Staffing Your Startup
Employees are the lifeblood of any business, and nowhere are staff more vital than in a startup. Having a team of excited and talented staff who share in a company vision can push your business needs if you want to survive long enough to sustain long-term growth. Alternatively, having an organization made up of staff who do not share in the company’s values or even feel excited by their work will show in the output. This is especially true in the early days when most start-ups only have a small and select team around them. Staffing your startup is all about finding the right people that you need to help your startup grow. This guide is here to help by giving you some ideas about how you can best find the right employees you need for your startup to flourish.
Understand Your Company’s Mission
When you are looking for the perfect employees for your startup, the last thing you want will be somebody who just clocks in, gets paid, and clocks out. When you’re starting a business, you need to all be prepared for long, exciting nights trying to sort out last-minute existential crises. You will want the top talent with you on those nights, talent that believes in your company and wants to help it fulfil its goals.
To secure this top talent and get them on-board, you must have a fleshed-out understanding of your company’s mission and vision. You need to thoroughly articulate this to any potential employees in a manner that is easily digestible at the drop of a hat. A good way to do this is to create a mission statement that explains your company’s goals and potential employees. You should also include your company’s mission in every elevator pitch you make.
Never Undervalue Training
There are many reasons why you might be struggling to fit specific positions within your startup. Maybe you don’t have the budget for the talent with specific skills, or maybe the role you are trying to fill is very niche and therefore only limited people with relevant skills. Whatever the reason might be, training should never be undervalued when it comes to your staff.
Training enables you to develop those people who fit with your company culture and vision in such a way that their value can improve dramatically. There are many ways to do this as a startup, but one such way is to create unique eLearning courses for your startup that enable you to quickly and easily train staff for specific job roles.
Offering Growth Opportunities
A great way to get exciting and highly ambitious people working for your start-up is to offer a structure that provides clear career growth opportunities. Even though they might not be doing what they want right now, having clear growth opportunities will help them to motivate themselves to work hard and grow with the company as it evolves. Illustrating this growth potential is a great way of showing a prospective employee that your startup values your staff and their future career. It means a lot when you value employee growth so much that you include growth strategies and progressions in your business plan.
Develop an Employer Brand and Workplace Culture
Offering an exciting and enjoyable work environment is an excellent strategy to attract that new talent and keep the highly skilled staff members you already have. When you focus on company culture, your staff will take pride in working for your startup, as long as they believe in that culture. When you have employees on board who fully believe in the company culture, they will be more productive, but you will have higher employee retention rates. If an employee is working in an environment and culture that they do not feel fulfils them, they will have poor performance and even experience anxiety or depression issues.
The antidote or preventative to this is to provide work that means a lot to staff and inspires them every day. If the nature of the work is boring – try to gamify some aspect of it. If employees need to work closely together, do everything you can to foster those relationships. That isn’t only good for staff members, but it improves productivity and reduces turnover.
Become the Head Hunter
As an entrepreneur, you should be used to identifying and nurturing leads. Rather than relying on other people to find you the staff, you need for your startup, why not take measures into your own hands and recruit people for your business. This is easier than ever with the internet – try scouting LinkedIn for potential staff members.
