1 Role less focused

Your startup role will likely be much less focused on a specific duty or responsibility. This can affect everyone from the co-founders, down to the last person to start in the team, and it is especially true of an early-stage startup that is just finding its feet or even growing at speed.

Don’t expect your role and responsibilities to be set in stone. You will need to have a positive attitude towards accepting responsibility, embracing change, dealing with problems and coming up with quick solutions!

2 Resources

With fewer people in the team, comes a more diverse range of daily set of work duties! Likewise, with less operational structure in place, fewer resources are often available for you to utilize. These can be the things you take for granted when working for a corporate.

There may not be an unlimited supply of colour printing available, there may not be a cleaner that empties your bins. Working in a marketing role, you might need to do your own PR, as opposed to sending your requests through to the outsourced PR team. But with fewer resources, you may find yourself becoming more job-smart, creative and quicker to come up with more exciting ways to deliver success.

3 Pay

It’s really exciting working for a tech startup that is on its way up in the world. Each person in the team will need to step up, take responsibility and hopefully benefit big time in the long run. In the short-term though, unless we are talking about a tech startup that has raised a series A round or beyond, you will often work long hours for less financial reward than you might typically have been paid in a similar role for a corporate.

However, there are loads of perks when working for startups, so you will need to measure that up - startups often work in cool co-working spaces and also are generally flexible in terms of working from home.

4 Career path

If you join a startup that has a team of 5, it’s very unlikely that you will jump internally from being a HR administrator, to a HR officer to a HR manager over a period of a couple of years. Why? Because structurally those jobs haven’t been created as yet.

However, if you are one of the first employees to join a tech startup and it grows, your role will naturally develop into one with more responsibility, so the role of HR manager becomes one you create for yourself! This does mean there is more uncertainty, but if you want the ability to shape the future and be at the forefront of where a company or an industry is heading, working for a tech startup could be ideal.

5 End of that Friday Feeling (at least at founder level)

It isn’t a case of working 9-5, Monday to Friday and then leaving work at work. At least at management and founder level, expect to take work home often, to find it harder to switch off and to feel a sense of responsibility for everything in the business that goes right or wrong. Of course, this might be similar to a high-pressured role working for a large corporate, but in a startup, every employee will be integral to daily, weekly and monthly performance.

TableCrowd Talent is a startup focused recruitment agency. If you’re looking for a role in a startup... tell us some more about your career plans or take a look at our current jobs here!

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