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Post-funding recruitment startup
August 8, 2017

Post-Funding Startup Recruitment (3/3)

Aik Deveneijns
Aik Deveneijns Founder/CEO

You’ve got the funds? Time to talent!

This is the last and most awesome post of our post-funding startup recruitment series, that will get you started on getting your hiring in order: the last 2 P’s of startup recruitment – perks and product.

In the previous posts, we’ve covered: people – leveraging your company culture, process and payment – getting agreement on your process, whipping out your ATS, interviewing and establishing relationships. And thinking about salary and equity.

Perks are nice, but the product is more important than you’d think. Let’s get going!

Perks

This is the fun part! Perks are those things you offer to your employees that they brag about to their friends and family when they are out of the office.

The Google’s and Facebook’s of the world have got perks down to an art. But c’mon, startups can’t even begin to compete with those big fish, right? Wrong!

You may not be able to provide 24-7 gourmet meals or computer accessories, vending machines or free bikes to use during the workday. However, there are a number of things you can do to make your employees feel appreciated!

Take your team on a few company outings a year, have a holiday party, provide ergonomic seating, have happy hour on Fridays. Even buying your team lunch a couple of times per week (more than the typical bread + cheese + spread) or allowing dogs in the office can differentiate you from the competitors. You could even deck your team out with company-branded shirts or sweatshirts.

And involve/invite the families and friends of your employees to your events! Believe it or not, when you do this the retention rate of employees who involve people from their personal lives is typically higher.

Oh yes, and don’t forget to take lots of pictures and post them to your Careers, Facebook, and Glassdoor pages. This way you promote your employer brand, as candidates can see how well you as a Founder treat your team. This is the part that should make you feel good about what you are providing to people.

Product

This one is a no brainer. Have an awesome product or service and people will knock on your door asking to help build it (eventually, hopefully).

If your product isn’t sexy, groundbreaking, or cool, the ‘A’ players you want to hire to help you build it will simply not want to work for your company.

In this case, you may need to settle with ‘B’ or ‘C’ players. That is something you should try to accept early on before you waste a bunch of time, money, and recruiting efforts on hunting the best of the best.

Maybe ask yourself this: If a recruiter approached you, would you leave your potentially high paying, cushy job and take a risk on your idea? If the answer is no, it’s probably time to think of something else or settle with ‘B’ or ‘C’ talent.

A way to make up for this is to offer equity along with long term contracts and/or have an awesome company culture and perks.

So there you have it… the last 2Ps of post-funding startup recruitment: perks and product. Finding good talent is challenging, and competitive, but we’ve all got to do it. Good luck to you, my founding friends!

If you missed the other two 3 P’s of post-funding startup recruitment, here you can find them:

Post-funding startup recruitment (1/3): People

Post-funding startup recruitment (2/3): Process & payment

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