You may get hired in s startup on your skills but you will only stay in the job for your will, says Varun Rathi, cofounder of Happay
TimesJobs.com Bureau
A new venture can start with one business model and then pivot into another the next year till it finds its feet and can scale smoothly. In such scenarios, the founders have to find employees who are very different from professionals looking to work in more established businesses.
In this context, TimesJobs.com spoke to Varun Rathi, cofounder and COO of Happay, a business expense management solution provider that moved from being a B2C startup to a successful B2B venture. Rathi and Anshul Rai, both IIT Kharagpur alumni, started Happay in 2012 in Bengaluru. In this interview, Rathi answers questions on different facets of hiring.
Why do startups want dynamic people?
The skills required at different stages in a startup are very dynamic and the same is expected from people joining in the early stage. We pivoted from B2C to B2B after running a product with decent success for a year and the same team continued our growth for B2B product even if the skills required to sell, promote, advertise and build the new product were completely different.
How is hiring different in your company?
-We would look for people who need the least amount of ‘unlearning’ – they are people who will come in with an open mind and not say ‘it has always been done this way, and that’s how I will do it’
-We are not very stringent on work experience. At times, even freshers do a job better.
-We like people to be agile and understand business requirements — be it in any profile. We run weekly iterations and sprints not just in product development but in marketing, customer support and even sales. So being able to adjust to constant and unpredictable change is a must.
What did you learn from your experience?
What we have learnt from our own experience, from industry experts and our mentors is that any startup will want to hire and retain people falling in the two quadrants — Will + No Skill or Will + Skill and No Will + No Skill or No Will + Skill). If the will to learn is there, the skill can be developed. You may get hired on your skill but will only stay for your will.
Depending on the stage of a startup, it might be looking for someone who comes on-board and starts building/writing/doing things from scratch or someone who can take up an already defined process and scale it to the next level.
Can you give some actual examples?
If you are applying for marketing/growth hacking: Apart from your core skills as a digital/offline marketer, basic knowledge of Photoshop and HTML are preferred. This increases your speed of execution and reduces dependency on a ‘design department’ and ‘tech team’ to test a new idea. It also saves valuable time of other teams.
Also, in most tech companies, marketing is evolving into growth hacking, which requires a deep understanding of ‘day in the life of the customer’ and planning based on that.
If you are applying for B2B Sales: Any startup building an enterprise product will want to depend on the value provided by the product to do the selling. Hence a more sought-after skill/attitude in the sales team is identifying the right target market, reaching out to them using proven and innovative ways and making sure that the decision maker has seen the product demo.
How to get hired in a day?
Do a bit of research online to identify the decision-maker for you role and then just shoot an email with the following:
1. A few lines describing your skills and why you want to join the team.
2. Identify a challenge which the specific team might be facing, propose a solution in brief and show willingness to take the ownership of execution. If it is good, you can just walk in the next day and start working on it.
source :-techgig