Hiring & Retaining in a rapidly growing Indian Startup Ecosystem

Indian start-up ecosystem is growing at an unprecedented pace and the start-up success in the next decade will depend largely on hiring & retaining top talent. Hiring is more of an art than science and it is the most important problem that the Indian start-up/tech ecosystem is dealing with today. The opinions expressed here are the result of my extensive work experience spanning many years. This is an attempt to give a candid picture of the challenges and suggest some remedies for all the stakeholders. Hiring mainly involves 3 stakeholders, let us call it a “trilogy of hiring” – Employees, Employers and Search firms. Let us focus on Employer and Employees for this cycle of the articles.

I get asked about this by many senior leaders and founders: How to hire top talent and retain? I would like to answer in a series of posts.

Let us divide the hiring & retaining into mainly 3 phases:

1.????Identifying the candidate through various initial screens - Top of the funnel

2.????Closing the candidate and increasing the odds of the candidate joining - Middle

3.????Retaining the candidate beyond 2+ years - Success

All three are equally important to be successful but if you see the funnel today middle of the funnel (#2) seems to be the cause of a huge concern and is becoming increasingly difficult in the industry that can offer top salaries thanks to the VC money floating around today to India. Most of the candidates I talked to have more than 3 offers at any point in time.

?Let me first address #2 in this post. Let me start with an interesting Tweet recently... It read something like this...

A start-up’s main goal should be:

1. Before product-market fit -> Customer acquisition & retention

2. After product-market fit -> Employee hiring & retention

It used to be “you take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers”, but now it is something like, “you take care of your employees and they will take of your growth/valuation ??”.

Hiring top talent has always been my favorite thing to do in the last decade or so. I would like to share a few things that helped me and more importantly, helped the candidate to make a more informed decision. These tips are mainly for managerial and director (SDE3/Senior DA/EM/SPM/DPM) and above roles.

• ?Ask the candidate what she/he is looking for in a job and make it more about the candidate interviewing the company than the other way around.
• Be authentic (do not act at all) and a good listener.?People want to work for someone they respect and trust.
• Make the candidate see the vision and the north star goals (preferably in a doc) of the company and the recent progress towards the north star; after that ask the candidate what parts can she/he contribute to get closer to the north star goal.
• Explain a recent difficult problem that your team solved and give an overview on a few other potential big ticket impact problems that can be solved.
• Share the gaps in the execution, so candidate can see the transparency.
• Explain your reasons for working in this company if you are not the founder. Offer help to evaluate the candidate’s other options and be open to losing the candidate for a better opportunity, if one exists.
• Move faster if you like the candidate. Nobody likes delays. Ideally close it within 2 weeks. The longer you wait the lesser the chance of getting the candidate to join.
• Look to build a long-term connect with the candidate even if the candidate is not taking up the job. Many candidates make wrong choices and may come back in a few months to the interviewer that was authentic and candid with her/him.?
• Do not ask about the current salary but have a conversation around compensation to discuss fair market numbers.
• Offer the candidate to speak with future peers in the company. Be very open about issues from the past.
• Close.... Close and Close. Good luck.