Running a business is stressful, and managing everything on your own can be overwhelming. Hiring a virtual assistant from RG People Solutions, a top recruiter, can help take some of that load off of your shoulders. A virtual assistant can help with anything from administrative tasks to social media management. But how do you find the perfect match for your business? In this blog, we will guide you through 10 tips for hiring a virtual assistant with RGpeople and utilizing resources such as Glassdoor. We will cover the role of a virtual assistant, identifying qualities to look for in an ideal candidate, how to find the right virtual assistant, evaluating potential candidates, and onboarding your new hire. With these tips, you’ll be able to find the right virtual assistant for your business and build a successful relationship with them.

Understanding the Role of a Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistants streamline business operations, providing full opportunity for sales teams to focus on strategic work. They handle email management, scheduling, and data entry remotely, offering flexibility for both parties. Utilizing them frees up time and ensures the right people are in the right job.

Defining the Tasks for Your Virtual Assistant

When hiring a virtual assistant, it’s crucial to clearly outline the specific tasks you need help with, such as managing social media or customer support. Setting expectations and providing clear instructions ensures alignment with your needs and effective performance.

Importance of a Virtual Assistant in Modern Business

Virtual assistants drive productivity, enabling business growth with diverse skill sets and cost savings, fostering scalability.

Identifying the Qualities of an Ideal Virtual Assistant

Look for virtual assistants with strong organizational skills and effective communication. High reliability, adaptability, professionalism, and discretion are crucial qualities for a virtual assistant.

Essential Skills to Look for in a Virtual Assistant

When hiring a virtual assistant, it’s essential to seek proficiency in Microsoft Office and Google Suite, strong time management, typing and data entry skills, effective communication, and familiarity with project management tools.

Personality Traits that Complement Your Work Style

Compatibility in work style and values ensures a harmonious working relationship. Seek a virtual assistant who can integrate seamlessly into your team dynamic. Proactive and self-motivated attitude is crucial for the right fit.

How to Find the Right Virtual Assistant?

Looking for the perfect virtual assistant? Try reputable online platforms, ask for recommendations from fellow entrepreneurs, consider recruitment agencies, or network within business communities. Evaluating potential assistants through trial projects is also a good idea.

Platforms to Find Virtual Assistants

When searching for virtual assistants, consider popular freelancing platforms like Upwork and Freelancer, online job boards, specialized virtual assistant companies, reputable agencies, and platforms offering varied expertise options.

The Role of Recommendations in Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Seeking advice from trusted entrepreneurs or industry professionals provides valuable insights into a virtual assistant’s reliability and professionalism. Prioritize recommendations to find the right fit.

Evaluating Potential Virtual Assistants

Assess the candidate’s work experience and client feedback, conduct thorough interviews to gauge communication and problem-solving abilities, consider trial periods for performance evaluation, verify qualifications, and ensure alignment with business requirements.

Conducting Interviews for Virtual Assistants

Assess problem-solving skills with open-ended questions, use video conferencing for face-to-face interviews, evaluate communication and time management, discuss scenarios, and assess understanding of responsibilities.

Assessments to Test the Skills of a Virtual Assistant

For assessing a virtual assistant’s skills, create practical tests, assign time-bound tasks, and use personality assessments. Offer sample projects and consider a trial period.

Onboarding Your Virtual Assistant

Providing the right people solutions, give full opportunity for seamless onboarding. Define job roles and performance expectations clearly. Schedule initial training and establish open communication channels for reference.

Setting Expectations for Your Virtual Assistant

To ensure a successful partnership with your virtual assistant, communicate work hours, availability, and expected response times. Define measurable goals, preferred communication methods, feedback mechanisms, and contingency plans to mitigate potential risks.

How to Build a Successful Relationship with Your Virtual Assistant?

To build a successful relationship with your virtual assistant, clearly define your expectations and goals for the working relationship. Establish open communication channels and provide regular feedback. Treat them as a valued team member, not just an outsourced service provider.

Recruiting the right talent is crucial to the success of any organization. The process of recruitment can be quite daunting, but with the right strategy and approach, it can be a seamless experience. In this blog, we will explore the art of recruitment and how it can enhance your hiring process. We will take a closer look at types of recruiting methods that are commonly used and delve deeper into key elements that make up an effective recruiting process. Additionally, we will discuss some innovative approaches to staff recruitment that you may not have considered before. Whether you are starting out in HR or looking to refresh your recruitment strategy, this post is for you. Get ready to learn some valuable tips that will help you attract top-notch talent and build a winning team!

