Last week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur, and he shared an idea I hadn’t heard before. One of the entrepreneurs he knows only hires people for part-time roles while they keep their existing full-time job with a different employer. So, if a candidate already has a full-time job making at least $70,000 per year, they work for a different company in a similar position and want to augment it with a part-time job, receiving another W-2 or 1099 as an independent contractor.
Some of the reasons the entrepreneur only hires candidates this way are that he wants the employees for his company to have a stable job from a different employer. He wants them to have health, dental, and retirement benefits from the other employer, and he wants the comfort that if his startup doesn’t work out, the employee is still gainfully employed. One final piece is that he leans on the existing employer as a form of quality control and hiring best practices. He says that when they’re employed, he has a level of comfort that they’ve already done their due diligence and have a great talent development organization.
Now, this isn’t to condone how this entrepreneur works or this idea of hiring people that already have jobs and then hiring them part-time for his own startup. The main idea here is that there are other ways to recruit and compensate employees. By default, we think of full-time employees, contractors, and offshore contractors, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are other pools of talent out there, and with some effort, there are even opportunities to tap into talent that might otherwise be viewed as too expensive or too difficult to get. This is made even more abundant with work from home and remote work.
As an entrepreneur with limited resources and incredible challenges, finding great people, even if they have an existing job and keep that job, is one of the most important responsibilities. This is but one of many alternative ideas to recruiting talent and building a business.
David Cummings on Startups 
Several years ago, I was the “full-time employer” paying a good salary and benefits to my team.
I found that one of my top data analysts was slipping with his productivity. When I leaned in to learn more, I found that he was spending some his normal workday engaged in “other part-time activity.” He was literally stealing time from our company to work on another early-stage business. When we talked about it, he was generally in denial that he was doing anything wrong, and told me “If you paid me more, I wouldn’t have to spend time working for this other company too.” I had to let him go. I told him that if he wanted to spend time working for another company, he shouldn’t be doing that while he was on the clock with us. And I wished him the best, but told him he should not expect a positive reference from me or anyone on our team.
Clay Herron, CFA
The main concerns I would have are 1/ are they allowed to work for another company and 2/ ownership of any proprietary developments of work if they already have a full time employer especially in a similar line of work.