Regardless of your company’s logistical infrastructure, business plan and management in general, the thing that will decide the quality of your work is the talent you have within your company. Let’s face it, some employees are simply more productive, more creative and overall more efficient than others. The problem with hiring them, however, lies in a fact that they require paycheck that is equal to their contribution to your company. As a startup, this puts you in a tough spot, seeing how you do need to hire top talent engineers, but probably aren’t in a position to afford them. Here are few tips on how you can make the impossible happen.

1.      Answer Questions Online

The first thing you need to do is establish yourself as an industry expert. In this way, you are giving your future employees a hint of all the things they can learn from you if they decide to find employment in your company. There are so many places where you can do such a thing like Quora, GrowthHackers or even Reddit. It is also quite effective (although more time consuming) to write a book or pitch a few industry-relevant ideas to the media. The best part of it all is that this shouldn’t take more than one hour per day of your time, while it builds your online reputation one step at a time.

2.      Grooming Top Talent

The problem with the idea of hiring top talent usually lies in the fact that people usually get the unrealistic idea of what they want. For example, they would prefer to get someone certified and battle-hardened who already knows everything about the business. Sure, people like this definitely exist on the job market, but they are usually looking for an offer more lucrative than yours.

This is why you need to start thinking towards grooming instead of hiring top talent. Get a perspective young engineer and then encourage them to self-improve and try to teach them as much as you can. Put them on tasks from which they will be able to learn and you will both benefit from this practice in no time.

3.      Outsource this Function

Another way of solving this problem is by outsourcing software development and predictive analysis to another (more experienced) company. Hiring consumes a lot of resources, while grooming takes time. Not to mention that both of these solutions require you to provide your engineers with adequate tools and even pay for expensive (yet necessary) courses for their self-improvement.

By going with outsourcing, you are skipping this altogether and adopting a course of action that is much more frugal in the short run. Sure, over the course of years it is much more cost-effective to go with an in-house team, but this probably isn’t a viable course of action for a startup on a tight budget.

4.      Make a Public Challenge

Next idea rests on challenging the ego of your potential employees. Namely, what you need to do is make a public challenge in a form of puzzle or a hack and propose a modest reward for those who manage to solve the issue. In this way, you will encourage all those confident in their abilities to try their hand at this task.

From your point of view, defeating the challenge will be a demonstration of their skills, but at the same time, this will be the most fun job interview they ever had. If there is one thing that this will show them is that working for you is far from boring.

5.      Demonstrate Your Company Values

Finally, although you can’t compete with a paycheck that larger companies have to offer, what you can offer them is a work-friendly environment and a highly-developed company culture. Show them all the advantages of working for a promising startup, such as a chance to demonstrate their creative prowess.

Furthermore, in a startup managed by a handful of people, they will have a much easier job of getting a crucial role in the project. This kind of responsibility is not something that can be taught at any course and is exactly what their future employers may be looking for. The same goes for any potential leadership position they might get in your company.

In Conclusion

As you can see, hiring top talent engineers on a budget is definitely difficult, but it is by no means impossible. For this, however, you need to put a focus on all the non-material things you have to offer, such as work experience, positive environment and a chance to self-improve. You would be surprised by the strength of this kind of incentive.