Understanding the Art of Recruitment

Recruiting encompasses a strategic process to hire and retain talent, aligning with organizational goals and values. A well-planned process ensures the selection of suitable candidates, contributing to company growth. Effective recruitment involves attracting and screening candidates and is crucial for long-term success.

Defining Recruitment in HRM

Recruitment in HR involves identifying, attracting, and hiring employees to fulfill organizational manpower needs efficiently. It encompasses sourcing, screening, and selecting the best candidates aligned with workforce planning and organizational development. The process includes various stages, from job analysis to hiring, integrating seamlessly with the company’s strategic goals and values.

The Involvement and Process of Recruitment

The recruitment process encompasses job analysis, sourcing, screening, and selection. It involves hiring managers, HR, and potential candidates, meeting specific job requirements and business needs. HR recruitment strategizes, implements, and evaluates efforts to ensure long-term talent needs.

Types of Recruiting: A Closer Look

Internal recruitment leverages existing employee talent pools, while external recruitment seeks candidates outside the organization. Both methods offer unique advantages, with traditional approaches involving job boards and referrals, and modern methods using social media and AI. Each method plays a role in effectively sourcing and selecting the best candidates.

Internal Vs. External Recruitment

Internal recruitment fosters existing talent, elevating employee morale and loyalty while promoting career development and succession planning. External recruitment expands the candidate pool, bringing in fresh perspectives, diversity, and industry-specific expertise. Both methods are crucial for organizational staffing, offering distinct advantages and contributing to overall workforce effectiveness.

Traditional Vs. Modern Recruitment Methods

In the realm of recruitment, traditional methods rely on print ads, job fairs, and physical screenings, whereas modern methods leverage online job postings, video interviews, and virtual assessments. While traditional methods follow established norms, modern methods embrace innovation, accelerating hiring and enhancing candidate experience for those seeking a new job. Both methods coexist, catering to varying recruitment needs.

Key Elements of Effective Recruiting

Talent acquisition specialists proactively drive strategic hiring aligned with the organization’s culture and long-term goals. Well-crafted job descriptions attract suitable candidates, setting clear expectations and ensuring sustainable hiring success by balancing speed, quality, and cost.

The Role of a Talent Acquisition Specialist

Overseeing the entire recruitment process, talent acquisition specialists collaborate with hiring managers, HR, and recruitment agencies. They streamline recruitment processes to ensure a seamless hiring experience, handling bulk and contract hiring, HR consulting, and process improvement. Acting as a bridge between business needs and recruitment efforts, they play a crucial role in talent acquisition.

Importance of a Well-defined Job Description

A precisely outlined job role not only attracts suitable candidates but also ensures successful hires. It delineates duties, requirements, and growth prospects, streamlining the recruitment process. Additionally, it serves as a communication tool, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. A well-crafted job description is crucial in recruiting the right talent.

What Are Some Innovative Approaches to Staff Recruitment?

Innovative staff recruitment approaches involve employer branding, recruitment marketing, and candidate engagement. AI and machine learning optimize hiring decisions, while virtual career fairs, gamified assessments, and chatbot-assisted recruitment redefine candidate experiences. Creative strategies tap into passive talent and prioritize diversity and inclusion for a dynamic workforce.

Should we buy a software solution off-the shelf or build our own?  – a question every enterprise business have to ask at some point – at the startup inception or at some stage of growth.

I was part of one of the startups about 3 years ago, the product was a subscription based with lots of features. One of the most important element of the product was to manage these subscribers, and the key question that the team debated was weather to develop an in-house subscription management software or use a SAAS product available online.

How the Enterprise software business has undergone a change can be seen from this basic fact, 10-15 years ago off-the-shelf or SAAS software were not only expensive but the enterprise had to commit to a wide range of costs into setup, maintenance, consultancy and training. Assessing the pros and cons of build vs. buying off the-shelf software made sense and was in fact a routine exercise in many large organizations. Today, thanks to the explosion of cloud-based software, it seems that there is a cheap, lightweight solution for practically any business problem out there.

So as part of the debate on buying a subscription product, the team realized that it had to be developed on a different platform and would have affected the team’s focus owing to different complexity of the product, the timelines were also prohibitory as it would have increased our time to market, so the idea of developing it in-house was dropped.

