Hello Everybody! This is Ayush Agrawal, I run a company called We The Chic. Operating from Hyderabad (India), We The Chic is a start-up in business of manufacturing, retailing, and distribution of licenced merchandise of various popular American TV Shows and comic book characters in the Indian territory. As a start-up we often face various challenges when it comes to recruiting and retaining people, through this article my intention is to identify some of the problems we face and our humble little ways in which we solve them.
Hiring: Being a start-up sometimes scare certain prospective employees. Majority of cream professionals prefer something that is established and has a mark set in the economy. Though the current stage of Start-Up boom in India is definitely working in our favour. This is the age when more and more individuals are realizing the potential lying in start-ups and are willing to go that extra mile to contribute in its success.
Background Verification: Ask any senior HR Manager, and he/she will swear by - how important it is to get any new candidate's background thoroughly checked. As a start-up we are constantly cash crunched and often the requirement is immediate which makes the task of finding new employees tedious. An external verification company not only is quite expensive but also is quite time consuming. One way to beat it, especially in small team environment such as ours, is to only recruit through referrals.
Policy Framing: Established organizations have a deck of rules, options and designations. Start-ups start small and the manager has to make do with what is. Further start-ups are often run by people with not a lot of experience behind them, thus mapping the appropriate qualities to the skill set is a challenge. The employees have to be hired and allotted responsibilities smartly so as to be efficient for both the sides. The Start-up being in the initial growing stage is dependent on all aspects of all the employees. Everyone in the office is important and everything done is vital.
Distribution of Work: In a start-up people are often swamped with work, every individual is often doing at least 3 men’s job, thus evaluating the happiness index and hence keeping the attrition in check is an issue. Further since each person’s contribution counts the manager has to make sure that every employee is satisfied with what he is doing and is efficient at it.
Finance: Nowadays when VC money is floating around, and is actually available to pretty much everybody quite easily, another big challenge that we as a start-up face is extremely unrealistic salary expectations. Just to give you a perspective - a full stack developer these days is quite easily looking for around 4-5 lac rupees a month (around 7-8 thousand US dollars). This challenge is more acute in ecommerce space, thanks to the presence of likes of amazons, and Alibabas of the world in India.
Fudged up resumes – It’s probably only natural for a candidate to exaggerate things in his/her resume, and since we are always cash starved we do not like to find ourselves in a soup where we find out the limited capabilities or rather the incapability of a candidate after we have hired him. One way to beat this is to talk as much as possible with the candidate in interview. Sometimes, when we are hiring for a technical position and are in a situation where the interviewee himself doesn’t have much knowledge about the kind of work, we often take help of mentors.
Planning: The HR managers have to ensure that the human resources involved look into not only the current situation of the company but are also the right fix for the future needs. The employees have to be kept pleased and satisfied. Dissatisfaction of an employee can reflect in his work and also on the overall efficiency of the team he is working in. Diplomacy and motivation has to be used so as to ensure a healthy workplace.
