Startup Hiring – Recruiter view:

In my role as a Talent Acquisition specialist, I've engaged in the practice of recognizing the most suitable talent while also serving as a catalyst in fostering a genuine hiring environment, showcasing both opportunities and obstacles

While hiring for startups, I have taken 0 to 1 journeys as projects. Initially I faced challenges on building a connect with talent ?for a “never known employer brand”.

Was it easy to hire? Never.

Thankfully I learnt through my craft and resources (social network, leaders, personal experience, candidate queries et al) available around me to work through them.

The challenges?

?In the markets I worked, tech talent and startup business leaders, candidates always had more than one option. They exactly knew which brand can pay them well and which ones they aspired to be associated with. Yet to be funded companies seldom drew attention.

There were phases where candidates were passive, thanks to the uncertain economy and startup bubble burst, candidates preferred to stay put and had lesser risk appetite for a move.

Being a new company, not all leadership was hired, I had to work with?the " one or two" leaders who already had a to shoulder larger portfolios including growth.

I had to make best use of their and my time to build a sustainable hiring plan for our 0 to 1 growth phase.?

Since compensation benchmarked thus far were never stable due to highly competitive market, we had to solve for a bigger question - what then is the ideal compensation philosophy one should go by where its talent market is the highly competitive.?

These and many such areas were true roadblocks.

In such a situations, how does one position the company, how does one build an authentic and yet aspirational storyline to hire great talent. Moreover, how do we attract the right candidates aligned to our purpose of building something of true value and not just play "the interview game" for yet another offer.

To answer these questions, I had to address a lot of other questions first :

• what are we trying to solve?
• how are we trying to do this?
• who supports us in our journey?
• how far in future are we planning for - hiring and businessHere I lay out the brief out line of the process I followed that may helped build my hiring conversations to create the talent pool. Mind you it never was an overnight process, but that of self discovery, trial, facts collection and seeking the one line that was tying all of us to the purpose of the startup.

Go within to find your why:?

I literally did this, cause I had signed up for an organization which hardly existed even on paper. It was on stealth mode initially. Yet I decided to join them as a hiring expert.

I asked myself again, What made me join them, what impact do I intend to create, how do I see my growth path, what’s the challenge that I get to work on, what's the opportunity that we will have in our different roles here?

So I zeroed in on my why, what, how, and it is ironical but I did get asked the same questions during my prescreen or HR interviews from the potential candidates and I shared my journey as applicable to them.

See the bigger picture yet don’t drop the ball on everyday tasks:

As a recruiter I must admit, startup hiring is not everyone’s game, it requires extra resilience, extra focus and (extra)^n patience to see your work through. At the beginning of my career, I used to fumble my way through a conversation when a candidate asked me about my own employer.

However, I did learn early on with my tenure building new CoEs and startups that you need to align your values to the big picture and yet not lose sight of the small everyday tasks that are the steps to that big goal.

The weekly progress we made as a team, people hired, MVP stage we have crossed, early success stories of our customers , helped to add more layers to my understanding of the landscape I was operating in.

Learn from the leaders and peers:

Spending time with and asking questions to my leaders in India and elsewhere helped me understand what they saw in this company, what was their why. The points they spoke of and the true progress we made, the way they articulated the idea, the way the runway was emerging in their vision helped to add my understanding of the businesses. I was privileged to be part of founding teams where everyday business standups made the picture cleared. It also made clear where is our company’s differentiator from an insider perspective.

Observe the competitors:?

One of the thing I definitely did and asked my team is was to be aware of the ?talent pool and the landscape we were in. It included our competitors our vendor partners and our general talent markets.

It gave the opportunity to understand about what they did, what kind of talent they hired and also what differentiates us from them from an external world view.

It added more facts to my business understanding and help rationalize the potential of the market we were serving and how.

Candidates had good market data and hence posed sometimes difficult questions about my startup employer, helped get our leaders also involved in resolving their queries. This made me more prepared for diverse questions and potential blocks from candidates that I should keep expecting when talking about the opportunity they have with us.

Evolving with business:?

As the growth begins, the company evolves, the vision, the end purpose of the organization may remain same.

With time and more leadership at the helm of the company, strategies, path taken, capability and team being built may evolve.

It was imperative I adapted to these changes, which was not always easy to maneuver, what seemed illogical and sometimes difficult decisions to me, upon later reflection, unraveled themselves as the best path we could have taken given the time space we were in.

These experiences of witnessing the growth and turbulent times, of triumphs and breakthroughs of the organization added more “meat” to my tenure and the mindshare I did with candidates across levels.

Adapting to present dynamics of any organization is a crucial part of mapping the journey.

Share the journey not the destination:?

I have realized that, when I share my journey with true elements, openly tell potential candidates that opportunity is in fact loaded with challenging path ahead, it made conversations clearer and evaluation of candidate’s purpose much clearer. I could always identify traces “made for the team I was building” or “not” within these conversations, backed by feedback from fellow interviewing members.

The destination may have many takers; the journey is not made for all.

Every organization has this distinct outline, until they become so huge that everything then is a common theme of grand success laden with profits and markets conquered by the brand.

End of the day, it is all about connection I was able to make with the candidates and the interest my journey could create that has ignited their aspiration to at least "think" about the opportunity.

Not all conversations ended up with a successful candidate in pipeline, but I knew they will remember the opportunity and me and may come back to me when the time is right, for them.

We. have always loved a good story that has the triumph after the turmoil.

When a recruiter, tells the candidate a new story with a great journey that piques their interest, they are already connected to each other. Add authenticity and reality to this and you will have a better-informed candidate deciding if he wants to be part of the journey or not.

I am a talent acquisition expert and a career coach building my practice. I write about the topics closest to my mind, be it candidate experience, recruitment, future of Talent acquisition, or about my professional experience.

If you liked what you read here, do connect with me and let me know your thoughts .