So should you build your own or subscribe to a SaaS software instead? The important questions that need to be answered before the evaluation process starts are:

• Is this our development team’s core competency?
• Is there a clear path to ROI, or return on investment?
• Can we absorb resource coverage, time, and financials of the project if it winds up costing 50% more than expected?

If the answers to the above questions are “yes”, an organization’s leaders must then weigh multiple factors, such as the goals of the business, size of their team, revenue, and the problem’s complexity.

The argument for building: how in-house solutions benefit business

In the article that follows we evaluate both options, drawn from decades of experience in IT.

1. Degree of customization

Theoretically:

• Custom-built: Custom-built software, by definition is fully customized to your needs
• SaaS Subscription: SaaS software meets most needs for most companies, but it won’t necessarily meet all your needs.

But in reality:

The best part of the custom-built software is that all you can include any feature that you want/need. But because of resource constraints, the features get prioritized which in itself is a messy, political process. In the process of trying to satisfy the needs of many stakeholders in the organization, it is not uncommon to end up with overly complex, overspecified software. This hampers the user experience, limits the efficient utilization of the software solution, and diminishes the benefits that the custom solution is supposed to bring. Research has shown that only 17% of the features included in the internal-use application are used and 19% of the features are rarely used.

SaaS solutions help you to avoid these issues, they are usually designed to do one thing very well. Over time they incorporate best practices from many different industries and companies into the product development, to maximize customer satisfaction. After all, their very existence relies on it. In consequence, SaaS solutions typically meets most needs of most companies. Crucially, they often come up with solutions that your employees hadn’t thought of. Today, in most cases it is good to start with SaaS solutions. Once your business outgrows the software’s usefulness, you may want to consider investing in custom solutions. Until then, it makes more sense to choose a SaaS solution.

2. Product improvements

Theoretically:

• Custom-built: You can improve the custom/ inhouse software as you often as you like
• SaaS Subscription: Competitive pressures forces SaaS companies to continuously improve their software.

In Reality:

Both statements are true, however, there are some important nuances to bear in mind: SaaS continuously incorporate customer feedback into their product roadmap. This is how they maximize customer satisfaction, thwart competition, and ensure business success. Their existence depends on it, so you are guaranteed that the product will evolve over time. What’s more, SaaS solutions usually follow agile development techniques, an approach that favors short development cycles of and new releases every two to four weeks. As part of the process, SaaS companies incorporate extensive user testing to align product specifications with market demands. The costs of all this are baked into their pricing model, so there are no surprise bills for the upgrades.

In theory, the same could apply to custom-built solution. But in practice once the software is built, most of the project team is disbanded and re-assigned to other projects. Even when that’s not the case, every evolution of the product is a mini-project that takes time and money. As a result, incase of custom softwares the cost of upgrading your software could be huge.

3. Integration with third-party software

Theoretically:

• Custom-built: you can design your custom-built software to integrate with any software you want.
• SaaS Subscription: Open APIs allow most SaaS solution to integrate with a wide range third party software.

in reality:

These days most software solutions come with ready APIs, the APIs are typically “connectors” that allow two programs to exchange information, which helps facilitate the integration with a wide-range of third party services. SaaS developers can give you all of the information you need to decide whether their programs can integrate with your existing software. If a SaaS solution isn’t compatible, then you shouldn’t buy it. If the developer says that its software’s API can work with your other software’s API, then integration should occur easily..

4. Speed of implementation

• Custom-built: Months or years
• SaaS Subscription: Instantaneous

Custom-built Enterprise software projects typically take a minimum of 6 months and can take years, depending on the size of the organization, complexity, number of stakeholders, scope of the project, etc. Getting started with SaaS software typically takes zero to a few days, depending on the complexity of the SaaS software, user training required, etc.

5. Last but not least: costs

• Custom-built is expensive
• SaaS Subscription is much cheaper

Custom-built software is more expensive than SaaS. If you go for custom-development, you’ll be spending at least $1 million, from start to finish, to have a software up & running. And then the maintenance costs which are usually in the thousands of dollars per month. None of this takes into account the cost of failure, which typically affects 30% to 70% of enterprise development projects. SaaS businesses distribute the costs of development across many customers. As a result, the costs are much lower. What’s more, with SaaS businesses, the costs are completely variable: you pay a subscription per month which also reduces the risk as you pay as-you -go. You can go for Outsourcing the software development which can be much cheaper option. We will discuss the pros & cons of outsourcing in next blog. I would recommend you to visit www.intileo.com, we are known for our IT services and outsourcing capabilities.

