Talent Management Strategies for Startups
Elizabeth Mackenzie, 14 May 2022.
As a startup, you’re constantly experiencing fast and massive changes. This may seem scary and challenging, especially when your company is growing at such a rapid pace. Many things can be new because your business is already innovative, so this means you may make mistakes.
Managing all that growth can be rough, so you may neglect fundamental aspects of your company, such as talent management, as you go up. That’s why we have created this list of techniques you can implement to be on top of your talent management strategies.
Integrate Your Employees to Your Strategy based on Your Goals
In the beginning, you may feel that you, your co-founders, and a small team have it all covered for the first six months, but as your business grows, it may feel overwhelming. This may lead to improvised recruitment, which could eventually bring harmful outcomes in the long term like having a low-performing team and wasting too much money and resources on rehiring.
With startups, everything’s new. That’s why planning ahead usually doesn’t sound like the greatest idea. You’re basically learning on the way. However, planning your talent recruitment system strategically puts you one step ahead for your company's success. This way, you’ll have the right people by your side to meet the needs of your growing business.
To do this, you need to map out your success journey and evaluate what type of talent you’ll need along the way. This involves skills gap analysis and recruitment costs evaluation. Let’s say everything goes right and your company needs a bigger team, you’ll need to incorporate talent that adapts to your company’s needs.
These can be data scientists, software engineers or digital marketers. You may also need to raise awareness of your brand with recruitment marketing strategies to prepare for when you need a bigger team.
Keep an Eye On the Hiring Process
When your company starts growing, you’ll most likely feel tempted to delegate, which isn’t essentially a bad thing. However, when it comes to recruiting, you need to have someone you trust to select the candidates.
This task is usually delegated to managers, and even though they may want the best for your company, they don’t want to be replaced. That’s why they might end up hiring a good candidate but not better than them.
This is why it is so important that you keep an eye on the hiring process, especially at the beginning of your company’s growth. You’ll set up a strong foundation of workers that your company can rely on. You can make sure that you’re hiring in-demand tech workers and efficient employees that match your company’s views.
Invest in Your Talent
Once you have a strong team, you should consider investing in your talent. You may have high-performing teams that are independent, collaborative, proactive, and creative, but they lack the hard skills to maximize their potential.
You can subscribe to a corporate training plan, pay for coding bootcamp courses, or online open programs to help them gain new skills. Investing in your workforce can be way less expensive than outsourcing new talent.
Provide Your Workforce with the Right Tools
Providing your workforce with the right tools can be one of the greatest investments you can make for your company. It can be developing an app to optimize processes, getting human resources management tools, or anything your talent needs.
However, it’s important to know that you may not want to rely on highly expensive technology that your company doesn’t need as a startup. Do some research and evaluate what you need to meet your goals and how much you’ll need to invest. A good idea would be to conduct a survey to ask your employees what tools might help them ease their processes.
Promote
Career advancement is something that most employees want during their professional lives. That’s why it’s so important to consider first if you have the ideal candidate for that position within your organization already. If that’s the case, let them know they have the opportunity to take that role.
It’s okay if you end up finding a better candidate from the outside, but be coherent with your message. By only offering the promotion opportunity multiple times without actually hiring someone from within, you demotivate your employees, and they might consider leaving your company.
Nobody wants to be trapped in the same position forever and not grow their careers. A high-performing employee would rather work at a company that provides job opportunities. In addition to retaining your employees, you will also reduce costs by outsourcing candidates. This is another aspect to consider when promoting.
In Summary
No matter how challenging talent management may look at the beginning, you can still implement strategies that’ll prepare you for your business growth. You’ll need to constantly oversee the hiring process, provide your team with the right tools and training, and maintain a positive corporate culture.
Remember that even though you’re learning on the way, it’s important to prepare yourself in advance. Data analytics, research, and recruitment marketing may be great allies on your way to success. Don’t forget that when you have a reliable team, you can also consider promotion to engage your workers and reduce hiring costs.