Kate BrodockEight top female founders lift the lid on what they’ve found most daunting.
By the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC)
Q. What was the biggest hiring challenge you faced while building your current business?
A. Finding People Who Are a Cultural Fit
At a startup, every hire is critically important. When you have a 5-person team, each team member is 20 percent of your company. This makes it especially important to make sure early hires are a great cultural fit, not just people who have the right skills or experience. This balancing act makes it vital to ask great interview questions to improve your chances of hiring the right person. – Brittany Hodak, ZinePak
A. Finding People Who Share Our Core Values
It’s easy to hire people based on skills, experience and even personality, but finding people whose core values match ours has meant delving deeper and figuring out what values drive a person. When you know their values, you get greater insight into how they may behave in certain situations, why they make the decisions they do and what motivates them — but getting to this level isn’t always easy. – Lea Woodward, Inspiring Ventures
A. Digging Through the Exaggerations
People lie on their résumés. It can sometimes be hard to tell who is exaggerating and who actually has the skills. As a result, we put tests in place to measure skill levels. Just doing that has really made a difference in the quality of our hires. – Brooke Bergman, Allied Business Network Inc.
A. Finding Natural Leaders
The biggest hiring challenge was to find candidates who were natural leaders. Oftentimes, people rely on the corporate structure to tell them what to do, how to do it and when to do something. Finding individuals who were proactive problem solvers with a willingness to roll up their sleeves and get it done was essential for our business. – Kim Kaupe, ZinePak
A. Hiring, Managing and Communicating With Developers
The biggest hiring challenge we faced in building Priori Legal was hiring and managing developers. I don’t have prior coding experience, so when we first wanted to develop our product, it was hard to find the right person who was both an excellent developer and could communicate with us Luddites! – Basha Rubin, Priori Legal
A. Finding People With Both Specific and General Skill Sets
We have to hire people with backgrounds in computer science, data science, medicine and life sciences. One of our challenges is finding people with a general skill set who also have specific domain knowledge. – Jessica Richman, UBiome
A. Raking Through a Shortage of Skills
We need people with very strong journalism and marketing skills, and that’s harder to find than many people realize. There are so many people out there who fancy themselves “writers,” but the vast majority just don’t have the skill level we require. It’s not easy to cull through the sea of mediocrity to find the people who are really great. – Mary Ellen Slayter, Reputation Capital
A. Attracting the Best Talent With Little or No Pay
My team has experience and résumés that are attractive to big companies. Finding individuals with the right skills and experience, but who also value the reward over the paycheck, was difficult. We’ve come full circle — the recruitment challenge helps my team deliver on our mission compassionately, and it also drives us to deliver on the experience we provide to others. – Mina Chang, Linking the World
This post originally appeared on Startup Collective.
Photo credit: Sukhonosova Anastasia via Shutterstock.