It takes the right team of people to turn a new venture into a lucrative business, but when you are competing for talent with global companies both large and small, how do you stand out from the crowd?
If you’re a start up or entrepreneur looking to grow your business by expanding your team, we’ve spoken to a number of successful start ups in order to get their insights and advice on sourcing and retaining talent.
First up we have expertise from John Peebles, the CEO of Administrate. Administrate is a developer of software that assists training companies and training departments to manage and deliver e-learning courses.
How important is your team to the success of your business?
Our team is the most important thing for our business! We rely on our team to build our products, sell them, service them, and get the word out about them.
What do you do differently in order to attract new talent?
We like to emphasize the fact that by working at Administrate you’re going to be working in a fast paced, high responsibility environment that is driven by our values. Some things that set us apart from other employers are the fact that we give a lot of autonomy, have a lot of hard problems to solve, provide huge transparency into how the business is running (all company stats are available to all employees), and we only work 4 days a week (32 hours) while paying a 5 day wage!
What advice do you have for start ups looking to grow their team?
Focus on building a great work environment that you yourself would love to work in. Really think about the company culture and codify it as much as possible so that when you grow you don’t lose sight.
Finally we have insights from Ry Morgan, the Co-founder and CEO of Yomp. Yomp provides a health and wellbeing platform that helps to increase productivity, reduce absenteeism and boost employee engagement.
How important is your team to the success of your business?
In my mind, business is all about people – so the team is of paramount importance to any business’ success. I love the expression “the people with the best people win” as it’s often true in the realms of start up – the company with the most committed, cohesive talent often outperform competitors. If you put “people” before “profits” then, funnily enough, you often get more of the latter.
What do you do differently in order to attract new talent?
We’re a very open, authentic organization and as a result we get the entire team involved during the recruitment process. As a small team of 8 (at the time of writing), each new person represents a significant chunk of the entire company – so the last stage of any hire is taking them out for a pint/coffee with the entire gang so as to gauge personality / culture fit. I think this also gives the candidate the sense of being a people-centric company – which I imagine is an alluring trait for a prospective employer.
What advice do you have for start ups looking to grow their team?
I always cite two quick soundbites when it comes to recruitment… The first is “character over competence” or, in other words, place more importance on the team / culture / passion fit of the person than their skill-set per se, as the technical ability can be taught, whereas their personality is inherent across everything they do. Don’t rush hires – it’ll cost you more in the long-run.
We hope that the advice provided by these start ups has given you inspiration on ways you can both attract and retain the talent needed to grow your business.
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