Startups Fighting the Hiring Conundrum

Startups Fighting the Hiring Conundrum

Sunday September 09, 2012,

3 min Read

We witnessed the biggest startup extravaganza yesterday at Techsparks 2012 and unveiled the T30 report as well (complete report will be available from tomorrow for download). Some of the most teething problems plaguing startups were discussed and hiring, which is no secret was at the top. How to find a co-founder? Where to find him or her? How to hire after the initial set of people? How to move from 15 to 50? We even had a separate post-it zone which worked magic. People could post-in their requirements and matches were made right here on earth (yes, heaven is not the only place for matching up).

One thing is clear, if you're running a startup, it's most likely that the bigger job portals like Naukri and Monster are not going to work for you. People there are not looking for a startup job and hence we came up with our own job board to meet this need. These focused efforts help but the best way yet remains 'referrals' which have their own limitation of not being enough in number. Shailendra Singh of Sequoia capital said, "A startup needs to use equity very intelligently. A very good team can be built with the equity trade-off." Another important tip Shailendra outlined was that hiring a senior guy might not be prudent in all cases; so if you do, make sure he has had hands on experience. Apart from this, you can use different tactics while recruiting. For instance, setting up an interview; you can set it up with a candidate on a Saturday night. His response to that can be a huge pointer if he's the guy you're looking for!

Hiring is also a problem for the bigger corporates and startups themselves fighting the problem are giving a solution for this. Some very interesting startups from India have come up.

1) HuntShire: A Tech30 company, HuntShire is trying to solve two basic problems: Identifying Talent and Employer Branding. Their product Ghunter, combines the principles of Gamification and Problem solving to give one the best fit resource for any job role.

2) Valuehire: Helping agencies automate, standardize, and track their processes and activities more efficiently, ValueHire is a SaaS / Cloud offering (i.e. it's 100% web-based) for placement and executive search agencies in India currently.

3) LookBeyondResumes: They believe, "There is a right job for everyone and a right person for every job." LookBeyondResumes aims to connect these dots via their 5 years of research in data. It is the first product from Redwood Associates.

Apart from these, there are companies like Resumonk that are trying to make the applicants' life easier. Resumonk helps make better resumes. TopTalent is a startup connecting appropriate candidates from elite institutes to top notch jobs. They're all trying to solve the 'hiring conundrum'. It's huge and everyone is grappling with it. At the end of the day, nothing but talking about it more & more and a growing awareness about a world 'outside the typical corporate job' is what will help solve the problem in India.

We also launched our Awesome Startup Employee as an effort to encourage people to join startups (read stories from FusionCharts, Snapdeal, SourceBits and more). The effort has been gaining momentum and we believe this is what will drive the ecosystem. We're doing our best here and have written aggressively as well. Here are some of the best ones:

Hiring in India

Advice from a startup employee to a founder

3 Important Hiring Tips

and...

Here's how not to hire.

Download the complete Report.

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