One of the fastest ways to land a high-potential client as a startup is to assist them with hiring high-quality talent. 

You will be surprised to know how difficult it is for CEOs to hire the right kind of talent.

Today, at our company, we have 600+ team members and we have been catering to training various kinds of professionals for the past 10 years.  

However, hiring the first employee when we were a 3-people team in 2012 was not easy at all.

We would speak to people for hours and hours, and they’d not be convinced.

Some of them would agree and then not show up on the date of joining. They said that they had an emergency. 

Others would vanish after a day or two of work.   

After much effort, a young grad agreed to join us! He knew about us through Ramanuj’s personal network in college.

It took us 1 year of effort to hire just 1 person! This is a problem faced by every startup out there.

If you want to assist fast-growing startups, you must help them ride this challenge. 

It is really difficult, yet very critical for early stage startups to hire employees in the right roles, otherwise they will not succeed.

We recently faced a similar challenge when we were scaling up our tech team. 

Potential candidates viewed us as a content/course company, and not a tech company, so they could not visualise a future with us. 

Where was the tech? What was the tech challenge? 

Even some of our existing tech team members started looking for opportunities with tech companies. 

We realised that to hire techies effectively, potential candidates needed to see us as a tech company, they needed to know what is the tech product, what is the challenge that is worthy of being solved through tech, which deserves their time, otherwise they will not consider it! 

We did a few things to change this, but once we fixed it, we rapidly hired 6-7 candidates in under a month!  

One of our ex-employees who started working with a big IT company now has joined us back full-time! 

Here is another IT professional who has worked with several international organisations across the globe, such as iBility, BATs and Wallenius Wilhelmsen (Nissan US).

Similarly, you can also assist startups to do this to attract and retain key talent.

This is called “employer branding” work. 

Please DO NOT confuse employer branding with recruitment. 

This comes before. 

Employer branding is the difference between getting lots of high-quality applications for a startup that enables it to rapidly scale and become a unicorn vs. not getting any quality applications and therefore grow slowly, and maybe lose out to competitors which are growing faster!  

A famous company or a well-funded startup that has raised several rounds of funding will have hundreds of applicants for every job role, but an early stage startup will not. 

Early stage startups don’t have a prior reputation and track record in the market for talent. 

There is probably no effort that was put into by them in terms of employer branding, barring a couple of interviews of founders and news coverage of funding (if any). As a result, enough candidates don’t apply to them.  

The startups have a promising business model, they have customers, and they have VC funding available, but all of that will not be of any use if they cannot hire effectively & scale! 

If you can help the startup founders here with employer branding (and then recruitment, onboarding, training , performance management, etc.), they will be able to attract the right kind of talent and scale, and will pay you very well.

You can think of this sort of work as an easy entry point if you want to do US HR work from India. Not only in the US, you can do this for startups anywhere in the world!

Even many professionals, lawyers, dentists, and SMEs such as real estate developers and agents, gym owners, etc. face these hiring challenges. 

They have clients willing to give them work, but they are unable to take up more work because they don’t have an effective team! 

So, how do you help them with employer branding? 

Let me give you a simple example any damn person can do without any further training. 

Here are some simple steps:

1. Interview the founders and set up some blog posts that explain the vision and mission of the startup on its website – most people do not have this. If you find any startup that does not have this – approach them and offer to do this for free – just to build relationship
2. Set up a team page which shows what kind of awesome people are already working in the team
3. Do some video interviews with the founders, top performers and clients, and put up on the startups youtube – potential employees and collaborators want to research the company before applying – what will they find?
4. Post some of these content on their linkedin and twitter page after repurposing – now this content will be easier to find
5. Want to go the extra step? Get the founders to be featured on some podcasts and interview websites

Some questions that should be covered in all such content:

1. What are we trying to do? How do we plan to change the world?
2. How are we different from all the other startups and competitors?
3. What did we already do that is inspiring and shows that we have great potential?
4. What is the ultimate mission? How will the world look different when we succeed?
5. What is life like when you work with us? What development can you expect in your life and career?

You need to ensure that all this content is inspiring, insightful and crisp. It would speak to the right people and make them want to join your startup.

When you are done, your startup would already stand out from other generic recruiters, there is a bunch of content to attract passionate operators to the startup!

