Entrepreneurial teams' acquisition of talent: Evidence from technology manufacturing industries using a two‐sided approach
研究创业公司如何招聘新员工，发现即使创始人缺乏行业经验，若初始团队规模较大，也能吸引有经验的员工，且公司会为行业经验支付工资溢价。
Abstract Research summary One of the established findings in the spinout literature is that founders with prior industry experience assemble larger entrepreneurial teams and create better‐performing startups. We examine the role of prior industry experience in the startups' next stage—its hiring of new employees. We tackle two empirical challenges—the mutual aspect of hiring and the effect of unobserved variables on employees' earnings using a two‐sided matching model. Our results reveal that even firms founded by entrepreneurs without industry experience can attract new employees with such experience if the founders start with a large entrepreneurial team. Further, startups provide new hires with an earnings premium for their industry experience. Our approach illustrates the benefits of matching models over traditional regressions. Managerial summary Growing startups face the question of who to hire and how much to compensate the new hires. Simultaneously, prospective new hires ask which startup to join and how much their salary will be. We explore these questions using a novel method that tackles the mutual selection process. In the context of five technological manufacturing industries, we find that having industry experience within founding teams may not be necessary to attract new hires with high quality if the startup can signal its own quality through other means such as having a larger founding team. Our results indicate that startups prefer employees with industry experience for which startups offer a wage premium. Thus, employees seeking startup employment benefit from gaining industry experience prior to joining a startup. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/w00YzYi5VqA .