Decisions to increase your startup’s vulnerability: crucial don’ts to succeed in talent recruiting

Establishing a technical staff for a new company is critical in the early stages. However, startups frequently underestimate a well-defined recruitment procedure. Several newbies begin by enlisting the assistance of instructors or consultants to assist them in hiring particular administrators or executives at the C-level. Others turn to counseling or outsourcing services to partially or completely subcontract the technical aspects of IT product creation and deployment. Numerous enthusiasts rely on the trial and error methodology.

Whatever road you take, your startup team-building tactics have to provide business stability, adaptability, and enhanced security. For instance, without custom MVP development services and the assistance of corresponding third parties, it is challenging to figure out what audiences require and present the best value-to-price ratio in the released project.

Checking resume after resume might be exhausting, but it is the right approach. At the same time, it is essential to advance your decision-making and hiring strategy to recruit the best candidates to join your team. To avoid hidden pitfalls, check the dos and don’ts to stick to.

Mind the gap!

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Outsourcing specialists without a proper strategy

In the product development cycle, discovery phase services are commonly omitted. This decision leads to missing out on numerous opportunities and the lack of understanding of the market needs and the audience’s behavioral patterns. That’s when all the team members work on planning design, testing, and other stages of the project in detail.

Without an analogical discovery phase in the recruitment process, you risk hiring experts you don’t need. Such overcrowded teams will only eat up your company’s resources and make the workflow unnecessarily complicated. On the one hand, experts recommend outsourcing talents for these jobs:

• QA engineers;
• UX/UI designers;
• software developers, separately for front-end and back-end purposes;
• project managers;
• business analysts;
• graphic designers;
• DevOps.

On the other hand, this approach doesn’t solve several performance-related challenges:

• Project details aren’t structured qualitatively. The absence of a uniform data system commonly leads to poor product vision and understanding of a specific function from all possible perspectives.
• Numerous delays take place since in-house members get confused as to whom to report project-related matters and apply for assistance.
• In the case of errors, it is impossible to hold one person accountable — it may be a chain of small mistakes that resulted in a disaster.

Such teams typically face communication challenges, especially at the beginning stages of their work. By hiring unnecessary experts and letting them do what’s stated in their job descriptions, you are most likely to lose on time-to-market efficiency. While project managers are mediators between different employees, any delays they cause negatively influence the speed of work of software engineers and manual QAs. This in-house team structure is prone to a lack of autonomy and enhanced risks of data misinterpretation and ambiguity.

How to avoid this startup hiring mistake

It is better to recruit so-called T-shaped specialists — talents capable of complicating general and sophisticated tasks to satisfy project requirements. While this approach makes job descriptions vague, it also advances the overall software development cycle:

• Software engineers can take care of quality assurance and automated testing to detect and fix bugs on time.
• Experienced developers can simplify the complex coding structure and pursue original goals in a custom front-end and back-end environment.
• Business analysis and project managers might perform the duties of each other, but they have to participate in strategic decision-making, including roadmap planning.

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Omitting the onboarding & development stage

Well-structured hiring tactics don’t always guarantee flawless results. Occasionally, the emergence of false positives might lead to significant errors in the project’s architecture or its decreased efficiency after release. Without onboarding processes, newbies will have a hard time getting accustomed to your brand’s policies. Their uncertainty will deprive them of a chance to shine brightly as genuine experts and showcase their professionalism.

In turn, the lack of preset standards and data transparency in development processes will negatively influence the project’s potential and overall teamwork. For startups, discussing details in person won’t be a problem. However, this simplicity won’t remain for ages and slowly disappear as the team grows. Don’t get into a “broken phone” game and add more chaos and data ambiguity with your actions.

Troubleshooting strategy

It is essential to establish a controlled environment to support your new employee’s acclimatization. It will simplify their learning curve and training, making them efficient members of the team promptly. You can either assign a responsible expert to control this process or present in-depth documentation that includes crucial details about your business vision, customer support approaches, work procedures, and so on.

When developing a team of developers and software engineers based on performance, ethical conduct at work, open communication, and preparedness to take responsibility, onboarding new members takes significantly more energy and dedication. To cater to the different backgrounds of newbies, it won’t be extra to demonstrate how things should be done to meet your standards.

