"THE A TEAM – Recruit staff part2"
entrepreneurship blog – Post 10
In the previous post we described our first efforts to recruit people to develop our Wibizz site – “Online community for lovers of arts and crafts”. While looking for our team of programmers, we also had to be active in other areas in order to upgrade the team. Our efforts focused on two main aspects: recruiting staff for our venture, and finding suitable consulting partners.
Staff for the venture: locating and screening candidates to help set up the company. These were the key figures at the stages of developing and building the company:
Programmers: in our case, our searches revolved around programmers who were the bottleneck in the stages of setting up the company.
Graphic designers and a bit on branding: while the site was being developed and programmed, we looked at a few site designers (here I’ll talk a bit more about design and then get back to the subject of recruiting people): the visual aspects of the Wibizz site are taken very seriously and still developing. The site is for creative people interested in the arts and crafts, and from our competitors we have learned that to communicate with creative users you must be unique as well as giving them the impression of a warm, fun place. Most of the homes of the artistic people we know don’t look like an IKEA kitchen display (white, angular grid, although IKEA does at least use some wood…). We wanted to have some color, with an atmosphere that is reminiscent of an artist’s studio/ home, in fact of how we all live and work.
A good example of a social network with character is the giant MySpace. This site was first addressed to musicians and quickly became the back yard/ junk heap of American and therefore global culture, a stronghold of popular culture and freedom of expression. The personal spaces look like the rooms of real people, and although it’s all quite a mess, its users see it as something authentic, and its success speaks for itself. On the other hand, most of our competitors have sites that are cold, monochrome, lacking any fun, enjoyment of life or the ability to laugh at ourselves a bit.
People for content, research and data mining, SEO: essential for any venture dealing with the Internet. It’s important to choose professionals with proven experience who can teach you about this subject, and not the other way round – which often happens with consultants.
Marketing manager: another key figure that we worked hard to find. From our meetings with consultants and investors, we realized that we needed a marketing manager with expertise on the subject of the Internet, someone with experience of developing and marketing products on the Internet to large groups of people, with an understanding of online clearing and site promotion. We advertised in several places, some of which are listed below. Salvation in fact came from a chance meeting (or not – depending on whether you believe in “chance” in life) at a workshop in the north for a bit of “mental spring cleaning”.
Advice and support: we looked for partners and advisers who could reinforce our business strength in our dealings with investors, with lots of experience of tightening up business plans, and who could point us in the right direction to promote our venture in Israel and abroad (both technological aspects and business aspects), act as our “big brothers” in the business world, help us to define recruitment strategy, give advice on planning schedules for launching products/ services and so on. (Sometimes these consultants could also function as partners and investors.)
Types of consultants:
- Business: consultants with a lot of experience and a good reputation in the field of business. It’s best to link up with those who have previously recruited staff and run a company!!! Look for consultants who know about the area the venture deals with, and make sure they have practical experience and a positive approach to working with beginner entrepreneurs. Let them be part of the company, compensate them properly and help them reduce your mistakes to a minimum. It’s important to remember that all their advice and help must go through your filters and at the end of the day the one who makes the decisions is the entrepreneur.
We knew the managers at ISEMI, the Israeli Center for Entrepreneurship, and they proved to be an excellent springboard for our venture. The founder and head of the Center was an active adviser on our board of directors; her contribution started from the first moment and continued through intensive high level mentoring, advice on constructing business models, the proper way to approach people in the business world and initiating meetings with them on the basis of an operative plan, physically accompanying us to meetings and helping us to recruit personnel. (For example, she was the one who found Oded who became the marketing manager of Wibizz.)
* It’s very important to have someone with real life experience and street smarts involved in running the company.
- Gurus: outstanding figures in business, technological or theoretical aspects of your field, personalities whose activities in the field are well known and admired. We linked up with Mel Bayers who is an expert in the history of art and design and who has written two encyclopedias on design for MOMA in New York and dozens of other books on art and design. He is a well known figure at important exhibitions and events, an entrepreneur and teacher. We got to know this colorful character through our studies at Betzalel and at international exhibitions we participated in. He now lives in Tel Aviv and is very active in the local design world (teaching design at the Holon Technological College). He mainly helps us to catalog and define areas of art and crafts for the site, while his extensive contacts here and abroad in all aspects of the art world - museums, galleries and schools – have also been enormously helpful to us.
- Professional partners: from the fields of finance, law – company law, search engine optimization (SEO) and more. In our studies at ISEMI we came into contact with leading consultants who help startups and have the necessary experience to help us avoid the typical critical errors that arise when you’re setting up a new company.
Tips from our experience of recruiting personnel:
· Finding the right people for a new venture is a complex task, which must be approached in an intelligent way.
· You have to find the right combination of practical ability and motivation to be part of a creative adventure. We found out that not everyone is suitable for work in a young startup. The elements of risk and ambiguity are hard for some people to deal with.
· Draw up initial working drafts which become detailed employment contracts as the company is actually established.
· Take legal advice from people with expertise in suitable mechanisms for startup employees – the most important thing is to avoid handing out company shares like candy.
The sources we used to find personnel
The ISEMI website, various Internet sites with wanted ads, friends and personal recommendations. If you’re not using recruitment agencies, you risk having to do a lot of work sifting through applications, but you must remember that most new startups don’t have the budget for large expenses, at least not until the first million…
More to come…