Conclusion:

So when should you build custom software? To answer this question you need to ask yourself:

• Is the software part of your core competency and helps you differentiate your product or service?
• Is the purpose of the software to fulfil something for which there is genuinely no solution?
• If you are leaning towards custom software, do you have people inhouse with deep IT experience, an understanding of current technologies, your legacy systems, and the interaction/interconnection between the two?

Communication – a single word, around which the world revolves now, is deemed to be the blessing of the current tides. One can safely argue that orators are made out of dedication, perseverance and a strong will to practice each day, every day. Such practice, when put to exercise in front of an actively listening crowd gives employees cut-throat confidence at work, undoubtedly. It’s rather surprising that the world thinks that communicators have it inbuilt in their DNA, but it’s rather truer that effective communication can be achieved thorough dedicated efforts, over a considerable period of time.

At work, there is a dire need to communicate information, information relevant to everyday functioning of the organization. Right from the daredevil developers to operation superheroes to marketing ninjas to every other single person in the hierarchy ladder, they all have the need to communicate. Especially, the marketing ninjas and customer support team who speak with the stakeholders on a daily basis, improving communication at work-place is a need which must be fulfilled by all means.

Here’s how one can improve their communication skills at work-place.

 Shaping up a Creative Thought Process at Work

Surely, sharing a few cool and popular memes might get you brownie points in your social media circle. Nevertheless, at work, what would really matter is coming up with speaking out loud your original and revolutionising ideas, as and when they come. Communication is the key here, make no mistake. Whenever a disruptive idea makes way to the mind, it must be a prerequisite that the recipient sits on it, and communicates it to the rest of the employees at work-space.

What sells today is a unique approach product which the ordinary consumer wants. In our case, we know this product as communication skills at the work place.

Serving the Thought Process to the Target Audience

Whilst one has won half the battle when the creative bright idea popped out in their minds, and made it way to pen and paper, and later to a digital platform, the laptop screen and the keyboard. The other half of the battle remains at large, with respect to delivering the idea to the right target audience within the stipulated deadline? How does one go about it? Are there some golden rules to it? Well, the answer is a big no. Improving communication at the work place is all about pitching the right message to the right person, in the deemed-to-be right manner. A lot of ‘rights’ in one sentence? True, but we must not forget that all is fair in love, war and communication. We kid you not.

The secret sauce doesn’t comprise of memorising the words in a robotic fashion and uttering them out like your Alexa does. The secret sauce comprises of understanding that there is none. The key is to keep working on understanding what needs to be communicated, until the mind devises its own mannerism of doing so, using both the tools, verbal and nonverbal (prima facie, your body language). One could also make a demo presentation to a trusted ally at work (we all have work friends, don’t we?) and accept constructive criticism against it. Once you know the content to be delivered, let your subject and delivery be open to questions, and in fact, encourage the same. Nothing stands better than accepting to-and-fro communication to transfer data or information at work.

Active Listening is Always at your Disposal

The good news is that everyone loves to speak. The bad news is, not everyone speaks sensibly. The best news is, you can always listen and chose to speak only when required. Healthy communication skills accept the need to listen to others more than the will of the tongue to speak. It makes one patient, ensures to-and-fro communication and makes pathway to learn from others and make amends in one’s own delivery of speeches and words.

Through active listening, one simply increases the chance of a healthy conversation all the more. This further accelerates the speed at which the conversing parties solve a problem at a larger level. Truly said, real communication takes place when the speaker does more of listening and then attempts to solve the problem, organically. Are you listening, audience?

The Last Strike of Real Dialogues to Increase Trust

Lastly, the work place gives employees and employers the real challenge to make dialogues. Engaging in real dialogues helps the speaker don leadership skills, and this in turn helps immensely to build trust, increase the rapport amongst the team members and finally, help in moving forward with work every single day.

Work-place and communication completely go hand-in-hand. One can make use of constructive feedback from their colleagues and bosses to remove anything which doesn’t help in communicating their message. Over time, this constant cycle of analysis and exercising improvement leads to one improve their communication skills at the work-place, in an amazing fashion.

