College2Startup Blog

The Battle for Startup Talent. What gives

Startups are always looking for qualified employees, startup jobs are very different from most jobs be it technical or non-technical and as a result the demand for the very best has always been sky high. A few weeks ago we read another story of a startup offering new employees up to $10,000 upfront and some other excellent perks. It’s not surprising. With startups (early stage ones), it has always been the case. Potential employees are getting lured by attractive bounties like free gym membership, beer on tap, cars, computers etc.

It is even more of a battle at the top with the bigger “startups”. A report in Business Insider sometime in April suggested that Google offered two of their most prized product managers $50million and $100 million respectively to turn down the advances of Twitter. We also often see stories of startups either merging with other startups or acq-hiring just for the talent pool that will be available.

When we came up with the idea for College2Startup, we wanted to come up with an avenue for startups to have access to a larger collection of talent that they didn’t know existed before. Many undergrads and recent grads be it at college level, masters or MBA level have shown serious interest in venturing into startups rather than take traditional jobs. There has however always been the problem of finding the startup jobs that match their skills. We then decided to take the HARO approach and collect all these startup job openings and send them to all the potential employees who have subscribed to receive these jobs.

I recently read a story on BusinessWeek that talked about how MBAs are approaching the working world upon receiving their degrees. In the past, we’ve seen more situations where these MBAs go on to work for traditional companies and take up management roles, but recently, there have been more of them willing to go into entrepreneurship albeit after a few years.

The article suggested that most MBAs (about 70%) who were interested in the whole startup culture either as a founder, an employee or a VC, were also more interested in waiting a few years before taking the plunge.

Even traditional companies are now after the entrepreneurial type - startup talent. With companies like GE, Unilever etc dangling incentives in front of the same talent startups are after, the battle for the smartest minds isn’t slowing down anytime soon. So it begs the question, how do smaller/early-stage startups keep up? how do they find the best talent to take them from 100k revenue to 10MM revenue?