If you want to successfully establish and preserve company culture for your startup business, you’ll have to consider a few important factors—a process that begins as early as your first outside hire. Your company culture goals are far easier to reach when you know exactly what to look for when you’re hiring new employees. As your organization grows, it may prove more challenging to preserve your initial company culture, which may require you to establish more stringent and well-targeted hiring and recruitment guidelines.
These top four startup hiring considerations can help you preserve your company culture and avoid dealing with stressful or troublesome hires down the road.
1. Balancing AI and human touch
Artificial intelligence represents a trend that no business can ignore. AI interview tools are available to help companies establish more objective recruitment processes. Pre-screening applicants before an interview with AI is now a common practice in large companies. AI helps make thousands of hires and attracts millions of applicants every year.
With software programs doing human work, gone are the days of encoding data, counting stocks, or checking inventory manually. However, you still need a human touch for in-depth analysis and management skills. Don’t be fooled by someone who appears to be a strong match on paper and end up hiring someone who doesn’t fit your company culture in the process.
To achieve the right balance between AI and human intuition, ask the right questions to ensure that you don’t simply hire a robot who isn’t a true culture match. You need someone who is passionate and hardworking to grow your team without compromising your culture.
Here are some tips for interviewing a job applicant:
- Ask extreme questions to learn about a candidate’s thoughts and motivations. For example, you can ask which changes the candidate would implement if given the chance to run the company.
- Ask the applicant to review negative feedback or reflect on a misstep that your company has made. Startups and growing companies make a lot of mistakes, and you want to hire someone who’s aware of and sensitive to the job’s nature, which may entail the willingness to face a lot of challenges and withstand pressure. Asking questions that tie into startup culture is an excellent way to set proper expectations before hiring someone. Candid feedback is a good sign, and it shows that the candidate could be a strong and self-aware team member.
- Observe how an applicant behaves or acts outside of the interview room; it is one way to get a small glimpse at the true colors of a candidate. Everybody is at their best behavior inside the interview room, so take any opportunity to get a look at a candidate’s nature.
2. Responsible vetting and background checking
There’s no denying that dependable background checks are crucial to hiring ideal future employees. You’re not only after the knowledge and skills that an applicant offers, but also their character, capacity, and work ethic.
It’s important to pay close attention to how you perform your background checks. Your vetting process should be comprehensive to give you a strong understanding of whether you’re hiring the right person for the job. Remember, safety should always be your priority, which includes protecting data security, a harassment-free workplace, and a healthy work environment. That’s why you want to make sure that you hire someone who won’t lead to a major headache—or a lawsuit—in the future.
Here are the essential things that you need to consider for a startup applicant background check:
- Criminal records
- Education verification
- Reference verification
- Credentials or certifications verification
- Employment verification
- Drug screening
- Credit check (depending on the role)
- Driving history (depending on the role)
Always adhere to the fair hiring guidelines in your area as you develop your startup screening policy.
3. Diversity considerations
You have probably been inundated with plenty of resumes and have interviewed a lot of candidates. You’ll likely encounter local and out-of-area candidates with various religious affinities, ethnic backgrounds, and life principles. Of course, you should be fair to everyone and not give any bearing to a person’s color, appearance, or nationality as you make your hiring decisions. You need to make your company or workforce more diverse and welcoming to preserve—or deepen—your company culture.
Some AI-based interview tools provide a series of games and activities that are based on neuroscience principles. These tools help employers assess job applicants before an interview by reviewing the candidate’s cognitive and emotional features while avoiding demographic biases that may affect a human interviewer, such as concepts about gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
Since you’re just starting your business, you want to hire employees who have the same core values and life principles as you do early in the recruitment process. Aside from using AI-based interview tools, another great way to achieve this goal is to build your hiring process based on your company’s vision and mission. Select interview questions that accurately reflect and speak to your company culture. culture.
4. Benefits
Google and Facebook are two of the world’s largest online platforms—and it’s no surprise that these titans offer some of the world’s best benefits to their employees. To keep their employees healthy and happy, Google offers medical services, on-site physicians and nurses, and healthcare coverage. Googlers can also travel worry-free: all employees have emergency assistance and travel insurance on both work-related and personal vacations.
Facebook implements a vast range of benefits in all areas of employee life, including family, finance, health, community support, convenience, career growth, and time off. A few other examples of employee benefits and privileges to help you retain your best employees:
- An office gym to keep your employees healthy and active
- Welcoming pets in the office and offering free pet services
- Offering unlimited vacation time
- A stress or burnout release room (with stress balls or walls to paint) to help reduce employee stress
Conclusion
Starting a business can be challenging, and the pressure increases as you start hiring people outside of your core group and growing your company. You can use AI-based interview tools to help you assess if a candidate is the best fit for your company while promoting or welcoming diversity.
Asking the right interview questions to assess a candidate’s core values and behavio
