74% Of Senior Professionals Prefer Working For a Startup Over A Large Corporate: Report
CoffeeMug.ai, a rapidly-growing community of over 2,50,000 founders, investors, CXOs, and business leaders, recently conducted a survey to understand where senior professionals stand in the corporate vs. start-up debate on their career choices. When it comes down to making a choice, 74% professionals would take the same offer from a start-up as opposed to a corporate. Having surveyed, 1250+ senior professionals from the CoffeeMug community, the report gleaned important insights into the preferences of senior-level professionals against the backdrop of the Great Reshuffle in India.
Speaking on the study, Abhishek Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, CoffeeMug.ai, “As of 2022, the start-up and corporate market is betting big on hiring top talent to overcome the growth lost during the pandemic period. What started as the Great Resignation has metamorphosed into the Great Reshuffle as professionals have their pick of amazing offers from both new and established companies. At CoffeeMug, we decided to gauge the preference, and it is interesting to see that most of them would choose start-ups over corporates for their next career move. The report is a deep-dive into the evolving needs and goals of top-level professionals, and can help both start-ups and corporates understand what makes them choose one over the other.”
Key influences on decision-making
When asked about the reasons why they would choose start-ups over corporates, a vast majority (74%) of CoffeeMug’s senior professional base cited growth opportunities as the main reason. More than half of the respondents (57%) also claimed that a more diverse experience attracts them towards start-ups. Further, 53% of the leaders said that they would prefer start-ups over corporates based on the impact they could make in the workplace. Other factors that play a role include flexibility, culture, and flat hierarchy. This clearly highlights the factors that start-ups need to focus on while devising their talent acquisition strategy,
What can start-ups offer?
While the choice between start-ups and corporates is abundantly clear, CoffeeMug also delved into the attributes that senior professionals consider while assessing start-up offers. The top three decision-making factors as per the report include the business idea (79%), the founder’s profile (67%), and the growth trajectory of the start-up (62%).
Takeaways for corporates
Start-ups have taken a lead when it comes to senior professionals choosing the next step in their career paths. However, to offer a holistic view of their mindset, CoffeeMug also noted the key reasons that could make them choose corporates over start-ups. The top factors included leadership positions (53%), work-life balance (46%), and perks & benefits (42%). Focusing on these attributes can help corporates manage and retain their senior professionals in the current scenario.
Focus on Flexibility
The new-age talent base prioritizes a positive work-life balance which is why flexibility has become a key factor for retention. As per the survey, 87% of the senior professionals agree that flexibility is important to them. Apart from this, flexibility in work timings (69%), flexibility in work location (60%), and the process of work (57%) also hold sway as determining factors for start-ups and corporates to retain talent.
Long term goals
In conclusion, CoffeeMug aimed to understand the long-term goals of senior professionals who prefer start-ups over corporates. It was found that 47% of the respondents want to start their own ventures down the line while 37% want to rise through the ranks and hold CXO positions in the long run. In a lucrative start-up environment such as India’s, it is no surprise that a majority of senior professionals aim to go on to become founders themselves.
Speaking on the current sentiment among senior leaders, Gaurav Porwal, COO, OLA, said, “For seasoned professionals, it is about stability and work-life balance. Currently, I don’t think anyone knows how the future dynamics of work will pan out. People are in favor of both extremes – fully virtual work or fully physical work. But this is just going to evolve because people will realize that some settings require physical facetime. Both start-ups and corporates will need to find this balance and maybe revisit employee expectations and employee reward systems. Whichever way it lands, it is going to be a departure from the existing norms.”
Adding to this, Kamal Kishore Kumawat, Co-Founder, Edgistify, said, “In the year 2022, senior members have started preferring startups because of the buzz created in the past couple of years. The kind of salaries that startups are offering and the rate at which they are growing are instilling confidence in senior professionals, who are now preferring start-ups. In my own company, which operates in the highly traditional warehousing and fulfillment sector, we have people who have 2-3 decades of experience incorporates. Start-ups require experienced people for growth, and such lucrative opportunities are driving senior professionals to move to this segment.”
Shantanu Saha, Founder & CEO, The Recruiters, said, “There are two kinds of senior professionals nowadays - professionals under 40 years of age with around 10 - 15 years of experience with an excellent pedigree in terms of education with fairly high compensation packages - typically 60 lakhs to 1 Cr plus and good ESOPs. Such candidates are happy to take leadership positions in high-growth startups. They would not really fit in large traditional organizational cultures or corporates. The other senior professionals are in their 40s and 50's and have mostly worked in traditional companies and have risen to top management levels. They prefer job security and traditional organizations and corporates. Even if a few are open to the idea of startups, they would want assurances on funding, and then they mostly end up as cultural misfits in a company where the average age is in the late 20s or early 30s. Senior professionals in the higher age bracket want a stable company that is well funded and they also prefer working with large teams. Senior professionals in the younger age bracket prefer companies growing at a rapid pace.
