What I've learned about hiring

Every day, over a thousand people visit Oru Space. This is a co-working, wellness, and dining destination in East Dulwich. Thirukumar and his co-founder, Paul Nelmes, started it in 2020.

More than 70 employees take care of them and those at Oru’s sister location in Sutton, from chefs and yoga instructors to reception staff. Each person has a specific role in the organisation. They also share a mission to support Oru’s goals. These goals focus on sustainability, wellness, social impact, and social cohesion.

Thirukumar credits the success of Oru to employees hired. But hiring employees is a high-risk process. Get it wrong, and you waste time, money and morale.

Get it right, however, and you reap outsize benefits, because people are the business. If you want an organisation that’s innovative, dynamic and ambitious, you need those people in the room.

Here, Thirukumar shares his top five tips for building a team within a small business or start-up …

What are the most effective hiring strategies for start-ups?

When starting out with Oru Space, the business was cash-tight. Despite a commitment to always pay the London Living Wage, says Thirukumar, “we were never going to be able to pay top-of-the-market”.

Instead, he and Paul Nelmes aimed to employ non-specialists within the hiring process who were kind, understood the ethos, and were keen to build the business with them and develop their skill set in the process and support their career path.

Of course, you’ll need to sustain their motivation to do that. While financial rewards may be out of reach, don’t underestimate the power of more affordable work perks. Oru committed to feeding its employees—everyone gets a free lunch—and offered free access to unlimited exercise classes - it's more cost effective. “You want your people to feel good,” says Thirukumar. “If you can provide that, they’ll value it.”

What are some tips for creating the right ethos within a small business?

When you create a specialised role in the business, there’s a risk everyone else assumes they’re no longer expected to think about that area on a day-to-day basis.

Thirukumar recalls a gregarious member of reception staff at Oru who wanted to create a new Community Manager role for themselves. They would have been good at it, but Thirukumar declined. “It would have taken away the community role from everyone else,” he says. “We’re all doing the community role; we should all be talking to all of our members, all the time.”

If other employees felt less impetus to listen to members’ feedback, it would weaken Oru’s ability to quickly respond to customer needs - it's about creating the right company culture.

How to have uncomfortable conversations with your employees

Nobody has a perfectly happy team all the time. “Disgruntled people are normal,” says Thirukumar. “That’s a part of life.” But you can control how you respond.

Thirukumar advises approaching the problem with honesty rather than ignoring it. Ideally, the person in question should perceive this conversation not as criticism or an attack, but a good-faith, constructive attempt to solve the issue.

“You need to be open,” says Thirukumar, “and you've got to be comfortable with talking about what people want, and what they don’t want.”

If someone is dissatisfied with their salary, talk to them about what they need to do to increase it, or explain why you can’t give them a pay rise. If they are struggling in a role, offer them training, or see if you can switch their responsibilities. Within reason, you owe it to them to do what you can. “The majority of the responsibility should go back to the employer.”

There can be a cognitive bias against hiring people back into the business at a later stage. Don’t fall into that trap. If you can employ someone who already knows the organisation inside out, someone you have already invested in—or simply someone who you have already deemed suitable for a role—why wouldn’t you?

Consider the second person Thirukumar hired, who was a head chef from France. Eight days after Oru Space opened, the pandemic struck, and the chef had to return to France. “We lost her about a month into the job,” he recalls, but while she was there she had been great. Three and a half years later, Oru rehired the same woman to launch their second site, in Sutton, where she is now the head chef and manages a team of 15 people.

So don’t forget about former employees—see the good ones as warm contacts for future roles. As you scale, cede control. Carefully.

Thirukumar did all the hiring for the first three years, until Oru grew to about 40 employees. But there comes a point when managers need to take over the hiring process and planning. “It doesn't make sense for me to hire for someone else’s team—it’s impractical and it’s bad for company culture,” he says. “If someone else is doing the day-to-day management, then they need to be able to choose and motivate and work with their own people.”

Delegating that responsibility can be difficult but it is necessary. It also can’t just be a snap change.

You need to calibrate your managers’ approach to hiring, so they hire the type of people you would want in the company. Thirukumar worked with managers to ensure they knew what a ‘good hire’ looked like, and how best to approach interviews.

His top tip? “Ask what people want to do next with their lives, about their passions,” he says. “We want people who are open to growth and change—they thrive at Oru. And so we pay attention to those attributes.”