Duedil Blog

So you’ve come up with a brilliant idea, registered with Companies House, and started to look for funding and customers. Now what? Well, how about some staff? Hiring the right people to join your team is absolutely critical for your startup to be a success. It’s a competitive world out there – there are probably many other businesses that do the same thing as you. The best way to differentiate yourself from them is by hiring the best people, people who will help you build your business into a success. With this in mind, here is Duedil’s quick guide to hiring smart.

Getting to know you

The thought of coming up with a hiring structure can be a daunting one that causes costly delays. Instead, start with focusing on the kinds of people that you want at your company. After you’ve come up with a list of skills that you need your new hires to have, the best thing to do is use this as a guideline for acquiring talent, rather than an absolute rule. With these guidelines in mind, concentrate your search on finding people with the right talent, passion, and personality to grow your business. Each company’s specific needs will be different, but it is generally a good idea to seek candidates who possess hustle, curiosity, and intelligence.

If you find someone who seems like a great match who will add to your company, but has a gap in certain skills, hire them anyway; good people can be trained and developed in the areas you need. Constraining yourself to very specific job titles and skill-sets can mean that you miss out on potentially transformational talent. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind the ABC rule: A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s. That is, talented people don’t feel threatened by other talented people, but instead want to bring them on board. Mediocre hires will hire less talented people than themselves, because they fear internal competition. If you only ever hire the best people you can find, you won’t have to worry about standards slipping because of insecure hiring practices. Don’t worry if some of your potential hires are less experienced. What they may lack in experience can be made up for in hunger and creativity.

Attracting the best people to your company isn’t easy, and it often takes months to complete the process. Since it’s such a long process, you can’t afford to only look at one candidate or position at a time. And since the best talent will also attract the most attention (and therefore receive the most job offers), when you do find someone you really like, you’ll need to act fast, before they get snapped up by someone else. In order to do this, you’ll need to be constantly hiring, always on the lookout for talent.

Finding the right person can be a drawn out and tedious affair, and can take you away from important day-to-day tasks in your startup. In order to attract the kind of quality that you want to hire, your company must look like an amazing place to work. When it comes to skilled candidates, there are literally thousands of potential workplaces for them to choose from. You want talented people to seek you out, rather than you spending time hunting them.

Whistle a happy tune

Making a name for yourself is crucial to the success of your business. These days, you don’t need a huge marketing budget to reach users and customers; you just need to be smart with using social media. Post interesting updates to Twitter and Facebook, interact with your followers, write blog posts detailing product updates, attend conferences, and post information to relevant user groups. Develop a blog with articles that explain your features, and post these to your Twitter feed so your followers can keep up to date on your progress. As more people hear about your company, your site’s traffic will increase. To maintain a consistent strategy, your website will need to be simple to navigate, and useful to curious visitors. On your website, show people what a fun place it is to work by giving a glimpse into your company culture, the people, the perks, and events you have outside of work.

When you Tweet about new job opportunities, try and avoid the tired “We’re hiring store managers. Apply here”. It’s boring and will get lost in a sea of chatter.
No-one wants to work for a robot, use this as an opportunity to show your personality.

“We’re hiring! Are you the batman of the accounting world? We want you on our team!”

“We’re looking for the next big thing in marketing. Could you sell Rogain to bigfoot? We want to hear from you!”

“We need a kick-ass new developer to join the team. If you’re more Lulzec than LolCats, get in touch now.”

Retweets are gold. In the beginning, you’ll need to get friends, family and second cousins to retweet your job ads. If you’re funny, light hearted or controversial, you’re more likely to ‘go viral’, so embrace it.

We don’t want to overwhelm you, so we’ll be posting another blog post soon on how to write a great job ad.

A great idea for building relationships, as well as attracting talent, is to attend and host local meet-ups for those in your industry. You’ll get to network with other business owners, and hopefully meet and get to know the kind of people that you want to bring on board. One such upcoming meet-up is Silicon Milkroundabout, on October 30th. This is a great way of getting to know the talent than simply having to trawl through job boards, as CVs are naturally one dimensional.

Bear in mind that we end up spending more time with our colleagues than our families, so make sure that prospective employees can get a good feel for the culture from your website. The most talented jobseekers will be looking for the right cultural fit, so don’t be afraid to highlight your company culture. A great ‘careers’ page should be a taster of what your new hires can expect from life at your startup. If people are turned away by this, then you can rest assured that they wouldn’t have turned out to be a good fit for your company, and vice versa.

The next blog entry will discuss some tips on how to filter through the responses, in order to keep you focused on tasks at hand, instead of spending hours reading CVs. Stay tuned for our next post, Filtering and Interviewing for your Startup

Andrew Connolly

Andrew is a key member of the Duedil team. In addition to coordinating Duedil’s research, social media and PR efforts, Andrew also regularly blogs about useful information for startups and business owners. Duedil is the world’s largest free database of company information. Using data gathered from a variety of sources, including Companies House, Duedil presents business owners, startups, venture capitalists, and the otherwise curious with key insight into any company in the UK and Ireland.