How Do You Recruit Senior People To Your Tiny Startup?
Recruiting top talent to your startup is tough, especially if you're trying to recruit people from large companies like Facebook. You're not going to be able to overpay to get them. After all, they're already likely making a lot of money.
So what can you do to give yourself a fighting chance? I'll go over the strategy we successfully used, that you can use too, to get top talent to join our startup in this short video.
Read The Video Transcript Below:
So how do you convince a really senior person. An experienced excellent person in your industry to join your tiny little startup? Let me start with how you don't do it.
You don't do it by offering them a huge salary. That's not going to be enough to get a really good person to join your company. That doesn't work.
And from my own personal experience, it has to be that you're giving them something they can't get anywhere else, but your company. We were very fortunate in that we were able to recruit really good, really senior people to our company. And some of these people were making 2X or 3X what we could afford to pay them.
Now we were paying reasonable salaries, but we weren't paying those kind of numbers. So when you look at all the dynamics, here are the dynamics you need to have to make it work.
First is if money's not the issue, then you're okay. Because if it's money and only money that's going to attract them, the only way you win is with stock options. You're not going to do it with salary. You're never going to be able to compete against somebody working at a Facebook or a Google for the money because they're already making a lot of money.
You have to give them something experientially, which gives them the promise of making money, but in the here and now, more importantly, gives them the enjoyment and the satisfaction of being part of a startup and being able to do interesting work. Now, the reality is this is not for everybody.
Not every person that you meet with, not every person that you recruit wants that. That's okay. These are people for later on in the company's life.
When you've reached a further growth in the business where you've gotten to traction, maybe even cashflow positive because at different stages of a company, different people are attracted and they have different risk profiles. Remember that.
So I recruited many people who weren't right, right when we started who joined a year or two or three years later. You always want to keep that pool of recruits going. So always be constantly recruiting. Don't be afraid to reach out to the senior people because maybe they're not right today, but maybe they'll be right a year from now. I'm Brett, www.brettjfox.com have a great, great day.