Without the right talents, no matter how good the entrepreneurial ideas can be.
Alpha says: Talent is important to startups at any time. Teams can’t get up, or people who get the wrong ones can hurt the company. The original author TimJackson is both a continuous entrepreneur and an early investor. He will use his own experience to help entrepreneurs solve the headaches of recruiting people and recruiting people.
For early entrepreneurs, talent is a headache. First, who is the headache, and second, how to recruit people with headaches.
As a continuous entrepreneur, I have suffered from talent recruitment. At the time of my first venture, my top 5 founding employees lost three in a few months, one of whom was the sales executive. She graduated from a top university with ten years of experience and a famous enterprise experience, but for startups, she is “too expensive” and we have to use a lot of options to keep her, but after things are not going well, she Leaving, this slows down the pace of our development.
Another failure was when the company approached the market, we introduced a CEO who has extensive experience in capital operations. After the successful listing, he began to implement “famous enterprise” in the company. The employees took business class and opened the BMW, but the good situation did not last long. After that, the company burned 75% of the money from the IPO. The stock price also fell by more than half.
These two examples illustrate an important issue: Startups should choose the right people at every stage.
When recruiting people in the early stage of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs can’t blindly look for “cattle people”, and they can’t take a team that will “will be”. Determining a talent recruitment strategy that can be implemented for a long time will not allow entrepreneurs to “remediate classes” in the process of company development.
For startups, there is a trade-off between implementation-management, innovation-scale, and recruitment.
Execute-Manage
In the early days of the company, the company’s strength in all aspects is not so strong, and it will tend to attract more people. They not only have a deep understanding and rich experience in their field, but also understand what they should do, and they have more Strong self-driving force.
As the company grows, the organizational structure is no longer as flat as it was in the beginning, and more managers are needed. Managers need to organize employees into one.Start and effectively motivate them to maximize the efficiency of the organization.
Innovation-Scale
In the early days of the venture, the company’s most important mission was to find products that fit the needs of the market. This product is what people really want to pay for. To create such a product, it will be much more difficult than imagined, and the process will be tortuous. Even with a good team, when you build a product, you will go through the long process of creating, testing, modifying, creating, and modifying. In this process, people put forward a new idea, verify them, then modify them, and finally find a product that best fits the market and stabilizes initially. Those who do these things need to be innovative, not only with innovative capabilities but also with innovative spirit.
But the company is growing up not only with talents with innovative capabilities. Whether the company offers products or services, you need to get as many customers or users as possible, and someone needs to support them after the products or services are sold. These talents are completely different from the skills that innovative talents need, but they want to expand and they are necessary.
According to the above four factors, the startup company needs the following four types of people in the initial stage and growth stage:
Innovative managers: can make good ideas, raise goals, plan, and manage people. In other words, he has both creativity and leadership. This role is usually held by the founder of the company.
Innovative executors: To build new products, companies need engineers, product managers, designers, and marketers. These people are usually experts who specialize in their field of expertise, have good ideas and continuous output and contributions, and they don’t need a management team.
Extended executors: When the company expands for the first time, people who are able to stand alone will find themselves busy on the agenda, and then they need to introduce new people and grassroots management. Their task is not to create new things, but to expand what has been created and benefit more people. If you use a metaphor, they are like machine operators.
Extended Manager: When your product is mature and has enough users and customers, your workforce is growing, and it’s hard to maintain a flat organization and grassroots managers. High efficiency, then it may be necessary to introduce senior managers. But there is actually a pit here. If it is a foreign executive, it is not so familiar with the company’s business and culture. Their role is more to manage people than to be a pioneer.
At every stage of the company, the needs of talents and organizations are different, and the appeal to talents is different. Entrepreneurs can use the factors of execution-management, innovation-scale to determine who they should recruit and what kind of talent strategy to use at different stages.
After understanding who should be recruited at each stage, there are specific things that startups should pay attention to when recruiting. As a startup company, it is difficult to compete with big technology companies in terms of talent attraction. Whether you are in Silicon Valley, London or Beijing, talents may choose Facebook and Google. Or Tencent, Ali; they raise the benchmark of talent, startups want to recruit the right talent, will pay more, and the initial high labor costs are not good for startups.
This requires better doing the other aspects of the details, improving the experience of the candidates, and tilting their balance to the startup.
Transparent and formalizing the recruitment process
Most start-ups not only have no talent strategy, but also formalize the recruitment process, and the recruitment process is confusing. When you have a reasonable process of hiring, such as resume screening, telephone notifications, written tests, interviews, etc., and can clearly and clearly show these processes transparently, candidates will have a clearer expectation, and Improve their trust.
Respond quickly
Fast and flexible is often the strength of a startup, but there are some startups that can’t do it on the job. One founder said that when recruiting senior positions, they usually have two board members interview candidates at the same time, but such interviews usually take three weeks to organize. Think about what it means to the candidate. In three weeks, he may be able to wait and be cut off by other efficient companies.
When designing a specific recruitment strategy, strict control is one aspect. In addition, it is necessary to reflect on whether those processes that are too well designed will increase costs and reduce efficiency. Entrepreneurs should fully consider the needs of both themselves and the candidates when designing the recruitment process, make the process as concise as possible, and respond quickly when executed so that you can not miss opportunities when outstanding talents appear.
Understanding the needs of candidates
When a company chooses a candidate, the candidate will also think about which job opportunity is best for them. This includes not only salary, commuting, responsibility and job content, but also whether the job is promising and whether it can bring long-term benefits to his life plan. So in recruitmentIn the early stages of the process, startups should ask candidates about their various requirements and demonstrate in a later interview why the company can meet these requirements. Actively helping outstanding candidates solve their worries, both demonstrating the company’s capabilities and signaling the candidate’s ability to provide long-term growth.
Let the reliable candidate know more about the company
Some candidates are willing to make friends with colleagues, and some just want to go home after they have finished their work. But every candidate will care about their future colleagues, because everyone will want to have a harmonious relationship, and no one is willing to work with the “pig teammates.” For more reliable candidates, in addition to scheduling interviews, candidates can also have lunch or coffee together with company employees to communicate and reach in an informal and easier way. Compared with the indifference and formulation of big companies, the easier working atmosphere of a startup company and the simple relationship of colleagues will make people feel more belonging.
In addition, you can also ask the candidate to come to the company to actually do the work to be done before approaching the job. The purpose of this is to let both parties confirm that the candidate is really suitable for the job. The worse thing than losing a good candidate is that after he got into the job, after a short period of time, he found that he was not suitable for the job and then resigned. This will cause both the candidate and the startup to suffer unnecessary losses.
Reasonable use of options
For many candidates, the salary of a startup is not necessarily attractive. What attracts people is the option and the growth of the option. But for others, they will think of options as drawing cakes, because in the current venture capital environment, many companies will break through and valuations will drop even if they go public, making many people who get options. It is difficult to exercise power.
For each candidate, clearly explain to them the company’s allocation of options, the method and timing of exercise, and the benefits and risks of options. For candidates who want to protect their lives at this stage, they can give more cash. For candidates with better future and growth prospects, the options are given more. In short, manage the candidate’s expectations, use options to be motivated, and don’t let the candidate feel like being painted.
Finally, the pool of options for employees should also be managed. Of course, this part invites entrepreneurs and their professional lawyers to conduct in-depth discussions and design according to their respective situations.
This article is compiled from Medium, the original author isContinuous entrepreneur, early investor TimJackson.