The kung-fu of startup hiring (3 of 7): Planning your hiring channels.
You already know who it is that you want to hire, why you are hiring them, what skills they need to have, and by when you should hire them. That’s awesome, now you need to draft up a game plan of how you’re going to find this person.
If someone is coming to work at your company, there are many paths that they can take. And it’s up to you to find the right balance between those paths in order to get the best results.
More doesn’t always mean better.
Common sense would tell you that when you’re searching for a perfect candidate, you’d want to get as many applications possible, so that you can then select from that pool of candidates and confidently know that you’ve chosen the right one. Well, common sense is wrong (most of the time). In most cases, the name of the game is quality, and not quantity, so your main objective is to strike a delicate balance between the volume of applicants, and their quality.
Whether we like it or not, hiring is a big resource drain for your organisation. If you’re focusing on hiring, that’s time that could be spent elsewhere, and every time you spend 30 minutes interviewing a wrong candidate, that’s half an hour you’ll never get back.
So, your first filter will be drafting up a great job description that is exciting enough to get people to knock at your door, but also descriptive enough that it can ensure that it is the right people that do the knocking. The second filter will also be the channels that you use. Each channel will bring you different levels of volume and quality, and some are finite whilst others aren’t, so you should be constantly evaluating results and adjusting your strategy as you go along.
Getting the word out there.
There are many ways to let the world know that you’re recruiting. All with their advantages and disadvantages. Some will work better than others, at different times and for different people. It’s up to you to find the right cocktail for your particular situation.
1. A careers section on your website
Usually the first place people start with tends to be their own website. If someone is already browsing through, interested in your product or service, they might be good candidates to come work with you, plus, it’s also the channel over which you have greatest control over, and it’s free — which is always great news for a startup.
Just like a good job description, a good careers section on a website should achieve a couple of things: it should let people know what it takes in order to work at your company, and it should also let people know why they would want to work at your company. Your culture should shine through, and that should be both a draw and a filter. Not everyone will fit in with your company culture. Not everyone should, and that’s ok.
There are many examples of great career sections out there on the web, but I’ll leave you some of my personal favourites:
Pinterest does an amazing job of showcasing their company culture right on that page, and it gives candidates a great idea of what they can expect once they join.
Dropbox also has a great careers page, where they are able to showcase the different areas of their business, with relevant content for each of those areas.
Spotify is another great example of how to let your culture shine through from the moment you open the page. Adding current employees and their favourite songs is a nice touch.
This will probably be a channel that everyone will always go for, and it offers you maximum control at an affordable cost, but its reach is always limited to a subset of people who are visiting your website, so the amount of visibility will always be limited.
2. Social networks
This one depends on what kind of candidate you’re looking for and whether or not he’s likely to be hanging around these parts. There have already been some very key and important hires done over social media (example below):
This was the way that UBER’s founder and CEO hired Ryan Graves, his first employee and UBER’s Global Head of Operations.
Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or get creative on Pinterest. Depending on the type of candidate and your personal reach on these networks, this might be a great (low cost) way to find the ideal person.
You can also have your team share the opening(s) through their personal networks, to ensure that you’re getting maximum reach possible.
3. Your current team
Oftentimes, your own team will be the absolute best source for getting great candidates into your pipeline. Reasons are as follows:
a) Their friends will tend to be similar to them in terms of culture and values.
b) These people already know the company and a recommendation from them will be worth a lot more.
c) If an employee joins from a referral, they will immediately have a support structure in place to make their transition easier.
d) Your employees will be happy to work with people that they like, and the new joiners as well.
Many companies go as far as to institute a bonus fee to be given out for any successful referrals, and honestly I think this is definitely a good way to do it if you can. Usually these are paid out once the referral candidate has been the company for a certain amount of time (such as 3 months), which aligns the company’s expectations with the referrer and the referee.
The drawback of this channel? Your current employees’ networks are not endless, which means that the potential value you can extract from here will always be limited.
It also introduces the added layer of complexity of dealing with peoples’ expectations. Some employees might not appreciate the fact that they referred their dear friend, but that he or she ended up not being hired, so you’ll have to ensure that you’re keeping the process as transparent as possible.
4. Hiring agencies
Whether or not you’ll need (or benefit) to use a hiring agency depends largely on a couple of factors: is it difficult is it to hire a person like this; do you have the available time to do it yourself; do you have a budget allocated for this hire; is it urgent to hire someone for this position;
If you’ve answered “Yes” to one or more of the points above, then perhaps it might be a good idea to use a hiring agency. There are many out there, and although it might seem like they’re all the same, one is not like the others. The first thing you should do before picking one would be asking for referrals within your network for any good agencies with whom your peers have worked with and had good results.
Don’t forget that these guys and gals will be representing your company out there on the job market, so be careful of whom you choose. There’s also the factors of which sector do they specialise in, how expensive are they, etc.
Most of these companies operate in a model where you’ll have to pay a percentage based fee on the yearly salary of the new hire, and some charge you a finding fee on top of that. So look for agencies that work on a success fee, or the ones that offer you a money back guarantee. They should all offer you a guarantee on a successful hire, meaning that in case the new hire leaves within the first months, you’ll get the commission you paid back.
If you do choose to work with a good hiring agency, remember that they won’t know your business and your needs as well as you do, so being able to give them adequate direction and guidance as to which kind of profile you’re looking for will be largely responsible for their success (or lack thereof). But if you were able to do your homework well (as detailed in my previous posts) then you should be fine.
5. Job portals
Job portals are usually great when it comes to quantity but not always good in terms of quality. If you are hiring for several positions or need to do it very quickly, then this can be a good channel to use. I would however advise you to find a good way to be able to filter through the bad candidates in a quick and easy manner, so that you don’t become buried in applications and end up missing out on great people.
A good way on how you can do this for instance is to introduce a challenge or a question into your application that can help you weed through the lower quality applicants and get to the gold quickly.
We were having an issue with quality here at Hole19 for instance when hiring senior swift developers, so we created a fun coding challenge that can immediately tell us if the candidate is really interested in the job (and likely to invest a little time into his or her application), if his skills match what he says in his CV and online profiles, and most importantly, how he codes.
Plus, you’ll also get to benefit from a little bit of the IKEA effect, as candidates are likely to be more deeply engaged with your company and application process now that they’ve gotten the chance to earn it and work for it.
6. Farming for candidates
Farming basically means you go out there and try to handpick potential candidates yourself.
This one is the most time-consuming way, but it is also the one that is likely to yield the best results, because no one knows what you’re looking for as well as you do, and no one knows the company as well as you do.
If you have some time to invest in your hands, or if you feel that none of the other channels have been bringing you the results that you need, then direct farming might just be the solution for you.
Farming can be done through various ways, and it’s up to you to be creative about it. You can do it through the web on websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, etc.. You can also look for relevant contribution on blogs, forums or code-repos such as Github or Bitbucket You can find people by attending (or even organising) industry events such as hackathons or conferences. The possibilities here are endless, and they also depend on how much time you can devote to something like this.
There are many other channels out there that you can use, but these are probably the main ones. Your hiring strategy will most likely be a mix of the above, and it will require some tweaking along the way, so as always, the best thing to do is to try different things, measure and improve as and when you can.
Now you should be able to find the mix of channels that will help you hire your next colleague. Next week, I’ll be writing about how you maximise your chances of attracting great talent passively.
Until then, questions and suggestions are more than welcome, just let me know in the comments or shoot me an email to gil@gilbelford.com.
