The ultimate guide to building your startup team

5 min readSep 8, 2021

Recruiting for a startup means recruiting hard to find talent with limited resources and rapidly changing requirements. So how do you know who to hire, how to find them, reach them and how to hire them? This guide is made for you.

Why recruitment for startups is different

Recruiting for a startup is very different from recruiting for established companies. Established companies have have clear job descriptions and requirements, defined recruitment processes, are relatively stable and have an established employer brand.

The startup work environment is one which is characterized by a constant flux, undefined processes and a strong variety in work activities.

This results in a different dynamic, hiring goals and job criteria.

Therefore startups have specific challenges to overcome in hiring for growth:

1. Need for talent that is growth minded and tech savvy

The most important difference is that the people that flourish in a startup are very different from talent that do well in a process oriented, structured and political environment of an established company. You need talent that is growth minded and that has the right tech and growth related skills. That talent is a rare breed and high in demand and therefore hard to find.

2. Unestablished employer brand

A startup has limited reach in terms of candidates that can be reached through the existing network and channels. This results in significantly less inbound candidate leads when compared to more established companies. Chances are very small that you find an engineer that is skilled enough in your technology stack by just posting a job on some job boards. Therefore startup recruiters need to include passive candidate sourcing in their sourcing strategy.

3. Limited recruitment resources

A startup has a limited number of recruiters and limited budget for recruitment tooling and campaigns. This means you have to be creative in your sourcing strategy. You have to look for talent in places where others are not searching and you have to differentiate your outreach from other recruiters to stand out.

4. High speed of scaling the team

The startup environment and needs are changing rapidly. And so are the recruitment goals and job requirements. The one moment you might be looking for a sales executive and a couple months later for an entire engineering team. Because of this you need to adjust your recruitment strategy on a regular basis.

Work related needs of startup talent (link)

The practical guide to startup recruitment

So how do overcome these challenges and find the best growth minded tech talent?

This practical guide will help you to better equip yourself to hire the right people following these topics:

How to understand who you need to hire
How to find the right candidates
How to reach out and engage candidates
How to move from candidate to hire

1. How to understand who you need to hire

Who you need to hire depends on many factors.

The candidate’s skills, background and experience are obviously important, also in a startup.

But in a startup environment some additional factors play an important role in deciding who you need to hire.

You need to take into account the current stage of growth of the startup and any expected changes in responsibilities in the near future since the startup goals and requirements are changing rapidly.

These are the steps to better understand who you need to hire.

Determine the job title and key criteria

Think of a position title that matches your desired position.

Maybe you have already seen a profile on for example LinkedIn that you think matches with what you need.

Is there a hiring manager or are there colleagues that will directly work with the future employee? Then involve them in the process, from brainstorming to decision.

Filter the needs for the position down to five key criteria that you think the candidate should at least bring.

Next to the hard skills that you include in your criteria, also define what kind of personality you are looking for.

To determine the desired personality you can use this startup personality assessment.

Write the Job description

Translate the key criteria into a job description.

Use a clear structure and if you’re not sure where to start use a job description template.

Topics that the job description should cover at a minimum:

Job title: Keywords of the role, seniority level and region (if applicable)
Location: Country, region and indicate if (partly) remote work
About: Your company’s mission, team and culture
Responsibilities: The job that the candidate is going to do on a daily or weekly basis
Requirements: Experience years, skills, market experience, languages
Benefits: Incentive scheme, stock options, goodies, salary, company fun
Learn more: Include links to company culture page, core values, product page, the mission statement, the team and overview with customers

Also take into account the alternative job titles talent will be searching for and use these in the job description.

Tools that help you write a good job description

‍Enlighten Jobs: Job and recruitment glossary to check for job title synonyms
‍QuillBot: Rephrasing tool to improve your job description text

Optionally do a talent mapping

Optionally do a talent mapping.

Talent mapping is the process of assessing the entire available talent pool that matches your job criteria.

A talent mapping results in a number representing the total addressable talent market.

The benefits of talent mapping are that you have a realistic view of the total size of the talent pool and that you can anticipate possible challenges during the sourcing process better.

Here’s a detailed guide on how to do a talent mapping.