Part 1: Buying Time or Buying Skills?
As a founder, you recruit to get your company closer to your ultimate ambition.
Hence before launching any recruitment, our founders start by working on their 18-month business plan and answer the question: “How are we going to get the company closer to that 18-month picture?” regarding 3 axes: Product, Go-to-market and Headquarter.
Then they reverse engineer their plan to determine whether they need to buy some time and/or to buy some skills to achieve their 18-month business plan.
1/ BUYING TIME: “The company as a whole already knows how to do what the vacant position is about. You just need to add extra hours of work to your team capacity”.
2/ BUYING SKILLS: “Nobody in the company knows how to do that. We need to fill this lack of skills to pursue the plan”.
Sorting your recruitments planned for the next 18 months can look like this:
How to orchestrate TIME and SKILLS recruitments?
The decision to launch a TIME recruitment is usually a response to a current operational [dysfunctioning/slowdown]:
- ”We are overwhelmed by customer support requests.”
- “Our product roadmap is clear & the tech team is structured, we just need more software engineers.”
- “We have set up a lead generation machine, we now need more Account Executives to close them.”
- …
The great thing about TIME hirings is that they usually take less time and are less likely to fail as:
- you already know what the job is about
- you already know what skills and personalities you look for
- you probably have several potential candidates in your close network
- you already know how to assess them
Then you can handle them progressively. Of course, it’s better to anticipate them yet we know founders need to focus on the uppercut they are throwing rather than think about the right hit they might take in 20 seconds (excuse the boxing metaphor, writing about golf did not sound as right 😉).
SKILLS hirings on the other hand are more strategic and usually take more time:
- You might not know what you don’t know. You often become aware of the necessity of hiring a new skillset in the company several months after this skillset started to be critical.
- Your network is often composed of people whose skillsets are closed to yours so sourcing candidates for a SKILLS hiring usually takes more time
- Bringing a new skillset to the company is usually a strategic move so we tend to maximize benchmarking among candidates leading to longer recruitment processes.
- Once the recruitment is made, it usually takes longer to confirm the candidate is the right person since you are not used to evaluate such skills.
As your SKILLS hirings take more time, you have very little margin for recruitment mistakes. Recruitment mistakes cost at the very least 6 months (awareness of the misfit, termination, new recruitment process) which usually represent ~25% of your cash runway (a fundraising round is usually designed to give a 24-month wash runway to the startup). Stating that we have no margin for recruitment mistakes means that we need to anticipate and prepare those hirings.
The 5 following chapters aim at helping you maximize your SKILLS hiring success rate.
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Read next:
>> part 2: Building your 18-month Organization Chart Target <<
