A strong engineer is considering three companies. Two are established and one is a startup with twelve people. She wants to know how long the money lasts, what the role is actually like in practice and who she would be working with, and the careers page says the team is passionate about building great products.
She takes one of the other offers, and nobody at the startup ever knows why.
Step 1: write a careers page that answers the real questions
Funding stage, team size, how the company makes money, what the role involves in the first six months, who the person reports to, how decisions are made and what the working arrangement is. Candidates evaluating a small company are assessing risk, and vague enthusiasm reads as evasion.
Step 2: publish a range
Salary ranges save everyone's time. A candidate who finds out at offer stage that the number is half what they need has wasted four hours, and so have you.
Step 3: be honest about stage
A twelve person company with eighteen months of runway is a different proposition to a funded company of two hundred, and some candidates specifically want the former. Describing the stage accurately attracts the people who thrive in it.
Step 4: explain equity properly
Candidates increasingly know that an option grant means little without the detail. Explaining that you discuss the numbers openly, and what the vesting arrangement is, distinguishes you from companies that wave a percentage around.
Step 5: publish the process
How many stages, who they meet, whether there is a task, how long it takes and when they hear back. Candidates drop out of processes that feel unbounded far more often than from processes they find demanding.
Step 6: reply fast, because you can
A small company can respond in an hour where a large one takes a week. That is a genuine advantage and it is thrown away when a founder is heads down for four days and the inbox sits unread.
Step 7: handle speculative approaches well
Good people contact companies they like without a role being open. A polite, quick response that captures their details is worth more than any job board, and the pattern is much like investor and partnership enquiries reaching startup websites.
Step 8: keep application specifics with a person
Where an application stands, feedback and offer discussions need a named human, not an automated answer.
Step 8b: make the team visible
Candidates joining a small company are joining specific people. Naming who they would work with, what those people have done and how the team operates day to day answers more than any description of culture, because it lets someone judge whether they want to spend their working life in that particular room.
Step 9: answer the same questions customers ask
Candidates research a startup the way early customers do, looking for evidence it is real, which is described in early-stage startups and their first customer questions.
Step 10: work with specialists where it helps
Specialist recruiters bring candidates who already understand the sector, as in niche recruiters and specialist candidate questions.
Step 11: treat the careers page like the pricing page
Both are high-intent pages where visitors decide whether to take a step, which is the approach in turning pricing page visitors into enquiries.
Getting started
Publish your stage, ranges, process and what the roles involve, then answer candidates at any hour. SpideyChat for startups answers from your published pages and hands applications to a person. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.