Hiring gets difficult when a startup starts growing quickly. Suddenly, there are more roles to fill, more specialist skills needed and much less time to find the right people. The bigger problem is that a growing startup is usually competing against companies with deeper pockets and a much more recognisable name. A candidate might have three or four offers on the table. Why choose the smaller company? Money matters, of course. But it’s rarely the whole answer.

Here are some of the things high-growth startups are using to make themselves more attractive to good candidates.

1.     Give People a Reason to Care About the Upside

Equity and stock options can make a startup offer more interesting, particularly for senior employees. Someone joining a young company is taking a different kind of risk than someone joining an established employer. If the company does well, having a stake in that success can make the risk feel worthwhile.

There’s an important catch, though. Equity needs to be explained properly. Candidates should know what they’re being offered, how it vests and what happens in different circumstances. A complicated equity package can create more confusion than excitement.

2.     Make the Mission Mean Something

“Changing the world” isn’t much of a mission if nobody can explain what the company actually does. Good candidates tend to look beyond the job description. They want to understand the problem being solved and why the business exists in the first place. That doesn’t have to mean a grand social mission. A startup making software that removes a painful administrative task can have a perfectly good reason for existing. What matters is that employees can see where their work fits. And the message has to match reality. If a company talks constantly about innovation but rejects every new idea, people notice.

3.     Let Good People Grow Quickly

One advantage startups have is that job titles don’t always have to define everything a person can do. Someone hired as a marketing manager may end up running a new market launch six months later. An engineer may have direct input into product decisions. A junior employee with the right skills can sometimes take on responsibility that would take years to reach in a large organisation. That can be a big attraction.

People who are ambitious generally don’t want to spend three years waiting for permission to do more interesting work. Startups can offer that opportunity much earlier, provided there’s enough support around it.

4.     Stop Treating Flexibility as a Perk

Flexible working is no longer particularly unusual. Candidates increasingly want to know what working at a company will actually look like before accepting an offer. That could mean working remotely, choosing different hours or having a hybrid arrangement. The exact model matters less than being clear about it.

The CIPD has also highlighted flexible working as a useful tool for attracting and retaining people, particularly when organisations are dealing with skills shortages. For a startup, there’s another advantage. If someone doesn’t need to live within commuting distance of the office, the available talent pool becomes much bigger.

5.     Ask Employees Who They Know

Some of the best hires can come through people already working at the company. Employees know former colleagues, university contacts, people they have worked with on projects and others in their professional circles. They can often identify good candidates before those people start looking at job boards.

Referral schemes don’t need to be complicated. A clear incentive helps, but so does simply making it easy for employees to recommend someone. Of course, a referral shouldn’t replace proper hiring standards. Knowing someone isn’t the same thing as knowing they can do the job.

6.     Don’t Take Six Weeks to Make a Decision

Good candidates have options. A slow hiring process can be especially painful for a startup because larger employers may already have established recruitment teams and processes. If a candidate has to complete five interviews, wait a week between each one and then hear nothing for another two weeks, interest tends to disappear.

Speed doesn’t mean hiring carelessly. It means deciding who needs to meet the candidate, agreeing on what needs to be assessed and making a decision when the information is there. If someone is a strong fit, there’s little value in keeping them waiting simply because the process has always worked that way.

7.     Look at the Whole Employment Package

There’s still a fairly simple reality behind all the newer approaches to hiring: people need to feel that they’re being paid fairly. Startups should understand what comparable roles are paying, particularly when hiring people with specialist or hard-to-find skills. Looking only at what the company can afford isn’t enough. The market matters too. External salary data can help here. Pay benchmarking gives employers a way to compare their salary levels with relevant market information before making an offer.

Then there are the things around the salary. Health and wellbeing support, training budgets, additional leave, professional development and even small benefits can influence how an offer feels. The UK government has also introduced further measures around employment rights and flexible working, making it increasingly important for employers to keep their people policies up to date.

It’s Not Always About Being the Highest Payer

Startups are unlikely to beat every established company on salary. Trying to do so can also become expensive very quickly. The better approach is to understand why someone would actually want to join. Maybe it’s the chance to work directly with the founders. Maybe it’s having responsibility over an entire product instead of one small part of it. Maybe it’s being able to work remotely while building something from an early stage.

Salary still needs to be competitive. But it doesn’t have to carry the entire offer. The startups that attract strong people tend to understand this balance. They offer enough financially to make the move credible, then give candidates something beyond the payslip such as responsibility, flexibility, growth and a genuine opportunity to have an impact. That combination can be difficult for a large organisation to replicate, and it’s one of the few areas where a growing startup can have a real advantage.

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