Abstract
In the project management sector, there is great emphasis placed on the importance of team selection, encapsulated by the ethos: ‘Before you even think about the project, think about the team’. The start-up of a new business is arguably a project. Conversely, large businesses pay significant attention to the recruitment of new team members, with well-established processes to support recruitment, selection and on-boarding; indeed, the importance of team selection in the corporate environment, or larger businesses, is widely-acknowledged. Echoing this approach is the recruitment sector, where prominence is placed on selection, recruitment and induction. However, in start-up contexts, where many pressing priorities compete for attention, empirical evidence suggests the recruitment of initial team members, in particular, is often hurried, informal and less effective (HIL), largely due to time constraints and the primary focuses on fundraising &/or customer acquisition. This research will examine if, by adopting a more strategic approach, similar to those undertaken by larger businesses and advocated by both the project management and recruitment sectors, this could have a significant impact on the productivity, growth and resilience of the start-up, along with retention rates and motivation levels. In particular, this will seek to build on the paper ‘On the consequences of firm growth’ (Freel & Gordon, 2021), in which they argue that many small businesses largely grow only once, if at all. My research will investigate if taking a more strategic approach to recruitment, particularly of initial team members, as so-called ‘culture carriers’, would address this issue to some significant degree. Utilising a small number of SMEs within the North West of England as case studies, in view of the substantial amount of European and UK government funding which has been directed towards addressing the issue of SME growth and productivity as well as the region’s strength in the technology sector, my research will also analyse if this strategy would help to address the growing issue of so-called ‘quiet quitting’, which some scholars argue has increased in popularity post-pandemic, as well as scrutinising the role technology could play, for example, online recruitment and induction, in supporting the entrepreneur during the time-pressured environment of the start-up process. Similarly, how online templates for job descriptions, person specifications and on-boarding processes might help to facilitate too. In summary, it will study whether adopting a more strategic approach could be an important and yet currently under-researched area of the literature.