A Founder’s Guide to Attracting Top Startup Talent

Regardless of how your company started, whether you started solo, in a garage, or none of those clichés, there comes a time when you will need to hire.

Whether you’re scaling to 5, 10, or 50 and beyond, these are critical moments when you entrust your business to others, relying on them to match your drive and commitment.

Hiring for a young startup can write your success story or leave your company dead in the water. Read on for my guide to attracting top talent to scale your startup to the next stage.

Why Talent Matters for Startups

One hire at a large company is a drop in the ocean, but from Seed to Series C, each new hire in your company has the potential to make an outsized impact. For better or worse.

Studies show that 60% of companies fail because of internal, team-based problems rather than external challenges related to the business. And survey after survey paints a stark and often grim picture of today’s recruitment landscape:

• In 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee’s wage.
• According to a survey by the job search engine CareerBuilder, 75% of employers said they have hired the wrong person for a position. Of those who had a bad hire affect their business in the last year, one bad hire costs them nearly $17,000 on average.
• Guidance Talent reported that 44% of CFOs agree that poor hires significantly impact the morale of the rest of the team. Bad hires can also result in a 32% drop in employee morale and a 36% drop in productivity.

Bringing the right people into your company matters because each new hire will have a substantial impact on your company’s operations, product innovation, growth trajectory, and precedents for future hiring decisions.

Where Most Startups Go Wrong in Attracting Talent

After over a decade of consulting for fast-growing companies looking to scale from seven to nine figures, I’ve seen the dark underbelly of the startup world and the havoc one bad hire can wreak.

Here are the areas where early-stage companies tend to go wrong:

• No clear candidate profile: Recruiting without an ideal candidate profile in mind will set your hiring process up for failure. You need to define an ideal hire. This starts with a candidate profile that fits your exact needs and specifications for the role.
• Poor hiring process: Inconsistent interview processes, vague requirements, and bad questions can all doom your hiring process while failing to weed out bad-fit candidates. Check out my guide to interviewing the right way for a full walkthrough on how to avoid this.
• Targeting/sourcing the wrong candidates: By starting with the wrong audience, you will clog your interview process with candidates who are a bad fit. Read my guide on where to post your job to avoid this.
• Rushing to fill seats: It’s often the case that startups feel a sense of urgency that drives their hiring process faster than it needs to. It’s a case of “the right candidate” versus “the candidate who’s here right now.” This is a big mistake. I discussed this in more depth with Annemarie Penny (a leading expert in startup recruitment), so listen to our discussion here.

Avoid these mistakes by giving yourself guardrails to protect your recruitment process from failure. There’s more to hiring top talent than simply avoiding common mistakes, though, so read on for the rest.

Tips for Identifying Talent Beyond the Resume

A large company may look at education or a narrow set of skills. You don’t necessarily need a Harvard grad deep in the trenches; you need someone flexible, able to solve problems, and ready to hit the ground running.

I recommend prioritizing the following when evaluating talent for your company:

• Hands-on experience
• Ownership mindset

• A “T-Shaped” profile

   

Hands-on Experience

In startups, nothing beats real, hands-on experience.

When one person could make up a significant chunk of a single department, you need A-players who are ready to make an impact right away, not people with theoretical experience. Prioritizing hands-on experience over “traditional” credentials, such as career duration or education, can give you a leg up in attracting A-players to your company.

Ownership Mindset

Employees may work hard 9-5, but they rarely extend themselves beyond then and will be quick to utter the all-too-common refrain, “That’s not my job.”

In the early-stage trenches of a startup, you need all hands on deck, ready to contribute, whether or not it’s in the exact job requirements. That doesn’t mean you should expect a marketer to take sales calls, but it could mean an engineering lead chips in with bug tickets, a customer success manager offers support help, or a sales manager gets their hands dirty with business development.

Look for candidates who are ready to roll up their sleeves and aren’t afraid to be adaptable when the time calls for it.

A “T-Shaped” Profile

Would you rather have the world’s leading social media expert on your marketing team, or someone who can handle content strategy, content creation, SEO, and a bit of social media as well?

You’re probably familiar with the phrase, “a jack of all trades, master of none,” but you also may not realize that the second half of the saying is, “but often better than a master of one.”

