Ben Yoskovitz is the CEO & Co-Founder of Standout Jobs, which offers Reception, a software product to help companies build more engaging and interactive career sites.

Companies can give candidate’s the information they want and market their jobs more effectively. He’s also an active blogger on startups and entrepreneurship at Instigator Blog.

One of the hardest things for startups is hiring great people. And one of the big reasons is that too few startups devote enough time to hiring; they’re too busy with a million other things. Without a doubt, there are a million things you need to do in order for a startup to succeed. But one of the most important – if not the most important – is hiring.

With that in mind, here are 8 tips to help you hire for your startup:

Hiring Tips

1. Build your employer brand. Few startups have any real brand recognition. You’re new, no one knows you exist, and if you’re in “stealth mode” no one even knows what you’re doing. Some startups may have star founders with huge successes in the past, and they can leverage their own name brand pretty quickly … but for the rest of us, we’re starting from scratch. So you need to build an employer brand.

What’s an employer brand, you ask?

It’s really all about how you’re perceived internally and externally. What do you want people to think, and say, and tell others about your company? We all understand the power of a brand when selling and marketing products, but you need to apply that very quickly to recruiting.

Building a brand isn’t hard, but it does take time. Think of blogging – it’s not the hardest thing in the world to do – but it can be time consuming. And, there are good and bad ways of doing things. A few thoughts:

• be authentic
• be active
• be out there
• be communicative

From the moment you start a company, you should be thinking about your employer brand. One of the simplest channels for exposing that brand is through blogging. You absolutely need to be blogging. Even if only 10 people read your blog; they could all be potential employees!

Along those lines, make sure you leverage your local community. Chances are you’ll hire locally, and while blogging is a great outreach tool for the greater world, you need to be active at a very grassroots level. So participate in local events. Make sure current employees are speaking openly about the work environment. Make sure people know your story as a startup, and where you’re headed. Get people excited. Get them feeling like they know your startup is a great place to work, even if they haven’t worked there. That positive reputation will work wonders to draw people to you.

2. Get everyone involved in the hiring process. Hiring people can’t be done solely by HR. Heck, when you’re starting out, you probably don’t even have an HR department. So who is responsible for hiring? The simple answer: everyone. Most companies – when hiring a programmer for example – will have a developer conduct at least one interview. But I would recommend having the applicant speak to multiple developers (even at the same time) as well as people in other departments. In a startup, everyone has to work very closely together and be completely aligned, so get as many people involved in the hiring process as possible.

3. Recruit constantly. If you’re not recruiting constantly you’re going to fail. You (and everyone on your team) should always be on the look out for top talent. Hopefully you’re in a position to hire that superstar A-player when they suddenly show up at your door. Anyone remember acronym from Glengarry Glenross? ABC: Always Be Closing. In your case it should be ABR: Always Be Recruiting. Not as sexy, but just as important.

This doesn’t mean you need to spend money on a regular basis or keep recruiters on retainer. But make sure your online career site is informative and interesting enough to keep people engaged. Make sure you’re marketing open positions to your pool of talent on a regular basis. Make sure you’re thinking about hiring needs a few months down the road, so you can start hiring for those positions right now.

4. Focus on personality and cultural fit above everything else. Startups live and die by the quality of the people. It’s as simple as that. And many things can be overcome – like a lack of experience – but you can’t fix a broken culture or team spirit without going through some serious problems first. It only takes one bad apple in a small startup to derail everything. So make sure the person you’re hiring fits in culturally. That’s a big reason to have lots of people involved in the hiring process. And don’t compromise on this – no matter how desperate you are to bring on additional people.

5. Benefits work. When startups think about benefits they’re often thinking about a fridge stocked with Red Bull and crappy snacks. OK, I’m a fan of the occasional bag of chips too, but what else can you offer candidates that’s easy to do and not expensive? At Standout Jobs we bring in a masseur on a semi-regular basis and he’ll spend the day bashing backs and cracking necks. It’s not expensive, it was easy to coordinate, and everyone enjoys it. The Wii is cool too…but think beyond the “traditional” benefits and see if you can’t come up with things that’ll help you stand out.

6. Don’t oversell stock options. All startup employees expect stock options. And they should be a part of a startup employee’s compensation package. But don’t try and oversell them. Don’t try and blow people away with the huge valuations you’ll get in the future, and how you’ll IPO for billions in 2 years and the soon-to-be-hired employee will be rich beyond his wildest dreams. It shows a lack of respect to candidates if you try and dazzle them too much with stock options. They’re there, every employee should get them, and I hope they’re worth something someday … but you better have more to sell candidates than that.

7. Do things professionally. I realize your startup was founded in a basement and you’ve been eating Ramen noodles for 6 months. But that’s no excuse for not handling the hiring process in a professional way. Startup or not, your new employee is making a huge decision and leap of faith. Treat them properly through the process and when it comes to things like paperwork and the process part of the hiring experience, do it properly. For example, you should have Employee Agreements. Think about what your Non-Disclosure and Non-Compete Agreements might contain. Handle this stuff smoothly and it will reflect well on you, and get things going on the right foot with the new hire.

8. Don’t over-hire. As Mark MacLeod points out, salaries are your biggest expense, so you need to be extremely careful about your growing ranks. Mark makes the point that you should question every hire, and really be sure that the position you’re making available is a necessary one, and once it’s filled that will bring incredible value to the startup. If that’s not the case, don’t hire. Plus, the more you control your hiring, the more likely you’ll avoid hiring the wrong person.

Every hire in a startup is critical. Make a mistake in the first handful or so and you can literally destroy your startup in a flash. Recovering from bad hires early in the game is extremely tough. And costly. But hire the right people – get top talent in the door that gel beautifully – and magic happens.