Abstract: Entrepreneurial firms, due to their size and limited resources, are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent. These challenges place the firm’s survival and success in jeopardy, as they waste resources on talent management and operate amid talent shortfalls. Simply put, in the scale-up phase, managing talent could be the most important activity entrepreneurs pursue. While entrepreneurs cannot eliminate their strategic shortcomings (e.g., prestige, the ability to pay top salaries), they can take advantage of their unique strengths (e.g., a more intimate environment, job flexibility, and greater opportunities for growth, advancement, and leadership) to make themselves more competitive among candidates not necessarily destined for large corporations. In this article, drawing upon the lessons of best practice and theory, we make three recommendations for entrepreneurial hiring managers: (1) treat all prospective employees as transformative organizational members, (2) recognize and embrace the contributions of all, and (3) make new and established employees consistently feel valued. While these lessons allow all managers to display their organizational strengths, they provide the best return on investment for those with the greatest hiring challenges: entrepreneurs.

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is the study of ordinary people doing extraordinary things: outliers in society, seeing and enacting new venture opportunities, while most others do not. Historically, the field of entrepreneurship has been dominated by competing homogeneity and heterogeneity perspectives. Extending current heterogeneity trends in the domain, this article builds the case for the benefits of examining the exceptional of the exceptional: entrepreneurs that produce extraordinary results. We argue that outlier entrepreneurs are not aberrations or empirical nuisances to be explained away or “fixed” through statistical wizardry. Rather, in most entrepreneurship phenomenon, those extremely high performing and disproportionately influential cases are “the goal” of entrepreneurship, and exactly where valuable theory-building potential lies. Building on several growing conversations in entrepreneurship research, we introduce why some phenomenological domains share characteristic potential for generating important insights using an outlier approach and present a set of methodological tools to tackle them.