The purpose of the paper is to find out if four founding conditions of US startups – total assets, the founder’s level of education, and industry experience, and the founder’s startup experience – influenced the generosity of employee offerings, such as healthcare insurance and paid holidays.
To test their four hypotheses, they studied a sample of 4,148 firms from a longitudinal panel database. All the data came from the KFS data set provided by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The authors studied the KFS data for indicators of seven HR benefits.
The data revealed positive associations for each of the first five years between total assets and HR benefits, between education and HR benefits, as well as between industry experience and HR benefits. In the first year, a positive association was found between startup experience and HR benefits.
The two authors argued that the results should be studied by startup founders. In a highly competitive market, it would help them to understand the importance of human resources as a source of advantage and understand their own attitudes to benefits. Implementing attractive compensation packages and benefit packages makes it easier to recruit talented people and retain the best employees.
