Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

I’ve discovered that I wrote about 5-6 articles on hiring in a small business. But that should stop me from adding more resources to it – simply because hiring is one of the most important steps a small business should take to grow.

This time I’m commenting on an article called How to Select a Startup Person? that appeared on Indian Startups, Entrepreneurship, Web2.0 blog. I’m happy to see that most of the views on hiring are common no matter the geography. Lets see:

• Right Mindset : For any startup, understanding the mind-set of prospective employee/partner is very important. It takes special peoples to work in a startup. I should know best, I’m some sort of startup junkie, loving to do the hard work in the beginning and getting bored once everything is set up. Even if you are a simple employee, working in a startup is harder and riskier. There is no saying if the company won’t go under and next thing you hear is that you have a dark spot on your resume. Of course, it doesn’t mean the company went under because of you, but in a way you were part of the things that didn’t go well.
• Financial expectations : People with startup mind-set would prefer to delay their financial gains. It’s way harder for a startup company to match the benefits an established company could offer. Luckily, the start-up employees take brain food from accomplishing things and making things matter.
• Higher Responsibilities : A Startup person would always emphasize his worth and capability to take higher responsibilities. You get to do a little bit of everything. And that especially good if you think about this as a learning experience. If I think well, most of the things I have an idea about today are things that I have experimented while being employed at my first start-up. Better than any college or anything.
• True Reflection of his aspirations/skill-set : A startup person would try to bring-out real aspirations in front of decision makers. Hm. What?
• Flexible Mind-set : A startup person is always open to new ideas and approaches. Chances are that sometimes you don’t know how to make things because they haven’t been done before. Or you have to make them different because of limited resources, or because you have enough liberty to do that. No matter how you put this, you’re walking paths than have never been traveled before.
• Innovation : A startup person would always think in innovative direction. He/She won’t try to solve problems in usual manner. Or as I said, you don’t know how to do stuff, and you… innovate

Good article. Now let me list the other articles I wrote about hiring in a small business.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• Good news: Small Businesses can hire part time or project based
• What kind of employees for your small business?
• Make your employees happy – it’s an entrepreneur task
• Hiring new employees versus profitability
• Hiring in a bootstrapped company
• Small Business compete with Big Corporation

While my previous writings talk about making your employees happy and hiring in a small business, the wage you pay has one more meaning and importance that I haven’t covered before. Sure, when you are small, is hard to compete with big business in offering strong packages to your employees, insurance and benefits.  Even more difficult when you are bootstrapping along the way, growing your business without outside investment.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. The wages you pay have another important meaning as well: value. Sometimes people tend to evaluate their professional and social position depending on the amount of money they get. Sometimes it doesn’t matter you are  a manager or whatever at a great company, because if your friend has a better payment at an unknown company, then it might be that he is more valuable than you. Or at least that how some people think.

If the amount of money you are paying your employees is a sign of their value, then how much should you pay them? Because no matter how many evaluations you make, sometimes the real value of an employee is more than you can measure – might not be the very best on standard evaluation terms, but might be just the ones are building the long term value of your company.

Well, I really have no idea. You can measure how much money they bring, what would be the costs of hiring a new person, or whatever else, but how can you translate their value in money?