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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 necesarily 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.

Whistleblowing is extraordinarily controversial because its occurrence is often reflective of fundamental failures in organizational governance, making leadership look bad. I argue that this perspective is shortsighted; rather, whistleblowing is a critical self-regulatory mechanism that, when properly actualized, protects asset value. I build on new research exploring a whistleblower orientation and integrate it with existing research on internal whistleblowing programs and whistleblowing cultures. Against this background, I present a novel, three-tier integrated program focused on promoting, supporting, and protecting a specific group of value-driven, highly moral-herein termed offended-whistleblowers to enhance firm self-regulation against fraud, sexual harassment, toxic cultures, and other malfeasances that occur both within firms and by their own actions. Whereas previous research has focused on organizational responses to whistleblowing, central to this program is identifying, nurturing, and supporting an idiosyncratic whistleblower orientation within key employees for a firm's own protection. The implication is that owners and managers can harness the power of whistleblowing, thereby protecting their firms, with less risk of individuals taking their grievances outside, where they could instead harm firms.