Thursday, April 11, 2013

10 Job Skills Startups Will Kill For

Megaphone-jobs-istockphoto2013-04-02 12:12:34 -0400

Scott Gerber is the founder of Young Entrepreneur Council, an invite-only organization comprised of promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC's #StartupLab is a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs grow businesses via live video chats.

Recruiting top-tier tech talent continues to be a challenge for startup founders — many are still looking to fill important jobs that involve a diverse mix of marketing, content, tech and people skills, including some you've probably never heard of.

The following panel of successful founders shares which skill sets they think will be in high demand at a startup near you — and why.

I think for most new startups, while they are mainly "tech" companies, it's not the technology that "makes" the company. It's the usability and the experience, and a designer is the chief architect of the user's experience. I think founding teams are going to move from a traditional two-person team (business/engineer) to three-person teams, incorporating a designer to be able to differentiate.

- Jessica Brondo, The Edge in College Prep

Growth hackers, people with deep analytical skillsets and the ability to influence product and often write code themselves, are invaluable to early stage startups that often lack focus on distribution.

Enterprise software sales people, who often make $250,000-$500,000+ per year, are also in an enviable position right now, with nearly unlimited job opportunities and very generous comp packages.

- Matt Mickiewicz, Flippa and 99designs

"Growth hacker" is a term that has a lot of cache right now, but it's a misfire. What's going to resonate for growing startups are people who, at their core, look like marketers, but have a deep dedication to analytics and product design.

Telling the story the way a marketing mind wants to is the element that "growth hacker" misses — startups need product-minded people who know how to market.

- Derek Shanahan, Playerize

I think there's a real opportunity for someone who understands how to create systems, processes and automation tools inside a business. It's not about adding more people, but how to be more efficient using the technology that's available to us all. Someone who has knowledge in programming, analytic thinking and sees opportunities in bad processes in a business will have many options.

- Chris Brisson, Call Loop & Automize

The ability to architect and develop a scalable software solution that can predict future outcomes (based on continually analyzing multiple sets of disparate data) will be a key component for any tech company looking to disrupt an industry over the next decade. Some are starting to tackle this problem by hiring data science engineers.

- Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, AirPR

Good content is absolutely crucial for building up credibility for your business and helping draw prospective customers. We are seeing the importance of strong writers, researchers, marketing designers, community managers and others that help produce very high-quality content. Creative people who write, design and communicate well are in much higher demand.

- Eric Koester, Zaarly

It's a little unorthodox, but I think every company needs someone whose sole purpose is to be an advocate of the user. Like an ombudsman of the company, he looks critically at every interaction, every experience, acting as if he were a user of the company. Often, everyone at a company is in a bubble, so it's important to have someone who's consciously trying to remain on the "outside."

- Adam Stillman, Ditto Holdings

We see contracts go through our platform daily, and we have detailed metrics on which job categories are growing, so we know where to apply our recruitment teams' resources. Ruby on Rails is one of the best languages to know if you'd like to get a great position fast, with back-end development a close second. Mobile development has been hot for years and is only getting hotter.

- Liam Martin, Staff.com

Everyone thinks that tech is where the innovation is taking place, but I think the next explosion is in tech-enabled businesses offline. A construction company needs a website, but it also needs to track inventory, logistics, planning and metrics. Technology can do a lot to make it more complete and more profitable. To me, the companies that are often not the "sexiest" are the most interesting.

- Wade Eyerly, Surf Air

Big data was all the buzz in 2012, but now it's time to make sense of it all. Every company, from startups to corporations, is tracking data and learning more than we ever knew about ourselves. If you have the skills to normalize this data, spot trends and explain it in an easy-to-understand way, you'll have a job.

- John Meyer, Lemon.ly

Image via istockphoto, tumpikuja

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