The basics of onboarding boil down to:

• Delegate the matters of access management properly. Otherwise, this bottleneck will decrease the seamless performance of the entire team. All parties involved in the target project should have corresponding access to your company’s data.
• Operational transparency is a must. While some things may seem intuitive, it isn’t the case for every hired worker. Explicit training will assist new members of the team to evaluate data merging, branching, risk mitigation, and other in-house processes correctly and avoid postponing replies or reports because of the lack of an initial explanation of how things work.
• Take care of setup tips and project documentation from the start.

Here are some more suggestions to overcome the challenge:

• Feel free to diversify your training approach. Nevertheless, a beginner-friendly scope of codebase aspects or other peculiarities every hired person within your crew should stick to won’t be surplus. This strategy speeds up the learning curve and boosts its efficiency.
• Ensure your first tasks are well-defined and avoid any in-house slang or ambiguous instructions. Not only will it simplify the evaluation of the final result, but it will create a friendlier atmosphere at your workplace.
• Before scaling your team, take your time to cover product owner responsibilities and duties. The most efficient strategies include feedback collection and analysis, code review, and pair programming sessions.
• Don’t stick to either traditional or agile team-building principles unless they are the ideal way to achieve your goals. Estimate your needs first to pick up the right strategy. In such a way, you will minimize the risk of pursuing unfeasible perfection while sacrificing quality and delaying project launch.
• Take into account the character traits of your new employees. Behavioral patterns have a huge impact on how clean project coding is.

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A bad economy of core personnel

Check the characteristics of overcrowded teams to ensure your strategy will allocate resources qualitatively and won’t spend time and effort on pursuing unnecessary ideas for your project:

• Insufficient processing and task coordination — if you grow your staff rapidly, it won’t be able to adapt to the performance shift and fail the challenge, no matter how skilled and talented they are.
• Rushing IT product development stages — you are always behind the planned schedule and coordinate your work to ensure every stage provides top-notch results.
  Focus on low-priority features — while there is never enough time or resources to advance new features, a lot of effort is on surplus design and performance details. This happens when the rapid growth of the team doesn’t allow for sufficient onboarding and reduces the overall team’s efficiency and understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses in the workforce.
• A team’s setup with one senior employee responsible for training newbies seems logical, but it isn’t sufficient in reality. Instead of progress, this strategy will overwhelm the assigned specialist with an extra-curriculum load and decrease their motivation to meet deadlines and provide top-notch performance quality. In the long run, it won’t cut operational expenses either — you will have to either invest tons more to solve the original team’s structure or lose your budget on the product’s release failure.

How to mitigate the risk

Instead of hiring several cheap specialists at once, it is better to enrich your team’s potential with the expertise of two to three seasoned software engineers. By letting them work in pairs, you guarantee straightforward communication and exchange of data — its transparency will make every person’s effort noticeable and trackable.

Of course, recruiting more experts will be a nice move to support your scaling effort. With the help of informative paystubs, essential resources and documentation for newbies, and clear project ToRs, you will ensure the onboarding process is effective. If your personnel’s core is robust and can make independent and knowledgeable decisions, staffing won’t be a hazard — a nice performance balance and the right task prioritization are guaranteed.

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Recruiting stranger candidates

Although this statement does sound strange, it makes a lot of sense. Without proper background checks, interacting with professionals in the target pool of candidates turns them into strangers. Such individuals can easily fool you and fail your effort to deploy a successful project in the chosen industry. With minimal information about prospective candidates, numerous companies make poor recruiting judgments.

How to solve the issue

The ideal solution is to create a seamless recruiting procedure that will allow you to select the most promising applicants that will suit your company’s standards and growth strategy. Feel free to taste their skill sets in real-time. Despite how breath-taking their portfolios and resumes may be, they don’t reveal how the target person can work in a unique environment, with new colleagues, and under pressure. To get a big picture to see the real pros and cons of hiring a particular candidate, let them share their concerns, test how they work on a codebase, make rapid decisions, etc.

Don’t hesitate to allow a prospective member of your team to cooperate with potential coworkers — it will provide actional insights into their chemistry, mutual understanding, and professionalism. Although this recruitment approach is more time-consuming, its efficiency is several times higher compared to traditional tactics.

