Hiring for your startup, however, is just as much a risk as it is a benchmark for success. According to the Small Business Administration, 1 small business in 5 fails in its first year of operation. Yet here you are, ready to begin expanding the staff that will define the early years of, what you hope to be, a game-changing startup with a lot to offer the world. Here’s 5 reasons why your startup isn’t recruiting well.
But first things first: hiring without breaking the bank or hurting your chances of surviving past your startup’s first birthday. Easier said than done. What common recruitment mistakes do many startups make?
1. Rushed recruitment
Startups tend to demand more from their entrepreneurs than the typical 40-hour workweek allows. Cramming recruitment in wherever possible is not ideal.
A fleshed-out hiring plan will ease recruiting tensions later. Block off a few hours of time to concentrate instead of addressing recruitment piecemeal.
2. Fear of fast turnover
Terrified by what you can lose because of a bad hire? You’re not the only one.
Startups and small businesses are all extremely vulnerable to high churn rates. Depending on the position in question, the cost of hiring and training one employee then rehiring and retraining another after the first doesn’t work out is enough to put startups in serious financial peril.
But do you know what’s worse that picking the wrong candidate? Not hiring anyone at all and atrophying from indecision. With a detailed recruitment plan, hiring won’t feel so risky.
3. Failure to impress self-starters
Every employee hired by a startup, regardless of position, must be willing to embrace the entrepreneurial vision of the organization’s founder.
Many mischaracterize millennials and members of Gen Z as favoring startup culture over corporate culture when in fact a survey from Infosys found the polar opposite.
Although many of the 1,000 16- to 25-year-olds polled were interested in starting their own business, less than 10 percent wanted to work for someone else’s startup.
Hiring managers who ask themselves these two questions can better align their recruitment interests with those of the candidates applying:
- Are your leaders a bit on the abrasive side? While it’s a stereotype about startup founders, it can have a grain of truth to it. Assertiveness is a good quality when fighting for investment or competing in the market, but less so when hiring.
- Is the value proposition strong enough? If hiring managers fail to articulate personal and professional fulfillment for candidates into job interviews, their startups will not convince go-getters to join up.
4. Selling an undeveloped culture
Culture is the advantage startups have over big businesses, but culture only gets you so far.
According to a study conducted by TINYpulse CEO David Niu and Mark Roberge, chief revenue officer at HubSpot, 70 percent of startups suffer from “cultural chasms” in their third or fourth years of operation. A startup with a culture that no longer empowers or resonates with employees or candidates as well as it used to is probably experiencing this phenomenon. It’s important to figure out why your startup isn’t recruiting
What does this mean? A number of things: The culture in question hasn’t matured enough, is in need of refurbishing or ought to return to its roots in order to reclaim its former glory. If culture is to do all the heavy lifting in the recruitment process, startups must define it and integrate it cleanly into their hiring messaging.
5. Being spread too thinly
Today’s “as-a-service” world makes it easy to overextend your recruitment efforts across too many platforms. In attempting to reach everyone, you’ve effectively reached no one – and spent a pretty penny doing so.
Instead, consolidate your recruitment initiatives into a single attack by contacting EBC Associates. EBC can find these reasons why your startup isn’t recruiting well. Our right-fit recruitment strategies leverage the latest tech and industry-leading expertise to deliver a short list of top talent. Save your startup the grief of hiring and speak to EBC Associates today.
