This post has been prompted by one of 3 founders of a b2b startup, well funded and just finalizing series A funding.
Snapshot:
15 employees, 3 founders, 1 technical. Cross functional teams in sales, engineering, ops.
Currently using a database that one of the funding VC’s provided and still using their network. They all want to keep their hands in recruiting but want to focus on improving by introducing metrics into their recruiting, finding the best sources, ways to find each pipeline of candidate. They do not want to offshore development or any other functions.
The technical co-founders question was “when is the right time for us to hire a technical recruiter?”
I posed the question back – when was it the right time for you to hire your lead developer? As soon as he no longer had time to code and it affected development of their product.
I use the same terms back when discussing when and if to hire a recruiter. When you and your team can no longer manage on top of your workload and when it is hindering growth of your company and product.
A scattered recruiting approach that uses your network and has resumes stored in everyones email and personal folders, using google docs to track (if that!) – will get you so far, then you will fall behind, recruiting will take months and months rather than weeks.
Yes now is the time to hire a technical recruiter.
So where do you go to hire a tech recruiter
1) ask your network
2) ask your funding VC’s if they can recommend anyone they have worked with
3) you could put an ad out on craigslist, indeed, monster, linkedin. you are likely to get a huge response to your posting
How do you know if they are any good
1) get a track record, look for references and other startups the recruiter has worked at
2) ask for stats, fill ratio, how long it took them to ramp up and whether it was in the time frame
3) ask them about requirements gathering and working with the internal team – so they have the ability to not only recruit, but to improve on processes, assess recruiting software and tools and be able to suggest the best ROI tools for your company
4) do they have a network of candidates
5) can they build up candidate pipelines.
6) what other abilities do they have on top of heads down recruiting. As a start up as much as you’d like a developer to wear multiple hats, you’ll want a recruiter who can do the same. Recruit for non tech positions, be able to work in a leadership capacity and provide push back to management so that they get the job done.
Hiring an unqualified recruiter will be a total waste of money and they won’t know or be able to improve
My biggest piece of advise is take some time here. Hire the best, even if its on contract – most independent recruiters will totally accept a contract or contract to hire position.
The key here is you want an expert as your first lead recruiter, no different to hiring your first lead developer. After key processes, tools and best practices are put in place you can go on to hire more junior recruiters to do a lot of the grunt work.
This question sparked me to do some research to see if there are actually any resources or agencies where you could hire a technical recruiter – as i suspected there aren’t any, which surprised me.
For me hiring a tech recruiter or salesperson are probably the easiest jobs i could fill, so why am i not connecting the two, would it be useful for startups to be able to go and hire a technical recruiter from a very reliable resource where they already come with the tools, processes, and software they need to do the job from day one. This was a great idea for the company i mentioned above. His concern is that he didn’t know whether the position would be fulltime, he thought he needed to hire 15 employees in 8 months but what if they wanted to stop at 5 then what. I suggested getting in a contract recruiter, and i’ve suggested doing the recruitment analysis, proposing tools and software, hiring the tech recruiter and putting them onsite for a contract length with weekly updates. With a small add-on, I offered him use of the recruiting software licenses that I buy yearly – linkedin recruiter is under $10K thats a lot to shell out if you don’t know you’ll have someone using it all year round, so I thought why don’t I get extra licences from my own subscriptions and mitigate the costs. In essence you get a less senior recruiter, for a contracted time, you don’t have to fork out $20-30K on recruiting software and you can rapidly hire as you go into series A. The recruiter is the execution piece. It turned out to be a highly cost effective solution.
If you have any suggestions or ideas please post. I’m interested in feedback – this may be a great stop gap for many startups in the same situation.
Till next time. Hope you all had a glorious memorial day weekend, I took time off after a very long time and spend the weekend on my partners boat, not sure i’m back in the swing of things today – but getting there!
rubybhattacharya 