangling the interview process. You may have experience of being a candidate in an interview yourself, but if you have never been on the other side of the desk then it is easy to get things wrong.
The main error to avoid is to focus on what the candidate’s hopes and ambitions for the future might be. It is all well and good if they are committed to giving their all to your company’s cause, but what really matters is what experience they bring to the table.
Aim to ask questions about their past three positions, and the achievements they have racked up during this time. Scrutinizing their past will let you work out how they will perform going forward, and whether they will be a good fit for your firm.
Look outside of your own background
We are all biased towards people who share a similar background to ourselves, whether that might be based on social class, gender, age, race or any other metric you care to mention.
This is a real bugbear in the world of recruitment, for obvious reasons. So you need to be aware of the biases you are bringing to the table when scouting out new hires, and be sure to counteract them as you go forward.
More than anything else, you might be able to snap up seriously talented yet previously undervalued and underestimated team members by reflecting on potential prejudicial blind spots and endeavoring to erase them.
