Why recruitment for startups is different

Recruiting for a startup is very different from recruiting for established companies.

Established companies have clear job descriptions and requirements, defined recruitment processes, are relatively stable and have an established employer brand.

The startup work environment is characterized by constant flux and change of direction, undefined processes and a strong variety in work activities.

Because of these differences recruiting for a startup brings different hiring goals, job requirements and ways of working compared to recruiting for an established company.

Startups have specific challenges to overcome in hiring for growth:

1. Need for talent that is growth minded and tech savvy

The most important difference is that the people that flourish in a startup are very different from talent that do well in a process oriented, structured and political environment of an established company. You need talent that is growth minded and that has the right tech and growth related skills. That talent is a rare breed and high in demand and therefore hard to find.

2. Unestablished employer brand

A startup has limited reach in terms of candidates that can be reached through the existing network and channels. This results in significantly less inbound candidate leads when compared to more established companies. Chances are very small that you find an engineer that is skilled enough in your technology stack by just posting a job on some job boards. Therefore startup recruiters need to include passive candidate sourcing in their sourcing strategy.

3. Limited recruitment resources

A startup has a limited number of recruiters and limited budget for recruitment tooling and campaigns. This means you have to be creative in your sourcing strategy. You have to look for talent in places where others are not searching and you have to differentiate your outreach from other recruiters to stand out.

4. High speed of scaling the team

The startup environment and needs are changing rapidly. And so are the recruitment goals and job requirements. The one moment you might be looking for a sales executive and a couple months later for an entire engineering team. Because of this you need to adjust your recruitment strategy on a regular basis.

The practical guide to startup recruitment

So how do overcome these challenges and find the best growth minded tech talent? 

This practical guide will help you to better equip yourself to hire the right people following these topics:

1. How to understand who you need to hire
2. How to find the right candidates
3. How to reach out and engage candidates
4. How to move from candidate to hire

1. How to understand who you need to hire

Who you need to hire depends on many factors.

The candidate's skills, background and experience are obviously important, also in a startup.

But in a startup environment some additional factors play an important role in deciding who you need to hire.

You need to take into account the current stage of growth of the startup and any expected changes in responsibilities in the near future since the startup goals and requirements are changing rapidly.

These are the steps to better understand who you need to hire.

Determine the job title and key criteria

Think of a position title that matches your desired position.

Maybe you have already seen a profile on for example LinkedIn that you think matches with what you need.

Is there a hiring manager or are there colleagues that will directly work with the future employee? Then involve them in the process, from brainstorming to decision.

Filter the needs for the position down to five key criteria that you think the candidate should at least bring.

Next to the hard skills that you include in your criteria, also define what kind of personality you are looking for.

To determine the desired personality you can use this startup personality assessment.

Write the Job description

Translate the key criteria into a job description.

Use a clear structure and if you’re not sure where to start use a job description template.

Topics that the job description should cover at a minimum:

• Job title: Keywords of the role, seniority level and region (if applicable)
• Location: Country, region and indicate if (partly) remote work
• About: Your company’s mission, team and culture
• Responsibilities: The job that the candidate is going to do on a daily or weekly basis
• Requirements: Experience years, skills, market experience, languages
• Benefits: Incentive scheme, stock options, goodies, salary, company fun
• Learn more: Include links to company culture page, core values, product page, the mission statement, the team and overview with customers
  

Also take into account the alternative job titles talent will be searching for and use these in the job description.

Tools that help you write a good job description

• ‍Enlighten Jobs: Job and recruitment glossary to check for job title synonyms
• ‍QuillBot: Rephrasing tool to improve your job description text

Optionally do a talent mapping

Optionally do a talent mapping.

Talent mapping is the process of assessing the entire available talent pool that matches your job criteria.

A talent mapping results in a number representing the total addressable talent market.

The benefits of talent mapping are that you have a realistic view of the total size of the talent pool and that you can anticipate possible challenges during the sourcing process better.

Here’s a detailed guide on how to do a talent mapping.

2. How to find the right people

When you have a clear picture of who you want to hire you want to find the people who match that picture.

Because startups are relatively small and have an unestablished employer brand, you can’t just rely on active job seekers who apply to your job on a job board or your career website.

You will have to find the candidates yourself.

You can do that either by passive sourcing or through referrals. 

Recruitment through referrals is a well known recruitment strategy so we focus here on how you can find candidates yourself by searching across a variety of platforms.

We also go through cross referencing candidates, applying role specific recruitment strategies and setting Google Alerts for layoffs.

Alternative platforms to source startup talent on

Tech talent in most cases have plenty of career opportunities.

This means you are competing with recruiters that source at scale for these candidates.

Therefore you have to search in places where most recruiters don’t.

Here cross platform sourcing comes in.

Cross platform sourcing is searching for candidates across a variety of professional and social media platforms, rather than being limited to one platform. 

For most recruiters LinkedIn is still the only source of hiring.

So there is a big opportunity to embrace alternative platforms to find candidates on.

Cross platform sourcing has some big benefits:

• There is less competition on alternative platforms compared to LinkedIn
• Candidate information that you can find on other platforms is in many cases richer in terms of professional activity and interests
• Alternative platforms are usually representing a niche of people who show very strong interest in a specific domain

Some of the best alternative platforms where startups are finding talent on are:

GitHub: With 65 million engineers GitHub is the platform with the most active engineering users, beating LinkedIn and any other platform. A goldmine of rich and up to tech skills information. How to recruit talent on GitHub.

Stack Overflow: This question and answer forum has over 14 million developers and up to date tech skills information. Stack Overflow is a must for sourcing tech talent. How to recruit talent on Stack Overflow‍

Reddit: The Redditors community is one of the biggest and most underestimated online communities today with 330 million users. Redditors engage in comical, but also professional discussions. How to recruit talent on Reddit‍.

AngelList: Angellist is home to startup enthusiasts that don’t only have the right skillset, but also the right mindset for a work environment with rapid change. How to source talent on AngelList‍.

XING: The assumption is that LinkedIn is used globally as the primary professional network. Not true for Germany. Xing is the leading professional network site here and it is gaining more users in other countries as well. How to source talent on XING‍.

Kaggle: With 5 million data scientists and machine learning experts, Kaggle is the go to source for finding data talent. How to source talent on Kaggle‍.

Medium: Medium is one of the leading publishing platforms where professionals showcase their thought leadership in their domain. This is the place to look for talent that wants to get their voice heard. How to source talent on Medium.

If you want to learn more on using alternative platforms to source talent go to our blog series on cross platform sourcing.

Tools that help you find the best candidates cross platform

• Recruitin: an Xray search string generator that creates the right Boolean search strings for several platforms based on the fields you choose to include in your search
• HeroHunt: a cross platform talent search engine specifically designed for tech companies