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Hiring people for your startup

Hiring people for your startup
Anastasios Vasileiadis
by Anastasios Vasileiadis
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One of the most exciting and the most challenging aspects of running a start-up is hiring staff. When you begin to become successful you will find that you need people to help you out. This means taking on new staff.

You may even be a position where you’re on your own and you need one other person or two people to help lighten the load of the work you have to do. Whatever the situation, taking on new staff can be an absolute nightmare unless you do it properly.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” - Jim Collins

Your main aim initially is to put together a good person spec for your job that you want to fill. Having a detailed and effective person spec ensures that you get the right person into the role. Putting the time in at this early stage is invaluable, because you’ll have more chances of finding the correct personality and right level of experience for the job that you need doing. The reason for having someone hired is that you can then get on with the work of building in more sales and bringing in more revenue for your company. So it is important that you find the right person for the job. A good person spec is fundamental.

Make sure you are realistic about your expectations. Obviously, you want to find the right person, but you will not necessarily get the perfect person immediately. People often take time to grow into their jobs, so hiring someone means looking at what you need at a basic level and then thinking about your wish list of further skills and attributes that you’d like to see in the applicant. The one thing you must not do is try and write a person spec for what is effectively the perfect employee.

Consider your own experiences

And it is also important that you think about your own experiences when you were trying to find a job. This may seem a long time ago, but think about all those times you really wanted to apply for a job but felt that the job spec had one or two aspects that you just couldn’t satisfy. Other than those two aspects you were perfect for the role. You probably even felt that it was a great shame, because if you had a chance to start you were sure that you’d grow into it and show how you could actually demonstrate the skills and attributes. But the job spec demanded more than you could offer.

The same could be true for your person specification. Running a start-up is not easy, and you want somebody who can get to work quickly and bring results. This means spreading your net that little bit wider when you’re putting together your person specification. Your startup will benefit from creativity, And this means putting people in place that are less than perfect, but have passion in bucket loads. Making your start-up business a success means finding good people who work hard to get better. With your person specification, you need to bear this in mind.

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