Startup team: employees must be selected as a wife
How I selected and motivated the startup team: tips, proven practice
Over four and a half years, managers from large corporations and specialists from small companies, gifted students and former downshifters with long experience managed to work at CDNvideo. Most of them I or my colleagues knew personally - for example, we worked together with one of the employees 10 years ago, and kept in touch with him all this time, so that, finally, last year we could take him to our staff. So we assembled the team carefully, bit by bit - each new employee is important, and each has its own story.
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I hope you can get observations and advice based on the experience of our company. But the main thing, probably, is this: do not take people to work, if there is even a slight doubt about the correctness of the choice - even if it seems that 99% of them consist of virtues. Employees need to be selected as a wife, even more carefully - when choosing an employee, you must take into account not only your personal attitude towards him, but also how he will fit into the team.
Outbid People - Failure Strategy
The worst thing you can do when recruiting a team is to outbid someone else’s employees. A startup can overpay a little for the lack of a well-known brand and stability, but only on condition that the candidate’s eyes are burning and you offer him a job that he precisely knows how to do. If at the same place of work an employee did something else, then it is not worth taking it. The chances that he will learn, at best, are 50 to 50. But if you are unlucky, you will get an average employee who closes some of the tasks within his position, while others cannot. At the same time, he receives an unjustifiably high salary and complains about the impossible plans.
Students are future stars
Hiring students is a more rewarding strategy than hiring ready-made specialists with professional skills, with cockroaches in their heads and well-established habits (often not the most useful). If you spend time on a student, then you do an employee with your own hands, suitable for working in your company. His working qualities will be about the same as yours, he will think in the same terms and behave in approximately the same way. At the same time, students are usually more positive and want to work hard to grow into professionals.
Some students have become "stars". For example, the head of the technical support department is just a former student whom we hired four years ago, and since then he has already raised several students who work in his team. By the way, I came to my first job at Orange at the invitation of the technical director of this company, who lectured here at Fiztekh.
Among other things, students can be perceived as an extremely efficient workforce from the point of value for money. For example, once I hired a student who, receiving 6 thousand rubles a month, prepared paper for four months to receive a subsidy from the Moscow Government amounting to 2.5 million rubles. Of course, I had to finish something behind it, but it was more efficient than if the manager did the same with a salary of 100 thousand rubles. Yes, we simply could not afford such a manager.
You can destroy the company alone
In my list of criteria when hiring an interest in work, it is our first place. Professionalism, of course, is important, but it is not even in second, but in third place. More important than the professionalism of hiring moral values ​​is responsibility, the desire to build, not destroy, loyalty. And of course - do not steal, do not expose your own, do not provoke conflicts. Even one “wrong” person can greatly change the company's microclimate.
I know people who very well "split" disloyal candidates is no longer the interview stage. Recently, we co-founded with our company communicated with one potential leader of a subsidiary project. At some point, the person opened up emotionally, and my partner asked him if he had paid his “black” salary at his previous job to his employees. The answer was: “How much you don’t steal from the Motherland, you will not return yours anyway”. After this and a few more questions, we came to the conclusion that he will steal from us too if he suddenly finds himself in some way disadvantaged.
I believe that it is very important to protect the internal microclimate of the company. Recently, I did not take on the work in the Moscow office of one too purposeful seller. It seems that he was familiar with NLP and tried to program me to take him to work. I imagined how he would turn my colleagues and me into zombies, but I still wanted to be human.
People often do not like
Many say that the market is overheated, and there is a large shortage of personnel. But if you dig deeper, you will find a huge number of people who are unhappy because they do not do what they want. They can be made happier by giving an interesting job. And in order to do what they love, many people are willing to temporarily lose significantly in income. In 2010, when we were just starting a business and could not pay people a big salary, I myself hired a couple of employees with a salary several times less than what they had received at their previous place of work.
Reasons to work much more than it seems.
People need to be appreciated, and I think that if you know the negative side of a person, it’s better than you don’t know anything at all. I am not afraid to hire people who have shortcomings and forgive mistakes if I consider an employee to be able to learn from them. The main thing is to know that the employee is valuable, and he will tear everyone away if he is well motivated.
By the way, about motivation, I have a whole theory. I analyzed the motivations of people who at various times came to us for interviews and ranked in order of value from the employer's point of view:
1. Creation, creation of values.
2. The desire to benefit, to be in demand.
3. The desire to feel responsibility, self-realization.
4. Study, gaining experience.
5. Communication in the team, with customers and suppliers.
6. The desire to be involved in an important project.
7. Getting money for work.
8. Desire to spend time with your hobby.
9. Work on the resume.
Keep people enthusiastic
If you draw a graph of job satisfaction from a new employee, it will be very similar to the Gartner technology maturity cycle curve. At first, you are very pleased that you took a new employee, you like him more and more, you start to consider his arrival as a great success (it looks like a romantic period in a relationship with a girl). The peak of a positive attitude comes in the first three months of work and coincides with the end of the probationary period. This is understandable: the transition to a new job is a good incentive. Adrenaline rush occurs, the employee wants to excel and works quickly, he likes to meet new people and perform new tasks. And then the routine begins, by the end of the sixth month of work the impression worsens and can completely decline, even the desire to immediately dismiss a new employee.
In this regard, it is important to give the employee such a first task so that he can fulfill it during the probationary period - for the manager, this will be an objective indicator of the employee's value and will allow to avoid exaggerated expectations. And for an employee, this will be a stepping stone in development, he will receive feedback from the company, he will think “I could!”, And his initiative will not decrease.
