1. Someone Who Can Take the Good with the Bad

Every job has drawbacks. Whether it’s part of the duties, a long commute, or the pressure of a fast-paced workplace, hiring managers want to find someone who can deal with the challenges and continue to be productive. Often, this means you will need to openly discuss the negatives and assure the hiring manager that you are well equipped to deal with the situation, whatever it may be.

2. Humility

You might think the job search is a time to show off, but that can hurt you when you’re talking to startups. “Working for a startup can really catapult you up a learning curve in a lot of ways, but it also requires extreme humility,” says Johnson.

Why? First, joining a startup means you’re going to make mistakes, and a lot of them. So startups look for people who can recover with optimism, ease, and ideas of how to proceed. Secondly, you’ll likely be asked to take on multiple roles, and unless you were a marketer/coder/salesperson/spokesperson/garbage collector in the past, you’re going to be doing things you probably don’t fully know how to do.

And about that garbage collecting? Yeah, you’ll probably be doing a bit of that in the early days.

3. Cares more about the team than their individual title

Great startup employees also have to understand and internalize this concept.

When you’re working at a startup, and you’re part of building something from scratch, your title will never be able to fully encompass all the different things you do (if you’re a high-performer, that is). If you try to come up with a title that is an umbrella to all the different hats you wear, your title won’t make sense (both internally and externally). But without some sort of title, it’s also difficult (internally and externally) for there to be clarity around your individual priorities.

4. Should have a sense of urgency.

Building on the above, one of the most important qualities in a startup is speed.

In startup land, a single day can feel like a month. A month can feel like a year. And a year can feel like an eternity. This means, in order to continue moving forward and making progress in a meaningful direction, every single team member has to be willing to run things as soon as they become a priority.

There isn’t time to wait a week. In many cases, “tomorrow” is too late.

5. Thrive in Ambiguity

Corporate employees may not quite be ready for the absolute lack of process and procedure that characterizes most startups. It doesn’t mean you can’t make the transition. You absolutely can. But you need a guide. You need to talk about it. And I think the transition starts to occur when you, as a new startup employee, begin to create processes. You will quickly realize those may not be the right processes, and then you iterate. ambiguity is always there in a startup. employees have to be ready to deal with that.