So, what’s the next-big-idea playing hide-and-seek with your creative minds?

As Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Your own image is the entirety of what you do, how you do it and why you do it. It’s not something you can counterfeit. It’s bona fide and profound situated.

In the event that you hit the nail on the head, your own image will influence you to emerge from the group, sparkle a focus on your mastery and upgrade your esteem. You’ll have a vitality and a buzz about you that individuals can’t resist being attracted to.

So how might you construct your own image?

First of all, don’t make the mistake of thinking your personal brand is all about you. It’s not. Your personal brand is not about your work experience or your personal accomplishments. Your personal brand should be about other people, specifically what you can do for other people.

Begin by putting forth a couple of inquiries: What requirements would you be able to address? Where can you offer the most esteem? What makes you not the same as the rest?

Few of the steps to be followed in building a personal brand are:

1. Check Your Online Presence.

It’s really important to understand what people perceive you as a person. Search for yourself online and understand that perception. Then only you will be able to rebuild it.

2. Be Authentic (Craft the right message)

You must ensure staying authentic while putting any information about you, anywhere online. It takes time to build in your image and your personal brand and wrong information about you can really hamper it at a great deal.

3. Social Media Presence

Make sure you are having active accounts on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc. the next thing you should really be caring is keeping a balanced approach towards personal and professional approach. People should know you as a person other than your work. This doesn’t mean you should be revealing your personal information to everybody out there but stay balanced in leaking some bit of personal information as well.

4. Have a personal Website

Having your personal website with your details can help you a lot in creating your brand and making you searched on search engines. It’s actually not necessary to have a lavished website and spend a good amount of money on it. You can keep it simple as well with the details of your work experience, your personal details etc.

5. Define Values

Your brand should reflect the kind of person you are.  Just copying others will really not help in creating your image. Show what you actually are and what you actually care about. Gradually people will understand you and will respect you.

6. Consistency

It’s human nature that we recognize something when it comes in front of us time and again. If you really want your client to recognize your brand, you must keep a consistent image in front of them and show it to them on a regular basis. Quick to and fro may damage your brand and ruin your efforts made. You can use this consistency by using different colors, logos, Themes etc.

7. Communicate Effectively at Public Gatherings

You should start speaking in public gatherings or events. Don’t care about what people will say, stay confident and keep communicating effectively.  Start small and go big. Gradually you will get a chance to speak in bigger public events as well. These activities and engagements will help you a lot in building your personal brand.

8. Know Your Stuff (be unique)

You must ensure you know what you are talking about. Talking about something you don’t know will only leave a poor impression of yours. So stay authentic and talk about the stuff you already know. There is no harm in talking about your shortcomings or weakness.

The need of your personal brand is increasing day by as the need of people and the organization is increasing to know who you are and what you stand for. So, building your brand is actually going to benefit you in multiple ways. And finally, this is one thing which will accompany you throughout your career and will not get affected by any job switch or company switch.

What is Contract Hiring?

An organization is nothing but the employees it works with. Therefore, it is critical that a company hire the best, not just via full time employment opportunities but also via contract hiring. In a nutshell, contract hiring refers to employing a skilled individual for a specific assignment. When the job is done, they may chose to keep working together or part ways, according to a mutual consent.

So, how do companies get in touch with these contractors? Undoubtedly, an important medium would be that of the contract hiring companies present in India. It is critical to choose the correct staffing contract hiring company for your requirements.

Here are 10 steps to find that perfect contract hiring company for your organizational needs.

10 Steps to Find the Perfect Contract Hiring Company

One cannot argue that there is intense competition among companies for having the right set of employees on board. In order to face the competition well, companies must follow these 10 steps to have better chances to get the perfect contract hiring company to work with.

1. Choose an industry-specific staffing company – The first step toward finding the perfect contract hiring company is to look for experts in your area of operations. Today, any company needs to focus on saving time and expenses and thus choosing a recruiter who understands the business needs and market conditions is important.

2. Specialized Networking – Networking stands crucially important in order to get to know about rising contract hiring services companies in the market. It could be friends and family, previous companies or even relevant professional associates. LinkedIn is the next big thing in the present times. An active means of networking on LinkedIn gives an additional edge to companies to find the perfect contract hiring company.

