Startup 101: Here’s How To Find The Best Employees For Your Startup

“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.” — Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple

In the startup world, where hustle is the essential key to making it through the day and to the next day, working for a startup has been considered a thrill as well as a chase by many.

But for entrepreneurs, finding the right employees remains a challenge. Should one hire an older (than the founders) and more experienced employee? If yes, how does one handle them? Or should one hire rookies for a low cost and train them? Also, how does one retain employees at a time when it is no longer taboo to shift jobs frequently?

Young entrepreneurs in India find themselves asking these questions ever so often.

Hiring ‘people like you’ helps in forming a homogeneous group that can deliver faster while heterogeneous groups can bring in diversity and creativity. Which way does one go?

What complicates thing further is the fact that most founders are answerable to their investors for each salary that goes out of the company’s coffers. Then there is the matter of deciding on and setting a work culture that is cool and reflects the startup’s values while being productive at the same time.

In this week’s Startup 101, Pallav Nadhani, cofounder and CEO of FusionCharts, which help developers convert any kind of data into meaningful and engaging visualizations, tells us how to hire the right employees.

Nadhani shares three golden rules to hire the right — and the best — employees in a startup:

• Always hire better than you
• Run a good process, and even if you meet somebody who is really good, don’t get blindsided
• Even if you’re not hiring right now, keep looking for people — you may not get the right person at the right time

As Jim Collins, an American author and lecturer on company sustainability and growth, said, great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Find your great team to be a great startup!