Fail to prepare and prepare to fail. Wise words from many a school teacher back in the day as their go-to mantra leading up to exams. But somehow it’s stuck, and for very good reason – in this case, we’re talking about how to prepare your scaleup for hiring success. When it comes to building a team for your scaleup – the preparation piece really is key.
TLDR: If your scaleup is going through, or will be going through a rapid period of growth, it’s important to lay the right foundations for hiring success. In this article, we look at ways you can prepare for hiring success if you’re looking to grow your teams, what you need, what you don’t, and what to focus on.
Ask the right questions (and lots of them!)
Let’s say you’ve secured a VC investor. Congrats! Your next round of funding is on the horizon. This is an exciting and motivating time for your business and it can be tempting to charge full steam ahead into bringing people onboard – hire 20 people for Product & Tech, 10 for Commercial, and throw some VPs in there too. Go, go, go!
But pause for a moment, and take a deep breath.
Before you even begin to start hiring, you need to engage in a certain level of workforce planning to understand who you need, when you need them, timelines for the project and have a fundamental understanding of what you do and don’t need skills-wise. Establishing a solid workforce planning process is key.
Get more guidance on how to do effective workforce planning in this related article:
The Workforce Planning Process: How To Get Ahead Of Recruitment Demand, The Sensible Way.
Key questions to ask yourself:
- What are your short, and long-term goals for your business? Have these been established clearly and have you baked in contingency plans?
- What should the next 6 months look like for your company?
- How quickly do you actually need to scale? Is this a realistic and achievable timeline? Can you keep BAU operations going while using flexible resources to hit your headcount goals?
- Is your hiring process robust enough to achieve this without breaking? Do you have the right tech and tools in place? Enough hiring managers? Can you avoid making costly miss-hires along the way?
- What talent do you actually need? And where do you have gaps? What skills or competencies are you currently missing from your teams?
- What risks are involved in your plan? What could pose potential problems along the way?
Remember, hiring is costly
We can all agree that hiring requires a significant amount of time, investment and resources to do it well.
According to Rebecca Price, Partner at VC firm, Primary, early-stage founders should spend at least one-third of their time networking, sourcing, interviewing and closing candidates – that’s a significant portion of your precious time.
Don’t rush into it.
Take the time to set the right foundations, put a solid headcount plan in place, a clear roadmap of how you will achieve your goals and who will be supporting you in getting there. Whether that’s an external hiring resource like an embedded talent partner, a recruitment agency or you decide to bring somebody in-house immediately to establish, or bolster your in-house TA team.
Head over to this related article for more considerations when scaling your startup including the 4 basics you need to have in place from the offset.
Create a place where people want to work
It’s not me, it’s you…
This is something nobody wants to hear. Least of all from that brilliant Machine Learning Engineer you were hoping to nab from the super successful scaleup that’s dominating the AI space. Gutted. Especially if you’ve put time, thought and planning into your outreach to them.
The more you make your organisation the candidate’s choice – a desirable place to work – the better your conversations become at the top of the hiring funnel. And this begins with your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and Employer Brand.
Attracting and keeping top talent with a strong EVP
As a startup, you may not be a well-known name (yet), so you’re competing against more recognised and established companies for top talent. You need to articulate what your organisation offers, what makes you unique and makes it the kind of place talented people want to join to support you on your mission.
Whether that’s your company values, focus on workplace learning and development (L&D), diversity hiring strategies, employee growth opportunities, your approach to wellness and wellbeing or compensation and benefits. Creating an EVP that you stick to and communicate clearly both internally, and externally, will reinforce your reputation and go a long way to making sure your employees (and new prospects!) are thoroughly engaged.
No matter what, keep it authentic. And no – ping pong tables, free Friday lunches and coffee vouchers don’t cut it.
Here’s more on employee engagement – find out why listening to your people is key to attracting, and holding on to great talent.
Investing in those who can get you where you want to be
Otherwise known as your critical, senior layer hires. Talented individuals who have been there and done it – folks that have the key skills and expertise to execute hiring plans at the speed you need to scale and can help you build and lead your teams to achieve your growth goals.
Often it can be tempting to promote a founding team member to your VP or ‘Heads Of’ layer – because they were there from the beginning – the good old days if you like. Consider this carefully, they may not be the right person for that role.
As Michail Katkoff, CEO & Co-Founder of Savage Games Studios said;
Don’t give away titles like candy!
🎧 Catch up on that episode of the Scede talent acquisition podcast, Scaling So Far to hear more of Michail’s growth insights from Savage Games Studios.
Dedicate time and headspace
It’s important to dedicate time to recruitment. Not just for those that are sourcing and reaching out to candidates, but for those that you’re expecting to be part of the interview process as well.
If your hiring manager is your Head of Engineering, have you given them allocated time to invest in building their team? Have you baked this into their capacity planning?
Doing so will not only show that hiring is a priority but it will avoid them seeing it as an “extra” task, facing potential burnout or interviewer fatigue.
Focus on an efficient hiring process
Efficiencies can certainly be gained across the hiring process too. Think about what tools you can implement to support recruitment. How your interview processes could be streamlined and more effective. Time-block the diaries of those that you know you will need to get involved. Set service-level agreements (SLA) on feedback time from hiring managers, and responses to candidates.
Gathering data is probably the most powerful tool to have under your belt for monitoring your performance and streamlining processes.
Spend as much time identifying areas for continuous improvement in your recruitment function as you would your customer-facing product or commercial function. It’ll work wonders.
It did for us here at Scede when we managed to increase the number of tech hires we made by 50%.
Key takeaway
You can’t be prepared for everything, we get that. Just like everything else, recruiting won’t always run smoothly – and that’s okay. But you need to be ready to adapt to and learn from any speed bumps along the way.
Be as agile as possible and empower your team to be agile too – hiring is a solid mix of science and art. It’s the art that all too often gets left behind.
If you’re open to a more flexible way of adding recruiting capability and capacity to your in-house team, as embedded talent partners here at Scede, we could offer you the support you need as you grow your teams.