A Guide to the Essentials of Startup Recruiting

“We’ve established our company, we’ve started an upswing in growth, time to hire, but it’s hard to find, sign, and onboard talent.” Is this something that you’re familiar with at your startup? This is a critical issue for any small company beginning to expand staff to hire top talent? And it can be the difference between success and failure.

Even established companies are having problems with hiring. It’s currently a candidate’s market, which is fantastic if you’re looking for a job but challenging if you’re hiring. According toAlexander Acosta , US Secretary of Labor, “Never before have we had an economy where the number of jobs exceeds the number of job seekers.”

As a growing startup, you need to be prepared to battle companies big and small for talent. In fact, according to Dr. John Sullivan , HR thought-leader, “The competition for talent is so high these days that if you don’t hire extremely fast, quality candidates who apply at your firm will be gone within days because they have accepted another offer from a firm that acted faster.”

‍If you’re interested in learning how to evolve your hiring process for your startup company, keep reading for some helpful tips.

Recruiting – an Evolving Discipline

What’s the answer, then? To prepare for that hiring battle, you need solid execution on all phases of your recruiting process to find and keep great employees. And to do that, you need to embrace industry best practices and technologies across all recruiting disciplines to ensure success.

Hiring and retention isn’t a simple process. Here is a list of recruiting specialties that a startup organization needs to become proficient at:

• Sourcing – where do you quickly find candidates that meet the job requirements
• Messaging – how do you get qualified candidates interested in your job description 
• Nurturing – intelligent ways to get qualified candidates to apply
• Interview process – does the candidate have the right skills and do they “fit” with the team
• Skills Assessment – can they do what they say they can
• Background Checks – are they who they say they are
• Compensation/Closing – is your offer competitive enough to close the deal
• Employee Engagement – what is your plan for onboarding successfully
• Retention – how can you prevent turnover in this competitive job market 

There are proven techniques and emerging tools that you can leverage within each discipline to improve your hiring performance. As an example, look at interviewing. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report, five techniques have come on the scene to improve the classic interviewing model:

1. Online soft skills assessments measure traits like teamwork and curiosity and give candidates a more holistic picture in the early stages.
2. Job auditions, where companies pay candidates to do real work so that they can observe skills in action.
3. Casual interviews typically take place over a meal and offer a unique look into a candidate’s character.
4. Virtual reality, in which companies immerse candidates in simulated 3D environments to test their skills standardized.
5. Video interviews can be recorded or live and help by tapping a broader talent pool in less time.

Are these relevant or even possible in your startup environment? Maybe not all, but you should at least consider some of them. Instead of just doing phone screens, for example, perhaps you could do a skills assessment or job tryout.

There’s hiring fast, and there is hiring the right person. It’s a balance, and the more you can do to drive both sides of the equation, the more successful your company will be.

Artificial Intelligence and Recruiting

Interestingly, in the LinkedIn report, one of the critical recruiting trends is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on recruiting. When asked where AI is most helpful in recruiting, the highest response was in sourcing candidates at 58%.

Recruiter.com’s AI recruiting software enables recruiters to find and engage a vast pool of high-value candidates quickly and efficiently by applying AI techniques to the traditionally manual process.

For example, this recruiting solution can free up your recruiter’s sourcing time. Some research has found that one-third of a recruiter’s week is spent just sourcing candidates, but recruiters will also need to spend time interviewing, screening, and facilitating the job acceptance process.

Recruiter.com’s tool can help you free up that time by automating the sourcing process. Once you find a list of candidates that you think would be a great fit, you can also use our tool to send out optimized and automated emails so that recruiters can get back to doing what they love: connecting with candidates.

Enhance Your Startup Recruitment Efforts

Talent acquisition can be the critical driving factor for success in a startup’s growth. But it’s not business as usual on your recruiting team. A startup needs to embrace the latest tools and technologies to drive its recruiting processes.

There has never been a tighter job market for employers, and time is of the essence. Startups must prepare for maximum effort to meet their hiring goals. Recruiter.com will continue to provide information in our upcoming posts that focus on this critical aspect of a startup’s life.

In future posts, we will dive deeper into each of the recruiting disciplines and provide some insights from our Recruiter.com experience, highlight key industry learnings and best practices, identify innovative new technologies coming to bear on recruiting, and point to online resources that will help startups meet today’s hiring challenges.

Whether you need to hire a startup recruiter, find someone to write your job descriptions to make your company stand out, or for someone to hire technical talent or freelance employees, we can help.

Contact us today to see which recruitment strategy solution will be the best option for you.

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