This post was triggered by a conversation with the Founder of a startup that has been reasonably successful in proving their concept and is now gearing up for scaling up. And as it usually is, finding and hiring a lot more people than they currently have on their rolls is one of the ‘to do’ lists for the Founders.
Having heard from others how challenging it is to get people for a startup, they are thinking of hiring someone appropriate to handle their HR – an HR Head.
My suggestion to them was - do not hire the head of HR at this stage, but outsource it to an ‘HR services provider’ (not a recruitment agency… but some agency like Plug HR which offers managed HR services).
The reasons for my suggestions are as follows:
First 50 employees are critical
The first 50 employees that you hire will define the personality of your organisation, which will gradually become its culture. By personality, I do not mean physical appearances in a person, but things like their passion, commitment, ‘niceness’, communications skills, etc.
At the starting up stage, you are unlikely to be able to hire an HR head who has the maturity to understand the nuances of the personalities that you need to seek in initial employees. In fact, the Founders themselves may not have the experience or understanding of what personality to define for their brand. And therefore, what they need is someone with solid experience who can guide them, which is unlikely to come from the level of seniority that they can afford at the current stage.
Startups may not be able to hire the most appropriate level of experience
You are most likely to attract an HR head, whose current experience is not sufficient for him/her to become an HR head in a larger organisation. I.e. In your effort to get someone to head your HR function, you will end up promoting someone to his or her level of incompetency. And neither is that good for the person and nor will that provide you the resources to hire right.
Hiring the first 50 employees is more than managing the process of finding, recruiting and on-boarding more people efficiently. And for this, you need someone with the experience of building teams across organisation and across different stages.
Startups evolve and roles change
One of the mistakes I have seen startups do is to hire someone senior for their current needs, and as the business evolves or pivots, the organisation’s needs change and some of the senior hires may not be relevant for the revised direction. E.g. if a startup was initially targeting large enterprise clients based on their initial success, and if they subsequently change the model to target the SME segment, a head of sales who was brought in to target large enterprise clients may neither be excited nor competent to handle sales to SMEs. The skill sets, competencies, experiences and, most importantly, interest areas could be totally different.
Now, if the startup has hired the head of sales, they would be stuck with a round peg in a square hole. And as we tend to do in India, instead of disengaging, we would ‘adjust’ the person in some role and try to make the relationship work. Some people may evolve to the new requirements, but this ‘learning’ could have ben avoided had you hired only after the variables in the business were well defined. Likewise, hiring ‘doers’ and hiring ‘managers’ require different skills. In the initial phase of the business, your company is more likely to hire managers, some of who will gradually progress to be heads of their respective functions. An HR person who is excited about hiring this high-quality talent may not be as excited about hiring the next 500 people over the next 2-3 years, who are most likely to be doers.
Therefore, my suggestion to startups is for the Founders to take on the ownership of critical functions as much as possible. They should seek advise from mentors and create an advisory board of relevant people to guide them. Wherever possible, outsource non-core functions so that they can hire someone, once they have decided on the longer-term road map. Also, hiring later also gives them the resources and respectability to hire someone more experienced than they can get at the earlier stages.
Of course, as in every aspect of business, there are no rules. Many companies have hired heads of different functions at the beginning of the journey, and they have jointly built formidable organisations over a period of time. But usually, these companies are headed by Founders who are super good sales persons and passionate individuals, able to get a buy-in into their dream by individuals who can bring in the maturity and experience. And that’s rare.
For more articles, please visit my blog - The Hub for Startups.
Image Source Link.
No comments:
Post a Comment