Useful Tips

• The employer must be clear about the kind of personnel it requires. A wrong choice can lead to disaster. To quote an example, as a start-up company, you need to evaluate your specific marketing requirements. There is a difference between a marketing person and a product marketing person. A professional, who understands product issues in business terms, has the right industry contacts, knows and understands technology and solutions on a holistic plane, is a product marketing professional. Such person has worked in the user industry in operations. Whereas, a mere marketing professional will not have these intrinsic qualities and may not be able to push the products as desired.

• Start-up entrepreneurs use their gut feeling when hiring employees. It would be advisable to invest more resources in the screening and selection process. Having a rigorous selection process will ensure hiring the right talent.

• Start-ups can adopt the strategy of grooming “raw talent” as they might not be able to vie with large companies. Grooming “raw talent” is a better recourse than hiring the best. The best will never come anyway. Make best use of what’s available. On the other hand, choosing ready manpower and grilling them with training is a time and money consuming process. Many a start-up company would not like utilize its resources and time to train people.

• What do employees really look for? Career prospect is the most important decisive factor people look for in a job, followed by workplace culture and remuneration. A start-up company offers better opportunities for advancement compared to the mega corporates. It is imperative that the start-up company leverages this aspect for retention of manpower.

• For retention, start-ups cannot compete financially with larger companies for the right talent. There are newer ways - creative share option schemes for key employees, long-term incentives, deferred bonuses, etc. Still, monetary compensation is a vital factor, so give your employees what they deserve.

• Tangible benefits are aka “hardware” and intangibles being “software”. It would be misleading to think that spending money on “hardware” is the key to keeping people. Only big companies have such luxury and even so it is not the reason why people stick around. While intangibles are important for start-ups, people can only experience the intangibles when they get there. Well, this is just too bad but there is no shortcut.

(These views are shared by Mr. Himanshu Karia, Director – Asian Media and Marketing group and Ex-Chief HR Manager, Bank of Baroda)