• Every entrepreneur faces the challenge of growing their business from scratch without proper guidance.
• In order to manage your venture as best as possible, you need to be aware of the things you, as the startup owner, should and should not do.
• Find out the 7 HR mistakes and how to avoid them to ensure success at all stages of your striving business.

Growing a startup is difficult especially when you don’t have a failsafe playbook to guide you at every step of the process. Taking a venture from the initial stages of struggle to sustainable success is fraught with challenges on every front. There are several things that startup owners can find themselves entangled in, which makes it very difficult to do justice to every business process.

If you want to avoid unnecessary obstacles that often lead to business failures, here are 7 mistakes you should absolutely avoid: 

1. Failing to Plan

When an entrepreneur sets out to start his own venture without an idea, he has already committed his first big mistake. The decision to start a business must be followed by a lucrative idea. Starting a venture without careful thought and preplanning is a surefire route to failure and financial loss.

2. Focusing on too Many Things – All at Once

Guess what? As a startup owner you have to split 100% of your time between every management function – sales, marketing, purchase, accounting, and recruiting. This ultimately takes a toll on your efficiency and keeps you from excelling in any one area. Instead you should spend 100% of your productive time on just one thing that you do best and for the rest – hire a workforce.

3. Trying to Play Multiple Roles

The concept that every startup owner needs to work himself to death is not a rule. Given the recent technological advances in every area, the need to work grueling hours is clearly a choice. The convenience and cost-effectiveness of automation and outsourcing have made it easy for startup owners to achieve excellence in every area while saving a lot of time and effort. So if you are still sacrificing your sleep and putting in extra hours, it is clearly your fault.

4. Starting a Venture With No Revenue

If you’re the entrepreneur who thinks, “Revenue will start rolling in when X happens,” it is time you know that it is your business you’re talking about and not a hobby. So make sure your product or service adds value and convinces people to pay for it. If you lack the ability to sell your offerings, you can always hire a digital marketing agency to promote your brand or you can take up a course in online marketing.

5. Not Hiring an HR

For a startup owner who needs to multitask day in, day out, hiring can easily fall through the cracks. But you need to understand that the success of any startup depends on the leadership skills of the owner and the capabilities of his initial team. So if you put off hiring for too long, you will not get the people who can help you run your business efficiently and you will continue to juggle multiple roles instead of innovating your products and pursuing your business goals. Trying to do things all alone will only mean spending far too much of your valuable time on manual activities and trivial tasks that are not effective in helping your business develop. Hiring a tech-savvy HR will allow you to streamline all your hiring decisions and give you better access to top talent that can actually take your business to the next level.

6. Trying to Be a Perfectionist

Regardless of the time and effort you are willing to invest in your business, you will never be able to achieve perfection. While small improvements will definitely make a massive difference over the time, it always makes sense to stay focused on refining your offerings and recruiting people to manage other business operations.

7. Relying on Traditional Recruitment Tactics

If you do not have the budget to hire a dedicated hiring manager and you plan to do the recruiting yourself, you can rely on recruiting software to save hundreds of your work hours. Recruitment for startups can be made quick and effortless with an applicant tracking system that automates every manual task while eliminating all HR mistakes. It is designed to do everything – right from posting your job openings on multiple platforms simultaneously and filtering several applications in a fraction of seconds to scheduling interviews with time slots and also informing the candidates about their upcoming interviews. Using an applicant tracking system to automate recruitment tasks will free up your valuable time for other important activities that can actually help your company grow. Recruiting software is an affordable technology that reduces your overall HR costs, makes candidate management easy, and streamlines the sourcing process from start to finish while saving tremendous time, effort and resources. 

For startup owners, the market is competitive but wide open for innovative ideas that truly add value. So, avoid these 7 mistakes and pursue your goals passionately while you watch your venture go from local to global successfully.