Why is it Worth Hiring Young Junior Talents to Start Your Business?

Feb 7, 2023

Hey! Each of us is either a Junior specialist or has already passed this stage of his career, in any case it affected everyone, including me. Today, I would like to talk a little about a very interesting topic for me - why is it worth working with Junior specialists when you start your own business? The short answer is that this will make your startup a profitable business. I will tell you in more detail now.

Why did I decide to write this article? It's simple - I myself start my own small business. For a long time I was looking for employees who could help me, take on some of the responsibilities and I came to the conclusion that in order to develop my own business, I do not need experienced specialists who will do everything for me in a day, I need completely different people with qualities, which I value more.

Experience

Who is junior. In fact, this is just a student who recently graduated from the university and is looking for a job. As a rule, they have work experience, at least relevant (pizza delivery experience does not count), they know a lot of things, but so far they don’t even have a clue how to apply this knowledge and skills to the benefit of a joint project. Of course, lack of experience is a problem. That is why it is so difficult for them to get a job in a well-known company, moreover, now, during the crisis.

Nevertheless, I believe that lack of experience is not a disadvantage, but rather an advantage. Such a specialist who has just graduated from the university is full of ambitions, and it seems that the whole world is open to him (judging by myself, I personally had such emotions and feelings when I graduated from the university). Yes, he has no experience, but he is also full of desire and motivation to get this experience, and you are the ones who can provide this experience to him.

Work Experince Meme

Yes, a junior specialist basically has skills and knowledge, but does not yet know how to apply them. Excellent, because all his skills and knowledge are fresh. He just took his cryptography exam, so isn't he the perfect candidate for a new VPN startup project. This is the type of person I would like to have on my team.

Fire in the Eyes

For me, this is the most important point. I don't know about you, but all the juniors I worked with (including myself as a junior) aspired to conquer the world. In a good way, of course. These are people who want only one thing - to show themselves and what they are capable of. Of course, salary is also important for someone, but, to be honest, I have not met any such junior.

I remember our first meeting with friends from the university a few months after graduation. Neither of us even mentioned salary - everyone bragged about their first projects, laughed at what petty work we do, but there was fire in our eyes. It was clear that none of us went to work not for the sake of money, but for the sake of an idea that he himself adheres to. I had a friend who dreamed of working in the travel industry - he got a job at Sky Scanner, there was one who dreamed of cybersecurity - he found himself in Dr Web and so on. Money did not play a role then, even though many lived with seven in a rented apartment.

The fire in the eyes is what I personally appreciate, if only because I myself was and remain so. When you're 22 and fresh out of university, all you dream about is being useful, joining something important, or doing something important yourself. I think this quality is much more important than experience and money. Experience and money will come later, but they will never be there if there is no this fire.

New Look

Sometimes, in my experience, a company hires a new employee not because they need more hands and help, but because they need a new perspective on a problem or project. For example, when we came to our first job, every week we monitored pricing in our company and pricing in a competitor's company, which is our direct competitor. I deliberately omit the name of the company, because I consider it unethical to mention it.

So, I suggested, as it seemed to me, a completely ordinary and simple solution - why manually monitor the pricing of a competitor, if we can write a parser that will do this automatically. It was a surprise to me why this could not have occurred to anyone before, although it seemed that it was generally worth starting with.

It seems to me that this is all because, working for a long time on the same projects and problems, more experienced employees simply get lost and do not see things that are obvious to them, I would even say banal. And that's okay. There is always a need for a new look, which will not emerge in the swamp, but which will throw a rope of help into it (a terrible analogy, but understandable). It happened to me, and I'm sure there are many more. Behind these simple, logical, but somehow inconspicuous ideas, businesses, especially beginners, need junior specialists, from whose eyes any inefficiency and illogicality will not escape.

Risks

I will briefly talk about the risks. We have already said that salary is not important for junior specialists, their eyes are burning, and the money will come along with promotion and experience, and they understand this very well. But, we, the creators of startups, should not think that junior specialists are employees for dirty and boring work - filling out spreadsheets in Excel or calling customers. So you just kill all the motivation in them, and not only in your company and subsequently, self-esteem and performance will fall. After all, they studied higher mathematics, and you put them in tables in Excel to fill in.

I understand that the risks of hiring inexperienced specialists for important work are high, but the chance of success is just as high. A new, motivated employee with a clear desire to grow, develop and move up the career ladder almost at a run. How much time will it take to train such an employee in normal, full-fledged, specialized work for him? A month, maybe two. But aren't those risks worth it? Indeed, in a month or two, you will have a full-fledged employee who is not disappointed in life and his career, who does not go out while working in Excel, but does exactly what he knows and can do.

I say all this to make it clear that the risks in this case justify the result. It is better to give junior additional motivation and load core work (for the benefit of yourself and him) than to be afraid to give him a real job with real problems and ruin his life, and to mark time yourself without developing a business.

Conclusion

Of course, what I was talking about here applies not only to junior IT specialists, but to any employee without work experience. I tried to dedicate this article not only to entrepreneurs who are discussing whether it is worth hiring an inexperienced employee, but also to junior specialists who, perhaps, will emphasize something and something new for themselves, something that they can cling to when looking for a job in a startup.