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In this market you grow by Recruiting, not Hiring


Recruiting is proactive, hiring is reactive. The goal of recruiting is to get as many qualified people to commit to joining you as possible. The goal of hiring is to select the best people out of a qualified pool of talent. Both are really hard and it takes a ton of time to build a great team, but the market dictates where you need to focus and in this market, you need to always be recruiting.

I met with an entrepreneur yesterday and we talked about the classic chicken or egg challenge of recruiting.  As CEO you are overwhelmed with the demands of a rapidly growing business and recognize the need to hire more people, but also you are overwhelmed with the demands of a rapidly growing business and cannot dedicate enough time to recruiting and hiring. I remember how this feels, but the current highly competitive environment demands an even more thoughtful and time-consuming approach.

Today, candidates are interviewing you as much if not more than you are interviewing them and you need to create a lovely experience for them from initial contact to final hiring decision. Recruiting is different than hiring and requires a fundamental shift in mentality.

  1. You are selling, not buying. In this market your first objective is NOT evaluating the candidates you meet with, but convincing them to say yes if you decide to extend an offer. Take the time to understand your audience, their background and goals and craft a sales pitch. Spend the first 10 minutes of each interview selling the opportunity to work with you.
  2. Everyone must be an evangelist. Engage your entire staff in identifying recruits and leveraging their personal networks to help build the team. A culture that celebrates referrals with high fives from the CEO is set up to win. If you add referral bonuses for all employees, that helps too.
  3. User experience is critical. Invest the time to create a user-friendly process that reflects your brand values and company culture. Make it easy for your recruits to participate and give them transparency into the process from beginning to end.
  4. Move quickly. It is very likely that candidates of any quality will be heavily recruited by multiple companies and your process needs to respect this reality. If you are not actively engaging with recruits within a 24 hours of initial contact, you can assume they will no longer be available. If you are not able to make decisions quickly and move a recruit from first meeting to an offer efficiently, you will struggle to grow your team.

I hope these four are helpful and would love to know other tricks/best practices that people see working out there.

Re-reading it now, I see 1-4 as good advice for investors in this market as well, but that is a topic for another day…

 

This entry was posted on May 18, 2011, 2:01 pm and is filed under First Round Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • http://twitter.com/DKrecruit Drew K.

    Great post.  It’s all about relationship management, efficiency and buy-in that everyone in your organization is a recruiter.  Make sure you provide resources to support your recruiter and allow them to be a rock star relationship manager who has the time to pipeline and build relationships.  You wouldn’t have your best sales guy/closer cold calling and updating a database all day – you need them out in front of prospects closing business – same concept.

  • http://www.sneakerheadVC.com/ phineasb

    For companies that take the leap and engage or hire a recruiter, I
    completely agree. But also, for those that choose to manage the process
    themselves, it is critical that everyone is a recruiter and that the
    process is candidate centric.

  • Anonymous

    This is a great article.  One thing that I think was missed is how do you extend your evangelists beyond your current team to cover more ground?  Any thoughts there? Thanks!

  • http://www.sneakerheadVC.com/ phineasb

    I think asking your employees to activate their networks is a great first step. I also think local PR is a great way to get people thinking about your business as a great place to work and can help with some of the selling that start ups need to do in order to attract the best talent.

    Phineas Barnes
    Principal, First Round Capital
    phin@firstround.com | @phineasb | sneakerheadvc

  • Anonymous

     Phineas, thanks for the reply.  I really like the PR idea.  We just signed Anheuser Busch as a client.  I think the fun factor of working with a beer brand would be newsworthy and helpful in recruiting.  What do you think? How do I frame the conversation?
    Cordell Giesen
    Co-founder, Zambig.com
    cordell@zambig.com |@cordellmediaace |zambig

  • vic mahillon

    I really like your first point that saying that when you are recruiting, it’s selling, not buying. There is a massive difference when I’m proactively recruiting people on Linkedin versus speaking to an inbound candidate who applied through our OpenView careers page. When you recruit someone, there is no certainty that the offer will be accepted when it’s made. However, when you offer the job to someone who applied on their own, it’s more than likely it will be accepted. Strangely, not many people differentiate recruiting from hiring when in fact they are two very different animals! Great post – keep them coming!