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Improper team staffing balance

As opposed to integrating an experienced group that has operated effectively for a long time, companies staff fresh units with newly recruited programmers who have distinct backgrounds, attitudes, and knowledge of what business values and ethical conduct are. There are no assurances that the newly formed squad will function productively, especially in the immediate future. Consequently, the IT product creation cycle may end up being highly disorganized, necessitating extra administrative expenses or an independent leader to manage in-house team relations.

Wrongly balanced staffing leads to the negligence of strong talents and individual traits of team members. Whether you are understaffed or overstaffed, it can easily damage your novice organization.

How to overcome this challenge for a startup team

Hiring newbies won’t ruin your workflow if you have a core crew which will be responsible for maintaining decent standards and verifying the quality of software development processes. It is a nice idea to recruit tenure engineers and work on the following performance aspects:

• creating a roadmap and ensuring its on-time delivery with clear and concise updates and regulations;
• consolidating hiring technologies, including the introduction of premium-class talent acquisition tools and strategies;
• direct interaction between team members instead of staffing your in-house personnel with several experts serving as communication mediators;
• reducing middlemen in supply chain management, coding reviews, project management, and so on;
• introducing custom recruiting metrics to spot the right opportunity for in-house squad improvement;
• ensuring consistent candidate experiences;
• working on the tactics to minimize the risks of perception bias in the market and analyze the candidate’s experience fairly;
• personalizing technical decisions.

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When a CTO expert doesn’t nail it

Hiring a chief technical officer isn’t always life-saving for startups. While these experts are supposed to simplify decision-making related to the brand’s innovations and technological growth, their vision of successful projects may be too distant from what teams are capable of and what the company’s stakeholders truly desire.

CTO job responsibilities include data governance, management, IT resource allocation, metrics identification, etc. These tasks are incredibly important, but they can be performed by different members of your team without the need to hire a separate expert. With outlined data for MVP schema, you are ready for the challenge. For newly formed teams, this assistance isn’t a must-have — it doesn’t guarantee immediate professional synergy.

Larger businesses prefer to segregate the roles of Head of Engineering and CTO. Thai decision complements the general team’s efficiency and increases the flexibility and versatility of its operational capacity without the blurred vision of its members.

How to mitigate risks

It is more crucial to organize an effective team-building process than to have an expert recruited solely to solve technical matters. It doesn’t mean a CTO position is useless — it is quite the opposite. For your organic growth and scaling, it is better to understand the rationale behind inviting such an expert to your crew. You may already have a marvelous expert in-house who can make well-thought-out engineering decisions — they will be able to prominently fill the function of CTO within the startup squad for a couple of years minimum.

Since startups don’t typically face such shift points as moving to a more advanced database or allocating internal resources for big data management, identifying the architectural direction of your brand’s project without CTOs will be a feasible challenge.

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Key takeaways

To sum up, the company’s engineering culture has to promote the high-end standards of onboarding and development stage processes:

• Collect feedback from new members of the team to analyze their acclimatization speed and professionalism, as well as detect any loopholes in your performance strategy.
• Promote friendly interaction and sufficient communication channels between departments. In the best-case scenario, your company’s corporate environment has to guarantee a reliable interaction of onboarding newbies and seasoned in-house employees.
• Be precise about a candidate’s responsibilities for the job you are hiring for. If you don’t set realistic expectations, miscommunication will waste your time and resources, reducing the overall recruitment efficiency.
• Focus on your brand’s roadmap and project management strategy to clarify what talents you are currently lacking. The plan to hire fifty experts at once will surely sacrifice IT development service quality. Startup teambuilding tactics have to be purposeful and rigorous in nature.

Don’t get tricked by the widespread stereotype that startup buildup is a fast and effortless process. It is better to take care of the in-house team’s competence from the beginning to avoid any pitfalls and difficulties while maximizing management efficiency. Since newcomers in the field don’t get bonus points for making their first steps as professionals, the amount of pressure and competitiveness to handle is no joke.

From this perspective, it is crucial to advance your team retention, hiring strategies, and branding identity with a sustainable, scalable, and prominent workforce. Thanks to the high-end discovery phase and MVP development services from COAX, you will be able to mitigate risks and assign responsibilities for a premium result without worries. Contact us for battle-tested and well-polished tool stacks and expertise to ensure your in-house and outsourced team-building is powerful and advantageous.