Over four and a half years, managers from large corporations and specialists from small companies, gifted students and former downshifters with long experience managed to work at CDNvideo. Most of them I or my colleagues knew personally - for example, we worked together with one of the employees 10 years ago, and kept in touch with him all this time, so that, finally, last year we could take him to our staff. So we assembled the team carefully, bit by bit - each new employee is important, and each has its own story.
')
I hope you can get observations and advice based on the experience of our company. But the main thing, probably, is this: do not take people to work, if there is even a slight doubt about the correctness of the choice - even if it seems that 99% of them consist of virtues. Employees need to be selected as a wife, even more carefully - when choosing an employee, you must take into account not only your personal attitude towards him, but also how he will fit into the team.
Outbid People - Failure Strategy
The worst thing you can do when recruiting a team is to outbid someone else’s employees. A startup can overpay a little for the lack of a well-known brand and stability, but only on condition that the candidate’s eyes are burning and you offer him a job that he precisely knows how to do. If at the same place of work an employee did something else, then it is not worth taking it. The chances that he will learn, at best, are 50 to 50. But if you are unlucky, you will get an average employee who closes some of the tasks within his position, while others cannot. At the same time, he receives an unjustifiably high salary and complains about the impossible plans.
Students are future stars
Hiring students is a more rewarding strategy than hiring ready-made specialists with professional skills, with cockroaches in their heads and well-established habits (often not the most useful). If you spend time on a student, then you do an employee with your own hands, suitable for working in your company. His working qualities will be about the same as yours, he will think in the same terms and behave in approximately the same way. At the same time, students are usually more positive and want to work hard to grow into professionals.
Some students have become "stars". For example, the head of the technical support department is just a former student whom we hired four years ago, and since then he has already raised several students who work in his team. By the way, I came to my first job at Orange at the invitation of the technical director of this company, who lectured here at Fiztekh.
Among other things, students can be perceived as an extremely efficient workforce from the point of value for money. For example, once I hired a student who, receiving 6 thousand rubles a month, prepared paper for four months to receive a subsidy from the Moscow Government amounting to 2.5 million rubles. Of course, I had to finish something behind it, but it was more efficient than if the manager did the same with a salary of 100 thousand rubles. Yes, we simply could not afford such a manager.
You can destroy the company alone
In my list of criteria when hiring an interest in work, it is our first place. Professionalism, of course, is important, but it is not even in second, but in third place. More important than the professionalism of hiring moral values ​​is responsibility, the desire to build, not destroy, loyalty. And of course - do not steal, do not expose your own, do not provoke conflicts. Even one “wrong” person can greatly change the company's microclimate.
I know people who very well "split" disloyal candidates is no longer the interview stage. Recently, we co-founded with our company communicated with one potential leader of a subsidiary project. At some point, the person opened up emotionally, and my partner asked him if he had paid his “black” salary at his previous job to his employees. The answer was: “How much you don’t steal from the Motherland, you will not return yours anyway”. After this and a few more questions, we came to the conclusion that he will steal from us too if he suddenly finds himself in some way disadvantaged.
I believe that it is very important to protect the internal microclimate of the company. Recently, I did not take on the work in the Moscow office of one too purposeful seller. It seems that he was familiar with NLP and tried to program me to take him to work. I imagined how he would turn my colleagues and me into zombies, but I still wanted to be human.
People often do not like
Many say that the market is overheated, and there is a large shortage of personnel. But if you dig deeper, you will find a huge number of people who are unhappy because they do not do what they want. They can be made happier by giving an interesting job. And in order to do what they love, many people are willing to temporarily lose significantly in income. In 2010, when we were just starting a business and could not pay people a big salary, I myself hired a couple of employees with a salary several times less than what they had received at their previous place of work.
Reasons to work much more than it seems.
People need to be appreciated, and I think that if you know the negative side of a person, it’s better than you don’t know anything at all. I am not afraid to hire people who have shortcomings and forgive mistakes if I consider an employee to be able to learn from them. The main thing is to know that the employee is valuable, and he will tear everyone away if he is well motivated.
By the way, about motivation, I have a whole theory. I analyzed the motivations of people who at various times came to us for interviews and ranked in order of value from the employer's point of view:
1. Creation, creation of values.
2. The desire to benefit, to be in demand.
3. The desire to feel responsibility, self-realization.
4. Study, gaining experience.
5. Communication in the team, with customers and suppliers.
6. The desire to be involved in an important project.
7. Getting money for work.
8. Desire to spend time with your hobby.
9. Work on the resume.
Keep people enthusiastic
If you draw a graph of job satisfaction from a new employee, it will be very similar to the Gartner technology maturity cycle curve. At first, you are very pleased that you took a new employee, you like him more and more, you start to consider his arrival as a great success (it looks like a romantic period in a relationship with a girl). The peak of a positive attitude comes in the first three months of work and coincides with the end of the probationary period. This is understandable: the transition to a new job is a good incentive. Adrenaline rush occurs, the employee wants to excel and works quickly, he likes to meet new people and perform new tasks. And then the routine begins, by the end of the sixth month of work the impression worsens and can completely decline, even the desire to immediately dismiss a new employee.
In this regard, it is important to give the employee such a first task so that he can fulfill it during the probationary period - for the manager, this will be an objective indicator of the employee's value and will allow to avoid exaggerated expectations. And for an employee, this will be a stepping stone in development, he will receive feedback from the company, he will think “I could!”, And his initiative will not decrease.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246127/
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