How to land a job at a UK startup

Working with early-stage companies helps you grow entrepreneurial traits but it can be hard to know where to begin

Photo by ROOM on Unsplash

If you want to start your own thing someday, sometimes the best education is the one you design yourself, by working with early-stage founders. In the short-term it’s more cost-effective than an MBA, and in the long run it’ll change you by instilling grit.

Since the process of bringing on early employees to a recently-formed startup is often random and unscientific, it can be hard to understand. To illustrate why some people get hired and others don’t, I wanted to share a fictional story about ‘Jane’ and ‘Barb’. Let’s pretend I was the founder.

(These insights are based on my time working with Escape the City in London, where I often got asked how to ‘break in’ to startups by corporate members.)

The early days of Escape the City (pics by Matt Trinetti)

The first step to being included is showing up

I met Jane at a startup event. (There are plenty). We had a mutual acquaintance (often, “it’s who you hardly know that counts“). Jane was interested in my startup and let me know (sincerely) what she admired about my startup’s work when she shook my hand.

She asked insightful questions. She listened to my responses and shared what she’d been working on — outside of her corporate day job; she’d spent evenings and weekends building up her Facebook app skills through reading books and taking various courses.

I told her about some issues we’d been having with our Facebook efforts. She mentioned that while this wasn’t her area of expertise yet, she’d read an interesting article about Facebook apps that she would forward on to me.

I didn’t meet Barb at that event because Barb wasn’t there. Barb had emailed me earlier that week, introducing herself. She had attached her CV and had plenty of information about herself, but hadn’t asked me a single question about my company except for more information about compensation.

I had replied to Barb telling her that I was going to the event that week and that I could meet her there for a quick chat if she was interested. Barb had forgotten to reply to my email, and instead, sent me a quick line the next day telling me that she’d also forgotten about the event.

A relationship is built in baby steps

Jane emailed me the next day as she’d said she would. She attached the article that she’d mentioned, which she’d found via Linkedin because she was subscribed to a Startup Marketing interest group.

She invited me to connect on Linkedin and asked me for feedback on her Linkedin page — as I browsed, I could see that outside of her day job she had worked on some interesting projects that she had uploaded to Slideshare.

Barb had mentioned Facebook marketing in her CV and I forwarded her the article that Jane had sent me to ask her opinion on the question that I had about Facebook.

Barb emailed me back saying that she didn’t trust the article as she was more qualified than its author (without specifying exactly what made her so) and told me that if I wanted more of a discussion, she’d be happy to talk but would charge an hourly rate as a consultant.

I went to browse Barb’s Linkedin page, which was fairly barren and cryptic. I went back to her and told her that we didn’t have a budget for external consultants right now. Our email trail ended.

I thanked Jane for the article, gave her some feedback on her Linkedin page, and reminded her that we weren’t hiring at this time but that I’d keep an eye out for other startup marketing gigs.

She was grateful but said that she already had a few other potential leads and that she wasn’t looking for a full-time job in another area right now — instead, she was going to take her time over the next six months and get to know startups that she could do small projects with, to build up her portfolio.

I told her that we’d be interested in being one of those startups. We kept in touch over the next month, got to know each other better, and since she was excellent (proactive, competent, confident, honest, willingly accepted feedback) I began to think of relevant people or hiring managers I could introduce her to or how I might be able to hire her in the future.

Make it hard to say no

Time is a startup founder’s most precious resource. So if you can make engaging with them easy and time-efficient and upside-only for them, they’re going to want to continue engaging with you.

You need to put your hand up instead of waiting for them to give you orders. And you need to be comfortable with uncertainty.

Even after you’ve got the job, everything (salary, working hours, role description) can change quickly and it’s very different from working at a big company where there is a specific square box for you to fit into.

In a startup, it’s more like the job functions exist in circles and they overlap like Venn diagrams — you pick a main circle to join, and you prepare yourself for the fact that other circles will overlap.

So before you even get the job, the startup manager often wants to see that you’ve got the prerequisite flexibility and dedication. It’s far easier to go the extra mile for founders or companies who you genuinely like who are in a space that you are genuinely interested in.

The best way to get to know founders is by working with them as much as you can afford to. If you’re transitioning into a new industry or skill-set and they can’t pay you much, it can still be a useful way to build your portfolio.

I did this in the early years of my career as often as I could. It was my way of finding out who I wanted to work for, de-risking myself to prospective employers, and that it was a cheaper learning method than graduate school. I was gaining learning that I couldn’t get anywhere else.

Of course you have to draw boundaries. But you also have to play the game if you want to be in the game, and if nobody’s going to pay you straight away, the best bet is to jump in and just start playing anyway.

The more mutual rapport and trust you’ve developed with founders, the more likely you are to become comfortable working together. The more genuine interest you have in their company and mission, the more genuine interest they will have in you and your skills.

So where do you begin?

• Find founders and startups that you genuinely get excited about. It’s important to know what your own mission is. List the areas that interest you then start learning about players in that space and reach out to them. If you don’t know where to start, watch this TED talk and figure out your own personal ‘why’.
• De-risk yourself as an investment. Startups are testing their way towards their business model, so things are already pretty uncertain. The less relevant experience you have, the higher risk they are taking on you being an effective team member. So design ways to give yourself relevant experience as efficiently as possible.
• Get in the game. A lot of people ‘want to work for a startup’ but people who really want to break into startups are already there in some capacity because they can’t not be — attend events, read startup blogs, start a side project or do a course. The initial interview process can often be a serendipitous meeting at a drinks event, as opposed to inside a formal boardroom.
• Do your homework. Read the relevant Quora debates. Have an active Twitter profile that allows you to follow the thought leaders in that space — at the very least, you can just retweet articles you find interesting to keep them in one place for your own reference. Listen to startup podcasts on your way to work every morning.
• Develop allies. If you want to build a useful network, you yourself have to be useful — this comes from being well read, well connected, and having a positive attitude about helping others out. This allows you to build a network of people who are aware that you exist and who know that you are interested in working in a specific area.
• Show that you’re hungry without being desperate. Reach out. Follow up. Deliver. Keep your promises. Be honest. Do what you say you’re going to do. These simple things matter more than the qualifications you’ve gathered.
• Accept ambiguity. In early-stage companies (the ones that are too tiny to even list their roles on Unicorn Hunt or AngelList) — there are rarely clear job descriptions. Often the founder simply has an idea of the outcomes that they need. Uncertainty is something you need to get used to. Having to get on with it, and making certain things up as you go along.

Mark Suster’s take on notable traits of great entrepreneurs applies to great startup employees too: “not very status oriented, questions authority, can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty, can handle rejection, not scared or ashamed of failure.” You can develop those attributes without the financial risk of starting your own company, by working in startups. I love his advice for people who want to make the leap into startups:

“Make sure it’s in your personality type, make sure you have the risk appetite, make sure you can afford to take the risks given your life situations and make sure you know that there is a high possibility your startup won’t be hugely financially rewarding. If you still want to go for it knowing all this and all that you’ll endure — awesome! It’s the best experience I’ve had in life. But not for the faint hearted.”

Adele Barlow has worked in top tech startups around London and is now Head of Content & Communications at Makers. She is the author of Finding Fulfilling Work, Leaving Law, and 8 Ways to Escape the MBA Debate and has also been published in the Huffington Post, Soho House magazine, and Virgin.com.