If you meet the requirements, do the following actions to submit your application.

This has always been the way corporates do their recruitments. It works for them (or seem to work for them) because they have brand and money as key factors to motivate candidates to go through the hassle. Just by adding phrases like “amazing team” or “interesting opportunity” to the above structure does not make it work for Startups.

In fact, a classic conversation between a talent and a startup in my experience, would look like this:

Startup advertises the following in a job board,

“We have an amazing opportunity. If you’re looking for challenging UX job, apply with your portfolio.”

Designer: “What’s the offer?”

Startup:“At this time, we don’t have money. But in the near future we might be able to offer stock options.”

Designer:“Seriously?”

Startup: “We believe this could also be an amazing experience for you to have in your resume”

Designer:“No Thanks”

Are you able to see what went wrong in the above conversation? Simple! You asked somebody to do a job for free and they said No.

This is a very critical problem for every founder. Raising investments and hiring talents are intertwined because it takes the best of one to attract the other.

The main reason we struggle today to attract talent is because the way we communicate our hiring:

1. Writing a job ad with the requirements that we believe are needed.
2. Spamming the internet with the job ad, publishing it in job boards, social networks, posters in schools, flyers in office spaces, etc asking people to apply.
3. Waiting and hoping you receive at least 30 or more applications before you can do a selection of candidates.

In my experience, the above process is not the best way to find your next teammate. So coming back to our important question,

In a startup that does not have the financial budget to do a recruitment, is it possible to interest a talent to join the team?

Absolutely YES!

Interesting people have always worked on amazing stuffs for non-monetary incentives (like quality content writers of Wikipedia and TripAdvisor as stated in the book “Drive” by Daniel H Pink).

But the way you communicate such an opportunity and the process in which you find them would be way different.

The magic is to remove the semantics of a “Job”.

What is the interesting problem you’re trying to solve? Who are you looking to solve it with? Which specific talent community are you targeting?

The moment you change your mindset to “inviting specific talent community” to solve a problem that fascinates them and remove any hassle for them to get involved, then you’re ready to start your next hire.

A simple workflow of such a startup hiring process would look like this:

1. Identify: Write down a list of skill keywords that you believe are needed in your team. It can be (B2B, Sales, Logistics) or (React.js, MongoDB, TDD) or (InDesign, Photoshop, HCI). Any set of skill tags that you believe is relevant and needed for your next teammate.
2. Personify with five profiles: Search for those keywords in LinkedIn (or any profile search service) and try to find 5 profiles of pilot person who you believe are interesting for you to interview/meet for the position. Don’t care or even think about whether that person would be available or interested in the job. This is not headhunting. What we are doing here is trying to take a sample of our targeted talent community and learn how they work and what they would like.

NOTE: Diverse the profiles the better insight you’ll have into the talent community. For example, different kinds of profiles can be: full-timer, freelancer, student, fresh-grad and consultant who share same skills we’ve selected in previous step Identify. Print those profiles and keep it in front of you. These pilot candidate profiles are the key sources of information for us to effectively understand and reach our target talent community. This step also gives a good estimate of the availability of talent pools.

3. Analyze: Study those 5 pilot profile candidates. Try to understand their work, how they progressed, where did they start and how has their path been. Ideally if you had found 5 pilot peoples of different kinds as suggested, you’ll be able to find some interesting patterns of work and progress in their profile. This eliminates your subconscious biases with evaluation.

4. Draft the job pitch: The goal here is to pitch the problem your company solves as a really interesting opportunity for your targeted talents, that they would be happy to INVEST their skills in. So everything you are going to write here in your job pitch is to attract the targeted talent group of which we have our 5 representatives as the sample profiles in front of us.

(a) Decide on a job title by seeing your sample profiles and reading what do they call themselves or more importantly what would they love to call themselves.

(b) Open your job draft with a crispy brief pitch of what problem you’re solving in your startup and why this is important (with scale, impact or effect factors).

(c) Then, read the pilot profiles again and see what kind of challenges have they solved before in companies and how long have they stayed there (hopefully assuming they enjoyed the challenge there and that’s why they stayed longer). And define the specific challenge that you want to solve with this targeted talent on board. In other words, express the purpose of this hiring as the challenge to be solved by or with this person.

(d) Prove that you’re a competent, serious and passionate team by expressing what has been accomplished in the past 90 days and what will be achieved in the next 90 days.

(e) Finally, Make it easy for them to get in touch with you.

5. Find the most relevant networks: Look at your pilot profiles again and try to find what are all the groups they are part of and is there a common pattern of networks they are part of. A network can be anything from a social media group to a meetup group or even an online forum. Extract the top 3 most relevant network of your targeted talents from the sample pilot profiles you’ve printed and holding in your hands.

6. Engage: Please DO NOT go to those groups and share your job ad link and say apply. Because the moment you do that, you’re treating everybody as job-seekers in that group and thereby ruining an amazing possibility of involving that talent group to help you in your problem. This is time for us to engage. Understanding how to engage with a talent group is simple. Imagine there is a Machine Learning interest group and you’re looking for a machine learning talent to join your team.

(a) Try to read through the posts in that group and find the posts that has had the maximum engagements (like more people commenting, liking or sharing). Then see who are the most active influencers in the group and how they communicate.

(b) Listen and then communicate your specific machine learning problem in your product/service and ask them for direction (how would they solve it?), request them for a referral and then add, “we’ve described in detail what we do and what our challenge is here in this (job) link, please PM/ comment here to join us in solving this problem and we’ll be happy to talk to you. (make it easy and friendly for them to get in touch with you).

(c) If you do that right, you’ll have a whole network of specific targeted people who knows you’re working with something in Machine learning and can help you in a multiple different ways that you could not have possibly imagined rather than just applying for a job with resume. And if you continue this extraction of right relevant networks by studying our pilot candidate profiles and engage with an open mind about the opportunity you hold, I’m confident you’ll be able to find your dream teammate within the next few days.

That’s it. The moment you change your mindset from “job — recruitment” to “invitation for solving a fascinating challenge”, you’re ready to hire your next teammate for your startup.