List Your Startup on AngelList (how-to)
As a startup, AngelList may be the first time an investor stumbles upon what you’re doing. It’s also become a hub of startup talent looking for new roles, therefore it’s important to make sure your AngelList profile is not only up-to-date for fundraising and potential clientele, but a solid representation of your employer brand.
At Avra Talent, we work with early-stage startups who often haven’t set up or optimized their AngelList profile yet. This post will guide you from prep work to publication. Now you can go out there, raise gobs of money, hire great people, and dent the universe or whatever it is your startup is here to do!
Step 1 – Prep Yo’self
- Ensure your main company information is finalized: company name, current team, website, mission, and services/product. Polish it. Shine bright like a diamond. Remember, investors don’t read every profile they see!
- Browse trending and featured Startups on AngelList. Looking at successful profiles can give you tips on how to fill out your own startup’s profile.
- Have a fire-ready pitch available and on short notice for anyone ready to hear it.
- Look for reputable people in your industry and begin to grow your network and display your support on AngelList and other online profiles. This will show other people that your company is, or will soon be, worth their time and money.
- Google your company, yourself, and all of your team members. Make sure that you are all portrayed in a strong, positive light and show that you are a reliable team.
- Be attentive to your marketing strategy, financials, and production timeline.
Step 2 — Create your company’s AngelList profile
- Create your Company Profile
- Firstly, you’ll need a personal Public Profile. A public profile exhibits your work history and details to the larger Angellist community.
- Secondly, click on your picture in the top right, and click Create Company Profile
- For specific help on editing or managing a Company Profile, check AngelList’s Company Profile Help Category.
- Fill out each field. Be to-the-point concise, but give a complete overview of your company.
- Clearly state your fundraising goal and be upfront about how much you want to raise in your current round of fundraising. Note: It’s not necessary to fundraise to create a Company Profile on AngelList or to post a job.
- Use all markets. Those following the listed markets will come across your startup easily. It is not wise to create a new market. If you do create a new one, no investors will be following it, therefore no one will be able to find you.
- Choose a semi-broad location. Many investors like to invest in local companies and will search for companies in their area. Therefore it would be better, for example, to list “Bay Area” or “Silicon Valley” over “San Jose.” On the flip side, “California” would be too large of a listing.
- Add every member of your team. This will ensure their network will be notified when you add them to your company, resulting in an increase in the number of people who visit your profile. It will also show a potential new-hire who their coworkers will be.
- You’ll want to invite certain team members to recruit for you. Note: You must be an admin for the company profile to invite colleagues.
- Revise. Before publishing your profile, go over it yourself and ask team members to review as well.
Step 3 — Hiring on AngelList
There are many candidates specifically looking for startup jobs on AngelList. Connecting with these people is free and easy.
- Gain Access
- Once you. have a user profile + access to a Company Profile you can post a job via AngelList.
- How do I post a Job on AngelList Talent?
- Fill in the job details
- The key here is to be realistic about the skills you need, and super thorough in explaining the role:
- Be specific: there’s no need to sift through poorly matched candidates.
- Remember, unicorns (probably) don’t exist. If you describe the perfect candidate with a million years experience (20+) and over-the-top proficiency in a rainbow of skills (5+) in your job posting, you won’t find them.
- When selecting skills, choose the ones with the most followers, unless you have to add a new skill. AngelList is actually really good about reviewing and adding new skills created by users to their system.
- Add salary and equity data
- You can leave out Salary/Equity but it will result in limited distribution. In AngelList’s system, jobs posted without salary ranges do not show up in candidate search results when jobseekers filter for new opportunities (unless it is a Co-Founder role).
- If you would like to keep compensation information hidden, you can upgrade a listing to a Promoted Job. To promote a job, please follow this guide: How do I promote a job? You also have the option to Promote your Job after it is published for more visibility.
- Candidates using AngelList expect any job posting they see to have accurate compensation information included. This allows for better alignment and more applications from qualified prospective candidates.
- If you are uncomfortable about posting salary or if you aren’t sure what the compensation for a role is ultimately going to look like, you can set a large range. If you need permission from someone else at your company to post compensation information, you can publish your job and then update it later.
- Need more help setting the right compensation? Use AngelList’s free salary tool.
- Set the Recruiting Contact(s) + Tag Coworkers
- These team members must be “employees” of your company or this will not work.
- Email address(es) must be your/their work email. This will likely need to be changed as most recruiters have set up a personal profile prior to the Company Profile being created, so a personal email is attached. To find out more about work email click here.
- If you are using a Recruiting Firm, this will need to be done in a slightly different way, and we are thrilled to help!
- Publish your Job
- Once all fields are complete, you’ll be able to click Publish to set the job posting live from the top right corner, or click Save Draft to save your progress.