Hiring has never been more difficult for early-stage start-ups than now. In this blog, we will discuss how remote work accelerated by Covid and massive venture capital inflow has made hiring extremely difficult for bootstrapped startups and MSMEs.
As Covid has enabled (accelerated) remote work; talent knows no geographical boundaries anymore. The best talents can sit with a laptop in Ara (Bihar) or Bikaner (Rajasthan) and earn compensation at San Francisco and Bay Area levels.
A senior software engineer earning 45L per year in Bangalore in a well-funded startup is still 2x less than their counterparts in most of the US and 3x-5x less than SF or NYC.
The remote world has made the Indian talent pool accessible to global companies within the comfort of their home. This has created a huge talent crunch for Indian start-ups at all levels.
Startup analysts have observed that exposure of the local talent pool to the global workforce has made Indian startups announce ESOP buyback much earlier in order to retain the best talent.
With venture capital funding touching $10 billion in 2020; there is an ongoing bidding war for talent in the market.
When Deepak Abbot, founder of Indiagold shared his struggle to hire & retain talent; it instantly became a talk of the town on Twitter with many founders relating with Deepak's pain.
https://twitter.com/deepakabbot/status/1374925586645217281
This insane bidding war is making it very difficult for startups (across all levels) to hire & retain talent but the ones that are most hit are the bootstrapped ones and MSMEs.
https://twitter.com/pacificleo/status/1373295215272894466
You don't have to pay more than others to win the game. Change the rules, instead! We are sharing a playbook. Don't worry!
In the book, Let's build a company: A start-up story minus the bullshit, Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal share their playbook on how to hire when you are bootstrapping and are devoid of external capital.
"We figured out that the right kind of people for an early-stage start-up with little to no funding are people with at least one drawback.
Generally, the drawback is either 'weak spoken English' or graduation from a 'no-name' college. These are the people ignored by big companies because they are biased towards certain colleges and pedigree. They want polished candidates.
This leaves a large pool of freshers who can be employed & trained by start-ups. Many of these folks are naturally hungry to achieve. They want to succeed in life as much as you want to build your own company."
Are you worried about what can freshers achieve? Will it be the right hiring strategy or not?
Zoho & Thyrocare have proved that a multi-million company can be built successfully with a team of freshers.