Is your start up hiring? Make sure you do your homework.

Whether your company has been around for one month or one hundred years, when you’re expanding into a new market, you have to hire with a start-up mentality. Hiring is an incredible opportunity, but it’s also a risk. As a start-up, you have fewer resources, so if a new hire doesn’t work out, it causes significant burden to the rest of the team. And if you’re managing a new team from a distance, the stakes are even higher. No pressure, but who you hire can make or break your start-up’s success!

Start-ups have a unique dynamic, and not everyone is well suited for it. It might be enticing to hire a seasoned professional from a big name company, but be careful. They may experience culture shock when they don’t have as many resources or a large team to take care of tasks for them.

Interviewing is obviously the biggest tool recruiters currently use to find the right fit for a team. Interviewing candidates is an art, both from the interviewer and the interviewee standpoints. Some candidates are great at selling themselves, others more reserved. It could be they grew up in a culture where self-promotion was considered a vice, not a virtue, and not indicative of how well they’d perform in a role. Some recruiters are better than others at bringing out the best in candidates in a conversation.

So how do you know if a candidate will fly or flounder in your company’s entrepreneurial culture? Look for these traits:

  1. Accountability: Determine how the candidate owns his or her work. Notice if he or she answers questions with “I” or “We”. It’s imperative in a start-up that employees take full responsibility for their roles, tasks and actions.
  2. Self-motivation: In a start-up you don’t have as much time for rah-rah speeches and trying to light a fire under your team. You need an employee who has an intrinsic desire to work hard and perform well.
  3. Flexibility: One day the goal might be sales, the next traffic. Mission statements and organization charts evolve quickly. To succeed in a start-up, one must be able to adapt to change.
  4. Skill/Education: Certainly, having the right skills and education for a role brings results. The closer a candidate matches the expertise you need the less time they’ll need to be trained.
  5. Passion: Believing in the mission of your company and having a passion for the work you’re doing is key for start-up company employees. It’s what will keep them going in the middle of the night before a big launch.
  6. Resourceful: An ideal start-up employee knows how to solve problems, often with little resources. Like business Macgyvers, they can make big things happen with Excel and a couple of paper clips.

You don’t have to rely on hours of subjective interviews to figure out if your candidate is “the one.” Identifying a candidate’s personality traits objectively can be done using a people analytics tool like the Talentoday Manager. Here’s an example profile of a real person who is currently successful at a start-up. As you can see, with one glance you can identify areas of strength to match the profile you need.

Talentoday further identifies her as a great start-up candidate with these insights:

Creativity 8 / 10: She likes to be innovative and find original solutions. She is not very conventional.

Stress Management 8 / 10: She finds it easy to keep her cool in stressful situations. She performs well under pressure.

Motivations — Security 1 / 10: She does not need security in her work; she likes to take risks.

Motivation — Need for Relations 9 / 10: She is motivated by teamwork and relations with others are very important.

The most important asset a start-up has is its people. When reviewing your candidates, identifying their personality traits is even more important than evaluating their skills. With the right personality traits, an employee can gain experience and move up the ladder, developing into exactly the long-term employee you need.

Allie Powers

Curious to find out your professional traits? Check out our page to take your free personality assessment today. And if you like this post, please hit the ❤️ button below or give me a shout on Twitter.