If you are hiring for a startup, an impactful AngelList or Wellfound profile to attract the right talent for your business seems to be a good starting point. This is how you can build a robust Wellfound or AngelList presence for your startup.
What is Wellfound (AngelList Talent)?
AngelList, as the name suggests, was a list of 80 angels launched by Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi. These can be easily mistaken for actual angels from heaven if you are a startup looking to raise capital. For the uninitiated, angel investors are defined as “wealthy private investors focused on financing small business ventures in exchange for equity.”
After AngelList’s launch in 2010, its early successes included enabling 4000 investments in 18 months, campaigning for changing the investment landscape for startups through the JOBS Act and raising $24 million in funding.
Of course it became the talk of the town and entrepreneurs speculated the next big move for the company.
Soon after, AngelList Talent was launched in September 2013. Unlike other traditional job portals, AngelList Talent (now known as Wellfound) levels the playing ground for job seekers and employers. To post a job, companies have to list all details such as funding, investors, salary offered for the position, culture, and perks. Many early stage startups may not even have an HR function. So, candidates get to connect with the founders directly—without involving any third parties.
Why Should Startups Care About Wellfound?
If you are hiring for a startup, an impactful AngelList or Wellfound profile to attract the right talent for your business seems to be a good starting point. This is how you can build a robust Wellfound or AngelList presence for your startup.
Maximising for Right Swipes on Your (Company) Profile
Get the basics in place: a company logo, description along with mission and values, links to website and active social profiles, headcount, location and funding. Update all relevant tags associated with your market and industry to help the right candidates discover your job openings. If you have popular investors on board who have also invested in well-known startups, your profile gets an upper edge with the ‘Same Investor as [Popular Company]’ badge. Do not include social profiles that are idle or inactive since they may reflect poorly on the company’s presence on the internet and its brand positioning. Since background verification is a two-way street, prospective new employees may want to connect with existing or ex-employees of the companies to gauge whether the company is the right fit for them. This is where companies with a Glassdoor presence benefit from favourable labels on their Wellfound profile. High ratings for work life balance, strong leadership and overall Glassdoor rating are likely to boost your job listing’s consideration for candidates.
Share the Vibe for the Right Tribe
With the average employee spending about one-third of their time at a workplace, company culture takes precedence over many other factors while evaluating an offer. Depending on the target age group of your workforce, align the culture for it. If your workforce is multigenerational, ensure it appeals to all applicants for specific perks.
As per research from Deloitte, 40% of GenZ want to leave their jobs within two years as opposed to 24% of millennials. This is despite the fact that the difference in top concerns for each generation, such as unemployment, cost of living and climate change, for each generation is marginal. It helps to identify commonalities for an inclusive company culture catering to the nuances of priorities of each generation.
Add photos and videos of a day in the life of an employee at your company, milestones from events, and adventures from offsites to bring your company culture to life on your Wellfound profile.
Talent Attracts Talent
Incentivise your existing employees to update their Wellfound profiles to appear as employees for your company. Candidates may be particularly interested in knowing the background and experience of the immediate team members in the department they want to be inducted into.
Get Your Job Descriptions On Point
Crafting a job description correctly is half the battle won. Draft the basic structure including job responsibilities, qualifications, about the role and the team. A job post or the description itself is a great opportunity to subtly recall the details highlighted under other sections such as company culture and team details. When your job description has all the essential information, add some personality to it to evoke an emotion from the reader. An unexciting post will receive equally unremarkable applications. Do not overshoot the word count though—shorter and skimmable job descriptions up to 1300 words tend to receive more responses. If you use an assessment platform for candidate screening, you can include the link within the job description to the screening assessment for filtering eligible candidates. This will reduce the entry barrier for high intent candidates and save you time in shortlisting candidates for interviews.
Delight your candidates with prompt responses
The first four steps lay the groundwork for a good Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent) profile. To carve a niche for your employer brand, respond to candidates promptly. Remember that job search can be a harrowing experience for candidates while coordinating with demands from different recruiters. Showcase all the values about your culture in your candidate interaction and treat them with empathy.
Conclusion
Estimated time to complete the checklist shared above? About an hour if you have well defined company values, vision and hiring requirements in place. If not, do invest time to align your hiring leaders for it as the long term rewards will pay off to build well-rounded teams.
If you want the right talent to discover your startup, a Wellfound profile should be able to showcase your company profile for the right reasons. To amplify your brand visibility, do explore other job boards, candidate sourcing platforms. Add recruitment marketing, career fairs and employee referrals to the mix and manifest your dream pipeline of ideal candidates for every role.
About the author:
Jayanth is the CEO at Equip. He has a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Syracuse University and is also a full-stack developer. He is passionate about eLearning and online assessments. He built AutoProctor, a tool to prevent cheating on online tests, which got into Y Combinator. Over 15 million tests have been conducted on AutoProctor. As many recruiters were using AutoProctor, Equip was launched to help recruiters filter candidates via online tests. Jayanth believes that in the remote-first world, candidates will increasingly be selected for skills, and not pedigree. He firmly believes that tools like Equip will make this selection easier for recruiters as well as candidates.