Life in a startup can be pretty unpredictable, particularly in the early days. It’s a dynamic environment where things can change quickly and everyone in the entire startup team - from the founder through to the newest hire needs to be able to adapt accordingly.
No matter how well crafted the startup business plan or strategy, adjustments need to be made along the way, often with minimal warning. Therefore when you’re building your startup, hiring staff who are adaptable, resilient and can handle those adjustments is a must.
Why do you need resilient staff in a startup?
In essence, employees with resilience are able to cope no matter how irregular the startup journey may be. They’ll be able to deal with the detours, the unexpected hiccups and challenges and rather than viewing them as setbacks, they’ll retain a sense of optimism, view them as opportunities and simply keep pushing forward. Resilient employees will be able to reevaluate things, make the necessary tweaks, bounce right back and keep everyone else upbeat and positive.
The end goal and your long-term startup vision will remain foremost in their mind and they’ll do what they can to help you achieve it. They’ll not let any sudden challenges demotivate them or get in the way. Instead, they’ll accept and recognise that mistakes will be made, that things don’t always go to plan and lessons are there to be learned.
Their can-do attitude, and ability to overcome hurdles and move on won’t just have a positive impact on your employee retention levels, it will also be vital to help you build and nurture a strong and effective workplace culture.
How to spot resilience on a CV
Whilst many candidates may profess to be resilient on their CVs, there are a few indicators that can help you determine if that is actually true.
For example, it’s worthwhile checking out the “Hobbies and Interests” section to see what a candidate does in their downtime. If they appear the adventurous sort, whether that’s through a love for extreme sports or a passion for long periods of travel, it’s likely that they’re pretty resilient too. After all, sports and travel often can and do go wrong, so it’s probably a given that they’ve had to overcome setbacks and challenges and lived to tell the tale! Likewise, if they’ve achieved their Duke of Edinburgh, they’ll most certainly have had to contend with knockbacks, which will have been both character-building as well as a clear sign of their inner strength and resilience.
Also, if they’ve previously worked for an early stage startup that has gone through considerable growth, it’s worth checking what size and stage it was actually at when they worked there. If they were working in the midst of that growth, they'd have been exposed to a fast-paced, dynamic environment and would have experienced the highs and the lows as the company grew. However, if things were a little stagnant when they were there or the development and growth hadn’t really kicked in, that experience doesn’t really reveal anything about how resilient they’re likely to be.
If a candidate appears to have had a pretty irregular work history and seems to hop from job to job incessantly, chances are they are not the most resilient of individuals. You may of course be able to probe further at the interview stage regarding their reasons for leaving particular jobs, however, chances are that when the going got tough, they made their move. If an employee leaves a job when things become challenging, it can often be a reliable sign that they are perhaps neither willing nor equipped to deal with difficult circumstances and situations.
On the other hand, if a candidate has a pretty solid and consistent employment background and has seemingly stayed the course even if things have been difficult for their company or sector, it may be likely that they will be able to withstand any future challenges and failures that could potentially arise. If the business where they worked has been through difficult times, faced some sort of adversity or major restructure and the candidate has remained throughout, they are clearly showing their ability to cope, come what may. They are inadvertently displaying tenacity, adaptability and of course that much coveted innate resilience.
How to interview for resilience
Although a candidate's resilience may become apparent at various stages of the recruitment process, the interview can be one of the most effective in determining exactly how resilient they are.
Of course, that's entirely dependent on asking the right questions. Frame the questions in the right way and you'll get a pretty good indicator both of how resilient they've been in the past as well as how resilient they're likely to be in the future. Asking them directly to assess their own resilience won’t be all that effective so instead here are a couple of suggestions for questions that should prove to be a little more insightful.
For example, you could ask them to describe a challenging or difficult situation that they have been in - at work, or in their personal lives - and ask them to explain in detail how they dealt with it. A resilient candidate will be able to give an objective analysis of what occurred and reveal a clear ability to reflect on a situation and identify lessons learned from the experience. They will also be able to give you an overview of their coping strategies, their capacity to be adaptable and their ability to manage their emotional reactions.
You could also ask a candidate to give you an example of an occasion when they experienced a significant setback or failure. Whilst a resilient candidate will of course express disappointment when describing such a situation, they will not apportion blame to someone or something else in a bid to justify the failure or setback.
Again, they will show an ability for self-reflection, as well as an ability to look at things clearly and objectively. They will be able to highlight what went wrong and why, analyse their own behaviour, identify what they could have done differently and also determine how or why an outcome or goal was not achieved as they had initially expected.
It’s not the case that they will be overly self-critical, instead will be more self-aware and show a desire and willingness to learn. Candidates who lack resilience will generally answer questions like this by criticising everyone but themselves and being in denial about how they may have played a part in causing the failure or setback.
Your goal should be to find a resilient candidate who will be able to provide a balanced view of even the most negative of events, acknowledge where mistakes were made and highlight the value of the lessons learned.
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Offering personalised, consultative service, at TableCrowd Talent we’re a specialist recruitment agency with our finger on the pulse of the startup and scaleup scene. We are committed to matching graduates, professionals and C-level executives to exciting startup and scaleup jobs across London, the UK and Europe.
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