This is a guest post by Alessandra Lanza, Technical Account Manager at Connery Consulting, a boutique HR consulting firm.
Are you looking to hire top-notch talent for your startup? During Ynext™ Incubator boot camp 3 in San Francisco, I delivered a presentation on best practices in recruiting. In this blog, I’d like to share three main areas to consider when recruiting for your startup: strategy and process; culture and values; and recruitment. The strategy and process element involves thinking long term about what your company will look like in 6, 12, 18, and 24 months down the road. Think about where you want to take your company and how many people you hope will be working for you. For the culture and values component, think about how you plan to create culture in your company. For instance, what if team members are distributed across offices and countries? To stay on top of this, define your values as a company early on. If you hire people based on your values, you can create a culture that's unique to your company. As you add each additional person, you can live by those values every day. As you grow, hire to meet those values, and the company should remain stable. When thinking about recruitment, identify the channels from which you wish to recruit. As an early startup, maybe you don't have a lot of money to spend. Think about how you can recruit from colleges, various specialized communities and meet-ups. Also, if you want to you use recruiters or pay for postings on job boards. The most cost-effective choice is to use referrals. Create a referral engine within your company where folks are happy and excited and want to work with people they've worked with before and want to refer folks that they know to the company. Between 25 and 30 percent of your initial hires should come from referrals and should continue to come from referrals even as you grow as a company. This will help build the sense of community within the company, and it can become a place where people enjoy working and spending hours and hours a day together. Here’s a helpful post on how to recruit for developers. In this blog, former CTO of Flatiron Sara Chipps describes how it’s essential to care about what is important to developers, offer clear incentives, and invest early in relationships. Recruiting for startups is more difficult and a bigger commitment than recruiting for large corporations. A single hire can have a positive boom or negative implosion on your company's culture. By creating a solid process, hiring based on culture and values, and recruiting through referrals, you can build a solid company where everyone buys into the vision and end goal. How’s your experience in recruiting for technical or non-technical talent? Are you interested in expert guidance, API access, networking opportunities, and resources to grow your startup? To learn more about Ynext Incubator, visit this website.
