How to find the right employees for your startup?

In large companies, it is normal for thousands of resumes and covers letters to arrive looking for a place in a workforce with high salaries, free food, and millions in benefits. However, when we talk about a startup, the context is very different.

It is difficult to offer competitive salaries, per diem incentives, salary bonuses, etc. The situation is so complicated that sometimes it is even challenging to ensure that your company will continue to exist in the long term.

Surely, the best candidates for your startup will never have heard of your business. However, and as it is logical, you will want competitive professionals committed to your project.

Like you, there are people with an entrepreneurial spirit who prefer to be part of a project to just work for someone, they are not worried about having to bring prepared food from home and have a low salary, as long as they feel they own the business. Here are some tips for finding the best employees for your startup:

Find the talent:

To find the right talent for our startup, we must first be able to detect it. That said, how can we spot talent?

In most cases, the curriculum vitae template does not give us enough information to categorize the candidates. But depending on the style of the resume and the cover letter, we can determine the level of creativity of the candidate, their ability to surprise through the word (cover letter) and visually (resume template/style).

In any case, we must understand that until we are in front of this person or maintain direct contact, we will not be able to determine if it is a valid candidate or not for what we are looking for. Therefore, before contacting any candidate, we must be very clear about what profiles we need for the company.

We cannot start from the idea that we need “someone from marketing”, or “someone who programs”. Instead of thinking about the different fields, it is good to determine the functions that we want our new collaborator to carry out.

Therefore, with the resume, the interview, and the duties proposed to the candidate, we will already have several clues to help us determine if they are a talented person or not.

Your contacts:

A capital element when a startup is born is trust. With your employees, you will go through situations that normally do not occur in large companies, and to move forward mutual trust will be necessary. So, you should first search your contacts for a trustworthy and competent person who you think might fit your business.

If you already have a person in mind, contact them immediately or find their contact info on Nuwber if necessary. Be ready to negotiate and change what you offer and demand.

Tech and startup communities:

Groups on social networks, web pages, forums… There are hundreds of communities on the internet related to the world of startups and entrepreneurship, there you can find professionals with experience and training in your sector to later contact them and present your business proposal.

You can also search for your best candidates personally, and networking at events related to your business sector can help you find a good candidate who is interested in your proposal.

Employment websites:

A slightly more classic method is simply to post an ad with the description of your offer and wait for the applications of the candidates to drop. This practice has the disadvantage that you can only choose among those who apply for your job offer.

The most important advantage is the convenience and ease with which you get an assortment of resumes with more or less segmented profiles for your business, this will help you narrow the search field.

Another option is to search through work networks like LinkedIn, the process is more direct and you can find all kinds of professionals. You will be able to choose your perfect candidate and contact him directly. However, you will not have any guarantee that he will show interest in your business, this can slow down the process a lot.

Contacts of your employees:

Once you have work companions, your circle of contacts will also be wider, since you can use their trusted environment to find competent professionals. Their networks of contacts can be just as helpful as yours in finding trusted and qualified people to join your project.

Above all, one must be respectful in cases in which the intended candidate already has a contract with another company. But sometimes a worker decides to make the transition from a large company to a startup, so you can move others to do the same.

Finding the best employees for your startup is not easy, but fortunately, there are more and more resources at your fingertips to achieve it.

Aptitude questions:

Once we have our candidate well presented, it is time to find out what he or she knows how to do and what he has done, both in work situations and outside of that. To ask questions related to aptitudes, as interviewers we only have the curriculum vitae to guide us.

Some of the answers to our questions will be included in the CV, but we must ask extra questions to investigate more about our candidate’s skills, focusing our efforts on what we need within the company. Some questions can be:

– What functions did you perform in your previous job?

– I see that you know _____, in what jobs have you applied it in your professional and/or educational career?

– What has your greatest professional achievement been?

– Have you had to resolve a crisis? How?

We can formulate this last question from a professional point of view or a personal one. Sometimes the candidates do not always have long experience, and even more so if they are young.

We have all had moments of crisis or conflict in our lives and, as employers, we are interested in how our candidate deals with them since it will be a way of seeing how he acts in difficult situations: if he remains calm, if he reflects before acting, or if it is instinctive and unwrapped in the face of difficulties.

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