5 Ways To Attract The Best Candidates For Your Startup

New startups need a lot of talent, and not just any talent: they only need the best! This is particularly true in crowded industries like tech or mobile app development.

Although there are more young professionals than ever before, your startup may not be able to get top talent right away. There are many competing startups all drawing talent from the same candidate pool, so you have to find a way to attract the best candidates to your startup instead of your competitors.

How can you do that? There are five primary strategies you can employ to get excellent employees working for you ASAP. Let’s take a look at them now.

A Classic Solution: Hiring Posters

Sometimes the old ways really are the best.

In this case, your startup should endeavor to make the most attractive hiring posters available. Hiring posters might seem a little old school, but place them in the right areas – such as at job fairs, university campuses, or even places where young people like to hang out like coffee shops – and you might find that they drive new interview levels through the roof.

The key, of course, is creating an attractive and informative hiring poster for your startup. It’s important to develop your hiring poster with top-tier graphic design principles and plenty of space for key information.

Fortunately, you can use platforms like PosterMyWall to make job posters perfectly tailored to your startup and its unique requirements and attractive qualities. 

When designing your poster, try to think about what separates your startup from other new companies in your area. Why would someone want to work at your company compared to the competition? Add this information, make your poster as clean and attractive as you can, and you might just get the best talent for your open positions calling about interviews in no time.

Attend Job Fairs

As mentioned above, job fairs can be a great place to attract new talent and find young people to work for your organization. Job fairs, however, are competitive places with plenty of other startups trying to snag the best talent before you can.

Therefore, you should prioritize the first few seconds of someone approaching your company’s booth or seeing your posters across the job fair floor. Make sure that you’re saying the right things and that you represent your company as optimistically and positively as possible. Be honest and upfront about what you want to achieve with your company and let your passion for your organization shine.

Another good idea is to hand out business cards. Not only is this professional (and can therefore attract potential candidates), but it also gives potential employees another avenue to contact you through after the job fair.

Try to Partner with Local Universities

Depending on where your startup is based, you might be able to partner with local universities and get them to advertise your startup for you. This is particularly helpful if you’re in a smaller city or town where there aren’t a lot of competing startups, but you might also find success with this approach in larger metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

Regardless, partnering with a university involves offering valuable job opportunities to university students, sometimes in exchange for offering other resources to universities themselves as well. You can provide internships or paying jobs depending on what your organization needs at the time and has in the budget.

The big advantage of partnering with local universities is that you get access to top talent at the earliest possible opportunity. You can begin partnerships with fantastic future employees right as they finish their education rather than having to steal them away from competing companies later down the road.

Offer Stock Options and Other Benefits

If you’re trying to hire a millennial or a younger employee from Gen Z, remember one big thing: the top talent in these generations isn’t necessarily looking for a huge salary (although it never hurts). In fact, many high-quality employees under the age of 30 are more than willing to jump on board with a great startup if there are other benefits or perks offered for their labor.

Stock options are just one example. By offering stock to new employees, you’re both restating your faith in your startup and asking employees to invest themselves in more than one way in your company.

When employees are invested, they are more willing to give their job more effort each day. And when your employees do a better job, the stock they have becomes more valuable.

Your startup can offer ancillary benefits or bonuses as well, including healthcare packages, workplace perks like unlimited coffee or soda, and so on. Sweeten the deal and the talent will flock to your startup sooner rather than later.

Be a Great Place to Work from Day One

Perhaps most importantly of all, you can attract the best candidates for your startup by making sure that the employees already at your company think it’s a fantastic place to work. Word-of-mouth is a real and potentially positive phenomenon, especially in light of social media.

Make your startup the best place to work in your area and your employees won’t hesitate to share how great it is. That’s easily the best way to get more top talent reaching out to your organization for potential job openings.

If you cultivate an atmosphere of professionalism, fun, and achievement, you’ll create a workplace that is engaging and exhilarating to be in. Modern workers don’t just want a place where they can clock in and out and collect a paycheck. They want a place where they believe they are doing great work and maximizing their personal potential.

Ultimately, you’ll have the best odds of finding top candidates for your startup if you follow each of the above strategies together. There’s no single trick that can nab the best candidates for your organization, so it’s best to work with each method until your hiring needs are met. Good luck!