3. The Right Set of Experimentation and Commitment – When it comes to acquiring contract services, staffing agencies in India play a huge role in bridging the divide between companies and contractors. A short term relationship provides leverage to companies to move on to the next one, in case of non-productive relationship if at all.
4. Reading References – Apart from just relying on the right expectation setting, one must constantly strive to procure references of chosen staffing companies. Reading references from the past and current clients of these staffing companies is an absolutely important step.

5. Choosing between quality and quantity – Another critical step taken in by companies to choose the perfect contract hiring company is to choose between the one which delivers quality or quantity. This simply refers to companies deciding whether a project requires specialisation or a good volume of contractors.

6. Placing the right candidate – Often candidates staffing companies just concentrate on filling in contract hiring position in companies, right at the start. For some job roles, the focus lays on hiring a specialized skill-set for a specific assignment. Thus, companies must keep screening for this metric as well.

7. Proper Back-up Plan – Contractors work hard toward achieving specific contracts. Nevertheless, sometimes the candidate might be an organizational misfit. In such a case, contract hiring companies must have an appropriate back up in place to replace the candidate.

8. Overall Budget for Staffing Companies – Companies allocate specific budget for specific projects. Overall, the ideal staffing company must fall in within their budget range, whether it accounts for hourly or as a percentage of new hire.

9. Measuring recruitment returns – Companies are keen to study the returns of investment (ROI) on each of their recruitment costs for each of the contractors hired. Thus, they look out for the recruitment metrics and study in place by these staffing agencies.

10. The final step – Business Rating – The last step requires the companies to close the deal at the agreed upon T&Cs. This is followed by the last check on overall business reviews ratings these staffing agencies have.

As highlighted earlier, a company is as good as its employees are. Having said that, considerable amount of effort must be exercised in hiring the perfect contract hiring company in India. The overall objective of acquiring highly trained contractors can only be fulfilled through the rightful association with a extremely competent staffing agency, today.

It’s 2018. The mark of 20^th century calls out for budding entrepreneurs to take the leap of faith, and leave their comfortable 9 to 5 jobs, and move toward the world of start-ups to follow their passions! It’s unquestionable that start-ups require entrepreneurs to be impactful, creative and aggressive; given the need to stand out from competitors and connect with the target audience.

However, as a superhero once said, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility’; every start-up founder must make their own set of to-dos and to-not-dos. These can be found in various books and blogs; but the real essence comes from the sweat and blood of an entrepreneur, known as experience! Let’s have a quick look at the things to take care of while donning the hat of a ‘startup-preur’.​

1. Funding –A company’s CEO’s most important issue is the need to raise the right amount of funding. A start-up needs to be dynamic; and it needs to be aggressively creative with the problem it is attempting to solve. This calls for the founders to convince angel investors and venture capitalists to invest in their start-ups. Even after a start-up has risen funding; the CEO must most effectively put these monies to grow the start-up. Founders make the mistake of burning the money in an aggressive fashion for discounts, advertising, and overall pull-marketing strategies; rather than utilising it for a balanced approach of push and pull.
2. Manpower – One of the key resources any start-up could possess would be the right set of people to work for it. Start-ups require a dynamic and creative set of minds that refuse to take a no for an answer. The consumers define companies, and employees always re-define a company. Having said that, founders of start-ups must always take key interest in having the right set of manpower onboard to take the start-ups to great heights. There must be an established and knowledgeable team in the Human Resource department, whose core job is to identify the right person and hire them for the right job.

3. People management – A CEO of a start-up must absolutely be a people’s person. He or she must make the right choices when it comes to keeping their people happy, for a company’s employees are the ones that lead the company on a success driven path. Employees always look up to their bosses, and hence the CEO/CTO of a start-up must walk and talk in the role of just another employee passionate to perform and inspire folks. Tasks like recruitment drives, performance appraisal and employee development initiatives must be taken into consideration, and these must become the KPIs for co-founders’ performance in start-ups.

4. Brand value – Brand value or recognition in the market as a trustworthy brand is yet another major aspect that a start-up needs to worry about. As a founder or co-founder of a start-up, a constant effort must be in the direction of brand awareness and acceptance. In today’s time, a company’s online and offline presence influences the way the brand is accepted by the target audience to a great extent. Using the right tools of digital marketing along with lucrative discounts and offers, a company can establish a strong market presence for the intended target audience. Nevertheless, there lies the need of a specialised digital marketing effort by the start-up to establish a strong presence in the market. 

