Startup Hiring: Acquiring the right talent!

I have been successfully recruiting for startups and over the years have realised that the first few people you hire set the culture of an organisation. Along the course, I made a few observations which might help in pulling the go-getters towards your enterprise:-

• Developing a stellar Employer Brand: Talent Acquisition is an art if done creatively and one such idea for startups is to get Recruitment and Marketing functions married in order to align the branding and business strategies. Millennials will always have an opinion about their employers and creating a compelling brand identity through blogs, word of mouth, creatives, calling candidates to office to work on live projects or conducting sessions/ meetups can be a great way of both Employer branding and attracting good talent. 
• The importance of Interviewer Training: At startups, processes change rapidly and so do the staffing needs. Be it a time of aggressive hiring or a phase where it has slowed down, one thing remains constant - good interviewer skills. While recruiting across teams, chances are that your interviewers are not born with innate interviewing talent, hence one should plan consistent interview training.

Recruitment should be treated like a two-way street i.e. 

• Interviewers should allow candidate questions.
• Ensure that their feedback is submitted on time (Candidates do not appreciate a lot of waiting days before hearing from you). 
• Definition of best candidate changes as a startup progresses: Imagine hiring the first 20 employees for your venture versus scaling it to a strength of 150 members. Would you prefer hiring Jack-and-Jill of all trades or specialised candidates for specific roles? Startups are living organisations where strategies change and tactics shift. Hence in phase 1, we need dynamic people who can tackle ever-changing startup challenges, even if the successful selection rate is 2 out of 100 applicants. At phase 2, one should begin to fill for particular positions and perhaps get an in-house recruiter so that the Marketing head does not have to try out coding! Hence who becomes the "Perfect candidate" is always a moving target.
• Compromise on skills, not work ethic: Skills can be learnt fast if you hire the right person, work ethic is hard to change. No one is a 10/10 in terms of expertise and, knowledge and experience become irrelevant if not put to use. It becomes essential to hire for the right attitude as skills can be honed along the way. For instance, someone is who lacking the perfect pitch can become a superstar in sales with training if he/she is passionate about the product and cares about personal growth than bringing in someone who does not deliver on time and leaves the workplace without feeling the slightest guilt to fulfil his/her responsibility. 

This being said, there is no set path in startup hiring and it's crucial for organisations and applicants to realise that every individual has a unique personality. What might be the best fit for a company might not be a match for the other. Hence the best we can do as Recruiters is to identify and promote talented individuals, making sure they are happy and challenged in an energetic environment.