Initial startup hiring: How to hire your initial employees?
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In last Thursday’s column, we had discussed outsourcing for smaller, repetitive and manual tasks. Today we will discuss how you should hire your employees at initial stages of your startup. A startup, as we know has very few employees and tonnes of responsibilities per employee.
When a venture is in starting stages, everything needs to be done - marketing, sales, partnerships, financial management, etc. Since you will focus on futuristic partnerships and other things, here is what you should keep in mind while doing your initial hiring:
Hire leaders
When you see startups posting job advertisements on different portals, you often see this line that they are looking for people with “entrepreneurial” mindset.
Why is that? In your initial days, you will have loads of work and will hardly have time to check if your employees are doing the tasks delegated to them or not. Better have leaders who will lead their projects without requiring a constant push from your side.
Hire people you can trust
Your initial employees will probably know most of your confidential information. Better have people who will maintain it that way.
Get hard working people
This one is tricky. Most people you will interview will claim that they are hard working. Then how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
When you interview them try to look for their previous leadership roles. Have they done something interesting during their college days (in the case of freshers) or in their previous jobs? That should give you a signal.
Filter people who have unwanted behaviour
All of us have distinct personalities and there is only some kind of people whom we get along with. Your employees don’t just have to be talented but also need to gel well with your personality. Or they might end up bad-mouthing you, your startup or the workplace.
Unpleasant politics can kill your venture - especially in its initial days.
Look for optimistic people
A startup journey is full of crests and troughs. You might change your priorities within few months depending on market trends and there is a possibility you might completely pivot your business model. People who are not optimistic will see each of these changes as a possible downfall for your startup. And that’s scary.
An optimistic hire will see that as a change for good. So better be sure you do not have pessimists in your team.
For any queries on your initial hiring, do drop me a mail on tamhankarrajeev@gmail.com . See you guys next week
The writer is the founder of TBS Planet Augmented Reality Comics and tweets @rajeevtamhankar