More and more corporates conduct company building. Instead of merely investing in start-ups or cooperating with them, they now prefer to build their own ones. Over the course of such company building projects, existing corporate personnel (e.g. from innovation departments or an in-house venture builder) or external resources are usually relied on in the initial phase. Only after a successful proof of concept (POC) and the start of the roll-out of the freshly built start-up does the creation of an independent team – which now has to be recruited – begin. This recruiting of a completely new team usually poses great challenges for the parent company. The usual corporate recruiting rules and mechanisms from the corporation no longer work for the start-up.

Within the following whitepaper, we provide an insight into which roles and positions are usually necessary for a corporate start-up and which positions can be filled optionally. Then we show which seven common mistakes corporates make when recruiting for their own start-ups and we present five basic rules that we have imposed on ourselves in terms of recruiting to find the right staff for corporate start-ups. We want to provide corporates facing the challenge of staffing a corporate start-up with a practical guide to action.

In the whitepaper, we do not only present our perspective and experience as a company builder, but we have also obtained experience values from recruiting practice of Gregor Tschurtschenthaler. He is a headhunter specialized in start-ups and expands our experience with specific headhunter insights.