Hiring for your start up? Become a hiring wizard with this free webinar and these recruiting tips.
If you are an entrepreneur you want nothing short of mystical candidates. Individuals that make something out of nothing and can conjure a lead out of thin air. 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!
If you want to learn all the ins and outs of recruiting for small companies and large companies alike tune into our free webinar on December 14th. Not only will you leave with valuable knowledge on how to assess your candidates soft skills & hard skills but we will also delve into the interview process and how to detect what is beyond the curtain. A professional recruiter give you her insights and you will leave with the tools to play psychologist and truly choose a candidate for the long haul.
But wait there is more..
In the mean time, lets discuss the traits you should look for in a candidate so you can land the perfect person for your company.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 magical beast you always dreamed of.
Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidate quickly & effectively for free!
Let’s face it, recruiting can be difficult. Let us help.
Join our free webinar to get in on the secrets of hiring for your start up