3 Ways Early-Stage Startups Can Make Competitive Candidate Offers
Closing top-tier talent as an early-stage startup can be difficult. Even with a large round of funding, providing at-market cash compensation packages isn’t always feasible or even enough. Most candidates interviewing for a startup understand that companies maintain a lean budget or are cash-poor, and therefore have to get creative in terms of total compensation.
By diving into what matters to a candidate and successfully getting your vision across, you can build a world-class team. Here’s how to do it.
1. Understand Your Candidate’s Motivations + Values
Most candidates are not joining a startup for high cash compensation. And if they are, they’re probably the wrong person for the (startup) job. I find that the folks we hired at OfficeTogether that do the best are highly motivated by working on a small, fast-paced team, believe in huge upside potential, are customer-obsessed, and care deeply about taking the next steps in their career. Typically, they are only interviewing at other early-stage companies and are excited by the autonomy, rather than the structure, that an early-stage team offers.
Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem, a Series-C recruiting software and talent acquisition platform, likes to use the “5 F’s” to better understand a candidate’s motivations and values.
● Fit — Is the company a good fit for me & my values?
● Family — Will I be able to prioritize my family?
● Freedom — Will I have freedom and autonomy?
● Fortune — What’s in it for me financially?
● Fun — And then how much fun are you going to have?
By utilizing the “5 F’s”, you can craft a competitive offer that sells to the candidate’s motivations or what they care about most in their next job opportunity. In short, you’ll be better able to position your offer in a way that is most appealing to the candidate.
2. Create a Meaningful Connection with the Candidate
Candidates are humans, and they want to feel a connection to other humans. There are many unknowns when accepting a new job, so ultimately, the candidate must have a strong emotional connection to the company to take the plunge and join your firm.
At OfficeTogether, we have a specific values interview, usually conducted by someone from a different department, to help create this strong connection. We ask questions like “Tell me about a time you failed” or “What’s most important to you in your next role?”. These highly personal questions create intimacy between the interviewers and candidates.
Another important part of creating a connection with a candidate is showing them how much you want to see them at your company. Jacqueline Loeb, the co-founder of Scouted, an early-career job-matching platform, has seen it too many times. The candidate felt that the company just wasn’t excited about them, so the candidate took another offer.
Always communicate your interest and intent early (and often). We meet in our virtual office GatherTown to surprise candidates with a verbal offer, and then have various members of the team follow up via email, expressing their excitement to see the candidate join the team. These emails do not cost money and have helped us convince candidates to join us over more cash-heavy offers. It also doesn’t hurt to send a personalized gift – we sent one candidate her favorite brand of vegan ice cream when we found out her birthday was coming up. Thoughtful, and spending $50 on ice cream to hire world-class talent is high value and more memorable than a signing bonus.
3. Provide Value Beyond Cash Compensation
Startup candidates (and employees) care about more than just cash compensation. And startup founders can get creative when thinking about what benefits and opportunities they can offer their team.
In a world where hybrid or remote-first work is the norm, something as simple as offering a physical space for people to come together to collaborate could be a huge selling point, especially for junior talent. Our 2021 summer engineering intern class joined, in part, because of the opportunity to work in person with our New York team.
In addition to our office space, OfficeTogether offers an annual $1000 learning and development credit, a 401k program, generous vacation days, refresh weeks around the holidays, international company offsites, and more. We go out of our way to have big company benefits even though the team is still small.
We care so much about people that we will bring on specific benefits to close candidates. One working mother wanted to return to the workforce and was concerned about the cost of hiring a caregiver for her child. To show her how much we wanted to support her family, we are implementing a caregiver FSA. This benefit was relatively affordable but time intensive to coordinate, especially with only a part-time HR function, but we felt that it was the right thing to do to support working parents.
The war for top talent is fiercer than ever, and it’s your job as a startup to stand out among the crowd. Cash is only one part of the package, and startups are uniquely positioned to not only show how much they care about a candidate but also how special working at their company is for their employees.