In hiring terms, we refer to these as “T-shaped employees.” They’re people who can go deep in one area and broad in others (like a “T”). Sure, having experts in each role may be theoretically better, but in practical terms, your marketing team may be three to five people, and you’d better believe each of those people should have some overlap.

How to Compete With Established Companies in Attracting Talent to Your Startup

You now know what mistakes to avoid and the kind of qualities to seek out. But how do you compete with Goliaths in your industry to attract top talent?

Companies like Google are so worried about competition that they will (allegedly) pay engineers exorbitant salaries to do… nothing. How do you compete with million-dollar signing bonuses? Lean into your strengths:

• Build a best-in-class culture
• Know where to look for candidates
• Incentivize employees

• Think outside the box with benefits

   

Build a Best-in-Class Culture

Culture isn’t ping-pong tables, free snacks, or beer in the office on Fridays.

Culture is the daily experience of how decisions are made, how people interact, and whether employees genuinely feel valued. In other words, culture signals to your team that “people like us do things this way.”

For an early-stage company, your culture can be a competitive advantage. Each new employee has the opportunity to shape the culture as the company evolves, giving them a stronger sense of belonging than they would receive at a larger company. Try to codify your culture: define your values and the way you do things, and defend them ruthlessly. This will signal to ideal hires that your company is the place for them.

Identify Where Your Candidates Spend Time

You need to do more than post on LinkedIn or Indeed while crossing your fingers.

Start with your ideal hire and map out where they spend their time online, such as Slack communities, industry meetups, and GitHub projects. Show up there and you’ll narrow your scope while improving your chances of sourcing the best candidates. The following niche job boards are great places to start:

• Wellfound (Angel List): AngelList (now Wellfound) is one of the most popular platforms for applicants to find jobs at early-stage startups. This is a great way to build visibility for your company and find people ready for the roller coaster ride of the startup world.
• WeWorkRemotely: Looking to offer remote opportunities? WeWorkRemotely is a remote-only job board that can get you in front of potential hires looking for their next role.
• Startup Jobs: As the name suggests, Startup Jobs is a job board aimed at startups, big and small, from founding engineers at early-stage startups to roles at unicorns like Airbnb and Spotify.
• Welcome to the Jungle: One of my favorites. For one, all jobs are curated and vetted by the job board, giving more credibility to job seekers. Secondly, they have a job matching engine based on job seeker preference, so you can improve your chances of your posting being seen by the right people.

Check out my guide on where to post your job to bring in the best candidates.

Incentivize Employees

Got a winning team already? Leverage your employees’ networks to attract more like-minded candidates.

Employee incentives can be a strong motivator for attracting top talent; for example, HubSpot launched a $30,000 referral bonus for engineers and designers.

If you have a high-performing core in your team, then they are a potential gold mine of quality candidates. Encourage them to act as brand ambassadors by sharing job openings and positive experiences online. Provide them with shareable posts, videos, or sample language to make it easy.

Think Outside the Box with Benefits

Almost any company these days offers some of the stock startup benefits:

• Work from home stipends
• Unlimited vacation (boy, do I have thoughts on that)
• Stock grants
• 401(k) match

I recommend digging deeper to find out what might motivate your ideal candidates to work for your company.

For example, Basecamp offers pet insurance, 6-week sabbaticals, summer hours, and profit sharing. And a fun thread on HR Redditreveals all sorts of unique perks:

• Paid holidays for your birthday
• 100% coverage of health insurance with 100% coverage for dependents
• Company-wide time off in the summer or the holiday season
• Travel stipends
• Lunch stipends
• Volunteer opportunities

Building a scalable benefit strategy is its own separate discussion; for now, I’ll leave you with the fact that a creative and enticing benefit plan doesn’t always have to be prohibitively expensive. By focusing on your ideal hire and defining your company culture, you can build a benefit strategy that helps you stand out, attract talent, and reward employees.

Hiring is Just One Piece of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide for the Rest

Hiring is key to your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of HR.

The most successful startups scale from 7 to 9 figures by building practices that attract and retain top performers. I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide.

In this free guide, you’ll learn:

• How HR can drive growth
• How to hire
• How HR evolves as your company grows
• And more!

Complete the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hypergrowth.