How to ensure your Recruiting Department keeps up
Ok. Now that we covered all of the roles involved in recruiting – let’s dive into a few scenarios to understand how you might want to build out your team. A great recruiting function isn’t built in a day. It usually evolves over time. So smart companies need to understand where they fall on the spectrum and plan accordingly.
SCENARIO #1: You need to make a couple of hires, but you are not really sure of what or when.
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What do you need? What can you pay? How challenging of a role is it?
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For a small company that needs to make one to two hires, there’s no simple solution. Everyone needs to roll up their sleeves and lend a hand.
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First, understand what you need and what you can afford. For example, looking for a CTO/Software Engineer to build out your app but don’t have any money to pay a competitive salary? Good luck. Not impossible, but be ready to give up a bunch of equity.
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Be realistic. Hit up your networks. Hop on LinkedIn. Ask your board/investors for help. Get the word out.
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If you’ve got more time than money, be ready in some cases to look for three-plus months. Have more money and less time? Consider using a recruiter that specializes in whatever you need to hire. It won’t be cheap (think 20 to 30 percent of starting salary), but you can see a bunch of candidates quickly.
SCENARIO #2: You can confidently say you need to hire ten plus people over the next 6 to 12 months.
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Same drill, scope out the actual needs, who is going to be involved, how you are going to vet them, and who’s going to find and screen them. Are these roles that are hard to fill (sales or engineers), or will you get a solid flow of candidates through employee referrals and people applying online?
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The options are to do it yourself (all hands on deck), utilize search firms, or potentially hire someone to do HR / Recruiting.
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If you go the third route, be thoughtful about what you need from that person. The common route is to hire an HR/Recruiter or Office Support/Recruiter. That can work in the short term, but understand that all of those roles are different.
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Finding someone that is an expert in HR and Recruiting is nearly impossible. Even if they are, most likely, they’ll want to gravitate towards one or the other over time.
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If the person is great at HR (but doesn’t have a lot of recruiting experience), you are most likely going to have to still rely heavily on hiring managers and/or external recruiters to find candidates.
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If you hire a great recruiter, he or she most likely knows next to nothing about HR (and can open you up to risk around employment law, benefits, and overall compliance).
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And even if you hire someone, odds are he or she will need external and internal help.
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SCENARIO #3: You need to hire 25 plus people over the next 6 to 12 months.
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Okay, now you really need a plan. At this point, you’ve got some options, but you need to understand what you want out of your talent acquisition function. Have you hired a bunch of people before? Are you any good at it (be honest)? If not, you need some help defining your hiring process (Strategy).
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You definitely need someone dedicated to recruiting, whether it’s an internal employee (internal recruiter) or an external consultant. That external consultant can be one person or an outsourced solution.
SCENARIO #4: You need to hire 50 to 100 plus people over the next 6 to 12 months
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By now, you should know one person can’t handle this. You most likely have already started building your internal team, and you now have a couple of things to think about…
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Is it working?
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Is this just a hiring surge or something that will continue (or grow over the next 18 to 24 months)?
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If the growth feels like it isn’t going to stop, you need to reevaluate your plan.
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Do you have the right TA/Recruiting leader in place?
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How is the team structured?
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What is your budget? You will spend a lot (time and money) to build something that works. You may still need to rely on external partners.
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You can outsource the whole thing if the hiring surge is going to end after a period of time (why build something that will go unused or need to be torn apart in a year) or if you don’t have time to build it right internally?
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Or you can build a great team.
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Hiring a Head of Recruiting (salary = 120 to 180k +), appoint one recruiter specializing in a specific function (sales, tech, etc.) for every 20 to 30 hires you to need to make.
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Augment those recruiters with a sourcer and/or scheduler to let them focus on pure recruiting.
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If you have a great team but still need some extra bandwidth short term, consider bringing on a Contract Recruiter, Sourcer, or Coordinator to help you get over the hump (our On-Demand Recruiting offering).
With all of that, you still may need to carve out some roles to give to search firms. The war for talent is that competitive. And expensive.
Remember, there are no silver bullets or Swiss army knives when it comes to hiring. Recruiting is hard. It has become an arms race. If you aren’t investing significant resources in your efforts to bring in top talent, your company is going to struggle to keep up.
Develop a plan. Hire great people to execute the plan. And bring in partners to fill in the gaps.
About the author: Matt Massucci is the founder and managing partner of Hirewell, a Chicago-based Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Solutions Provider.
