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In today’s highly competitive business landscape, hiring the right talent is tough. It’s tougher for startups with big dreams but usually, stringent budgets. If you are a startup owner and plan to find and hire top talent for your business, having a plan will help.
Hiring Plan For a Startup – How to Create One?
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An effective hiring plan for a startup should outline
- When to hire
- Who to hire
- For which positions to hire
- How to hire
- Expected hiring costs
Not sure why you need a startup hiring plan? Without having one in place, you will risk
- A long wait time to hire
- Overhiring
- Overspending
- Growing inefficiently
Whether you are hiring the first team for your startup or bringing in people while scaling, having a plan is crucial.
Though you may not realise the importance of a hiring plan for your startup when hiring a people or two, putting systems in place will help you significantly when you grow a 10-member team to a 50 or 100-member team across 5 or 10 departments.
Ready to create a hiring plan?
Here’s a 4-step process, which you can mould to make it fit your hiring needs better, if necessary:
1. When to Hire
Do you want to hire before your “Series A” funding? Or before you pitch to investors? Having a detailed startup hiring plan will let you craft your budget accordingly and help your potential investors see how you want to use the amount and plan to grow.
2. Create a Hiring Process for Your Startup
You need to create hiring processes for:
- Meeting hiring needs: Do you need to hire interns for your startup? Or developers? Or programmers? Or a head of sales? Or a CTO (Chief Technology Officer)? Who will be in charge of meeting these hiring needs and through what steps? Answering these questions is crucial.
- Deciding the salary: How do you decide the salary ranges? How much do you plan to allocate for referral bonuses or the fees to be paid to the recruiting agency or headhunter?
- Sourcing and recruiting: Will you use traditional job boards? Or professional networks and referrals? Or social media to find candidates? Do you plan to target both active and passive candidates? Will you handle the hiring process in-house or bring in a recruiter or headhunter? In either of these cases, who will handle what specific tasks (such as writing job descriptions, short-listing and screening candidates, contacting them, conducting interviews, etc.)? How do you plan to use technology (including AI) for hiring?
Image courtesy: Ryan Musselman on LinkedIn
- Setting a budget: This will include your initial costs (such as the paperwork, running background checks, etc.) and recurring costs (salary and benefits).
- Making the final hiring decision: This step involves deciding who will have the authority to approve or decline the recruitment of a candidate. Will it be the CEO, CTO, CFO, Sales Director, or the Head of HR? In case it’s decided to move forward with a candidate, who will negotiate and approve salaries?
3. Decide Your Hiring Needs
Your hiring needs should align with your business goals. It’s vital to decide whether you want to hire professionals for the short-term or long-term. To avoid overhiring, it’s vital to hire for necessary roles.
You can ask your existing employees to know where you are over- or under-resourced, if new roles need to be created and hired for to make their job pressure bearable, and get other insights related to your hiring needs.
4. Launch Your Recruiting Process
Once you have ironed out the above details, you are ready to launch your hiring plan.
Top 3 Qualities to Prioritise When Hiring for Startups
1. Passion and Alignment With Your Business Mission
Startups aren’t easy to survive. Unless your prospective candidates are passionate about working with you, they aren’t likely to stick around for long. However, passion needn’t necessarily be about a specific thing.
It could be about your offering (product or service), your company values, the mission you have your eyes set on, or the pain point of your customers that you want to address. Believing that your offering is going to make the world better and staying motivated to contribute to it with fervour will help your future employees navigate the crests and troughs of startup life and emerge stronger on the other side.
Alignment with your business mission is equally crucial for your candidates. It fuels their motivation and drives them to perform their allotted tasks with passion. If there’s any conflict, it will hit the focus and productivity of your new hires, which will ultimately affect your bottom-line adversely.
2. An Entrepreneurial Mindset
Startups are driven by a blend of grit, innovation, desire to learn, collaboration, problem-solving abilities, willingness to take risks, and proactive attitude. All these make up the inherent recipe of what’s called entrepreneurship.
Candidates with an entrepreneurial mindset will show the above traits and even have the resourcefulness and ability to thrive in ambiguity (especially where there’s a complete lack of systems and procedures, which characterises many early-stage startups).
Hiring these candidates who can think ahead, not get bogged down by repeated failures, are ready to test, fail, learn, and reiterate, willing to improvise and hustle, come up with stellar ideas, and anticipate things can make an impact and help your business.
3. Adaptability
Working with a startup could mean sitting at your desk one day, working on the go the next, and then doing WFH (work-from-home) for the next 2-3 days. Since startups often experience rapid changes and evolving priorities as they rush to meet the varying demands of their clients and adapt to the dynamic nature of their industry, they need people who are adaptable and flexible.
Be it working from anywhere, accepting new challenges, learning new skills, pivoting when necessary, or wearing multiple hats, candidates who are adaptable are preferred over those who aren’t.
Final Words
Hiring for startups needn’t be tough. Once you have set up a hiring process for your startup and know what qualities to prioritise, you can streamline and accelerate your search for top talent.
In case your search doesn’t yield the desired results, you can always rely on us at InHunt World. Whether you are hiring developers, programmers, interns, or C-level executives for your startup, we can help meet your hiring needs.
This article was written by InHunt World