Ask yourself this question, “What do employers owe the people they do not hire?” Brooke Allen’s answer from “How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire” offers three great suggestions for the startup hiring process.
- Information on where they stand.
- An explanation of what they are doing wrong.
- Help improving.
Most bootstrappers offer cash and equity for cofounders and employees. Brooke Allen took it much further: he committed to helping everyone who applied and invested energy in understanding his business needs. This is fantastic idea.
Be Strategic: Your Hiring Process Can Foster
Goodwill And Long Term Relationships
Even though most bootstrappers cannot run a multi-week training course as he did they can still play a “long game” and do what they can to treat applicants as potential partners and members of a common interest group. This approach lays the groundwork for a variety of different types of future collaboration, not the least of which is to encourage the ones who were not selected to make you aware of potential opportunities as a way to reciprocate for the assistance that you provided.
Bootstrappers cannot let transactional thinking and urgent hiring needs crowd out the benefits of long term thinking.
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