Recruiting for Rapid Growth: How to Scale Your Workforce Along With Your Company
Growing your company is an exciting process — but it doesn’t come without its challenges. For one thing, you’ll need to make sure your recruiting tactics are up to par to get the right team in place as you scale your operations.
The corporate recruiting landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years due to low unemployment, increasing interest in flexible and remote work arrangements, and the rise of the gig economy. All of these trends have made it more difficult for employers to fill full-time roles and staff growing teams with the best candidates.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to scale your workforce along with your organization. Follow these tips for a rapid recruitment strategy that works, even in a tight talent market :
1. Identify Your Employee Value Proposition
Your employee value proposition (EVP) communicates both the benefits you offer to your employees and the overarching reasons why people are excited to work for your company. Your EVP should cover both tangible benefits — like paid time off or a strong insurance package — and more intangible rewards, such as a great office culture or meaningful work.
Your EVP will become increasingly important as you scale your organization. It takes a lot to attract top candidates, and the more employees you need, the fiercer the competition can be. Recent research from BetterUp found that 90 percent of workers would be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for meaningful work, so having an EVP that conveys a strong mission will give you a leg up.
Take some time to really hone your brand, clarify what you stand for, and build a strong company culture that will support your organization’s continued growth. Having a solid internal compass will guide your hiring decisions and ensure your company doesn’t lose its core values as it grows — meaning your EVP will stay relevant for years to come.
2. Adapt Your Interview Process for Volume
As you start to interview more and more candidates, you’ll need a sustainable and efficient process in place to manage the talent flow. You simply can’t afford to reinvent the wheel with every interaction.
Instead, systematize as much as you reasonably can. Standardize interview questions and processes for every role you need to fill. Not that you shouldn’t allow for any spontaneity in interviews, but asking all of your candidates similar questions will make it easier to evaluate applicants objectively, leading to better hiring decisions in less time.
As you make these changes, be sure all of your recruiters and hiring managers are on the same page about what the interview process will look like. And keep your EVP in mind throughout: Efficiency matters, but not at the expense of the candidate experience. You want candidates to walk away from the hiring process with a positive impression of your company, even if they aren’t hired.
For more expert recruiting insights, check out the latest issue of Recruiter.com Magazine:
3. Invest in Tech
Technology will play a vital role in building a sustainable, efficient, scalable recruiting process. The key is to automate workflows as much as possible to optimize your recruiting team’s capabilities. If you aren’t already, start using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, and applicant tracking system (ATS), and/or other tools to more easily engage and track promising candidates as they move through your pipeline.
Technology will also be key to streamlining your interviews. Make sure you have the right tools in place — like video conferencing software — to make scheduling and conducting early interviews easy. Your goal should be to collect as much relevant information about a candidate as possible before committing time and resources to in-person interviews.
4. Nail the Onboarding
While you may end up building a successful recruiting model that scales with your company, your effort won’t be worth much if you aren’t retaining those hires and setting them up for success within your organization. Just as important as updating your hiring strategy is creating an effective onboarding process that gets new hires settled into their positions.
Onboarding is especially critical at a growing company, as you’ll want every new employee to feel like a valued addition to the team. Here are a few simple but powerful steps you can take to make sure new hires are integrated into the culture and feeling supported from day one:
• Send a welcome letter to each new hire in advance of their first day. Include any important information they’ll need to know to get started.
• Prepare a welcome gift, perhaps some branded swag, for the employee’s first day.
• Set up meetings to introduce the new hire to the people they will be working closely with.
• Implement a buddy system so new employees will have a direct point of contact for any questions they may have about the organization.
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Expanding your team is a necessary part of scaling your company, but it isn’t an easy one. Rapid growth can disrupt the culture you’ve so carefully built, and it can strain employee relationships as you add new layers of management. Existing employees may feel threatened by changes to their roles or your new reporting structure.
But you can’t just refuse to recruit at the pace needed to sustain your growth. By keeping these four tips in mind, you may be able to circumvent some of the issues that often arise when scaling your workforce, allowing you to meet your rapidly changing needs with minimal setbacks.
Matt Shealy is the president of ChamberofCommerce.com.