Everytime someone applies, you want to send them some of these links before the interview so they know about the startup and its mission!

You need to identify which points you can highlight:

• Is it the opportunity to build a cool product that is used by millions? 
• Is it about being a part of the next unicorn in a unique niche? 
• Is it about having a very friendly work environment, and opportunities to directly speak to anyone in the company? 
• Is it about being exposed to a culture of entrepreneurship in your first career? 
• Is it about opportunities to get mentored by the CEO/CTO directly?
• How will this experience help them later? Will other companies be willing to hire them? 

What can you highlight about the organisation that will enable the organisation to attract talent?

You may even create some content or videos and posts around this!   

Don’t worry that you have to do too much writing work. 

You can use AI to do a lot of this work too! 

For example, you can use ChatGPT to generate amazing interview questions.

Go on a zoom call with the startup founders. 

Then use a video editing tool called Descript that will help you edit the video like a word document.

We  will send you a demo in the coming days.

You will be able to generate captions, automatically remove stutters and filler words, remove background, improve lighting, and produce studio-quality sound (remove kitchen noise, dogs barking, construction noise, etc.) in under 10 minutes without being a professional video editor or hiring one!

Do you want to see a demo of it? 

I can send you a live case study of a real Silicon valley startup if you want, tomorrow.

Reply to this or comment saying “Silicon Valley”! 

And do you want a step-by-step script for the pitch? 

Here it is: 

Hey Mr Startup CEO,

I know to unlock the massive potential of your startup you need to attract top talent. It seems you did not have the bandwidth to work on employer branding of your startup yet. I want to help you with that, free of cost. Here is what I will do for you:

1. Add a few blogposts on your website that explain what you to and why your mission is compelling & exciting to join. To do this, I will interview you first to get a deep understanding of what makes your startup special. This is a must do for every startup – this content will not only attract the right talent but reduce your effort on explaining to potential candidates what is different about your startup and what they are signing up for.
2. I will design a very cool team section for your website that shows future candidates that they will get to work with an amazing and inspiring team – thereby helping you to attract top talent
3. I will also do some video interviews with the founders, top performers and clients, and put up edited clips on your youtube channel. Potential employees and collaborators want to research the company before applying – this is what they will find. Some exciting candidates may discover you through this channel as well!
4. I will repurpose some of this content and post them on your other social media channels like twitter and linkedin too
5. What is next? I am going to get you featured on some podcasts and interview websites which the job seekers you are looking for are following. I will also hunt down the candidates you need and make sure they read these interviews before I set up your calls with them.

This kind of employer branding can totally change your recruitment game. You know doing these things is no brainer, and you probably did not do these only because you don’t have enough time. 

You don’t have to worry about such small things anymore. Leave them to me and go conquer the world doing what you do best.

Would you like to get started? Lets jump into a zoom call this week to see how can I help you?

Regards

XYZ

Do you think you can do this?

Not that difficult. You have to do it properly though or you will blow your opportunity and lose confidence.

Btw, if you can do this, you can offer the following additional services to charge more:

1. Recruitment (pays incentives like the sales guys), 
2. Administer legal documentation to bring people on board
3. Create onboarding plans and trainings,
4. Performance management, 
5. Allocate ESOPs and incentives
6. Create culture decks, mission, vision statements (all the cool stuff!)

It all becomes possible, once you get started.

But without employer branding, the game is not on. 

Imagine that you can do a few of these things. 

Can you imagine the boost in their profitability?

Will they be willing to pay you for that?

How much importance will you get for your work?

Any HR professional at any level can do it. 

If you do it successfully, you will not be considered a cost-centre, but a magician who has taken the startup on to a profitability highway!

Ok, this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

If you want to tap into this opportunity, here are the likely questions that you may have: 

1. Which clients should you target? How can you find them? 
2. How much can you earn if you tap into remote work? 
3. How should you pitch to them?
4. How can you get started? How long does it take to get results? 
5. Which skill sets are critical for success?
6. Can you do it on the side?
7. How should you use AI in the process?
8. Are other people already doing this?

We are sitting on a once-in-a-generation opportunity in India currently. 

You have a massive cost advantage when you perform remote work for clients in advanced economies, and competition is low currently.