5. Employee Development – An important question a CEO must ask himself when it comes to employees’ performance is – What pushes a person to keep working for the same company? A constant assurance for monthly money to come to their banks called salary? Yes. The lucrative invitation known as incentives? Yes. Nevertheless, more than anything, the assurance of a constant growth in the same work place, both personally and professionally is the biggest drivers for an employee to stick to a work place. CEOs and start-up founders must make constant efforts to initiate and maintain employee development programs. This not only insures for an employee’s long term association with the company and progressive development; but also leads to overall growth of the start-up.

6. Infrastructure – An important question people ask today is – what do you need to start off a business? A couple of computer systems, funding, people, online presence; these all are just constituents of what we know as an office set up,or infrastructure. The right set up of facilities make overall business operations smoother and thereby all the more productive. With the advent of co-working spaces, the problem of expensive office space has gotten reduced to a huge extent; and this is pushing more and more employees to become their own bosses.

We’re hiring! How many times have the previous words given you little butterflies, when you see your dream companies put it up on their virtual addresses? Let’s understand why.

With the advent of 2023, the modern-day literate labour market has become much more dynamic. We as job-seekers know that the focus of IT recruiters has massively shifted toward acquiring skilled labour, as opposed to traditional means of acquiring experienced candidates. These skills act as means of filtering the prospective candidates for given posts and roles. Hence, the modern day IT labour market is brimming with the idea of adding more and more skills on their resume, for better chances of getting hired.

Let’s have a look at 10 top skills IT Recruiters are looking for in candidates in 2023.

1. Machine Learning – The term machine learning points out to the art and science of learning, without actually writing a separate program for it. With the progress in technology, the time has come where machines are self-sustainable and do not require humans to control them. Therefore, it has become all the more important for the right set of IT professionals to handle data carefully, both socially and ethically.

2. Software Programming – Coding requires the knowledge of a computer language. With the passage of time, there have been higher demands of coders of a particular language and also along with it, requirement of coders who code in numerous languages. We are not surprised why IT recruiters have put software programming as a skill they want prospective IT job seekers to possess.

3. Data Science – 2023 will see a surge in the demand for data analysts and data scientists. The major reason for this can be accredited to the fact data will play a huge role in decision making of business houses in the coming times. Therefore, IT recruiters look for data scientists in the pool of engineers.

4. Cyber security – Systems are prone to viruses and mass outbreak of a new bug casually encroaching upon the security systems of companies’ online existence. A lot of times, companies do not even report it fearing the loss of prospective consumers. Nevertheless, it certainly does not discount the fact that IT recruiters have started looking out for cyber security study as one of the top skills in IT job seekers.

5. Data Analytics and Business Intelligence – With the massive adoption of computer and it replacing human labour, it is important that IT recruiters get hold of the right data analyst. Data analyst could study data effectively, and will be able to steer the organization toward productivity and competence for the company in question.

6. Soft Skill Development – Despite having the best of technical knowhow, it is an utter waste if that knowledge isn’t transferrable. An ideal manager in the IT sector must have the right set of people skill or soft skills, to effectively deal with their teams. Come 2023, this has become an absolute criterion with all IT recruiters to hire candidates.

7. UI/UX – There is no doubt that machines and software are on a constant brink of transformational revolution. At the same time, the user interface or user experience needs to be simplistic enough to drive sales for a particular brand, product or company. It’s one of the top notch skills IT recruiters attempt to filter job seekers with, these days.

8. Cloud Computing – We all hear of cloud computing way more than often. It involves hosting, storing and managing data to a set of remote servers rather than on your physical computers. Imagine storing your money in a bank rather than keeping it on you. There is a guarantee of safety which comes along with it, and assurance of proper storage. Therefore, it’s also one of the top skills IT recruiters filter candidates with.

9. Industrial Robotics and Automation – When Industrial Revolution took place, experts commented that there will come a day when machines replace men. Well, it is certainly happening as you read this and hence it is important that IT job seekers possess skills of robotics and automation. The demand for such skills is only going to increase aggressively in the future, without a doubt.

10. Natural Language Processing – Try saying ‘Hey, Siri. How does the weather look like?” on your Apple devices. Or, try Google Assistant for the same. You get a fully fledged report of the weather conditions today. With the rapid advancements of voice automation, natural language processing has reached the next level. IT Recruiters are on the lookout for candidates who could contribute largely to the stated field.