Although your young company may have an exciting product, great investors, and a few brilliant team members, recruiting in the early stages of a startup can be extremely difficult. In this post, our Director of Customer Development, Vivek, explains some common misconceptions about early recruiting.
The perfect candidates will find you
You just launched your product and got a good amount of press, so great candidates should come flocking to you, right? Unfortunately it's not that simple. You may get some inbound traffic, especially if it's through your network, but realize that there are hundreds of great startups that are all vying for the best talent. Being early-stage with X amount of funding isn't enough anymore. The best talent rarely apply for positions- they need to be courted (42Floors had a great blog post about this recently: Consider this a job offer to work at 42Floors). You need to have:
- A clear value proposition for why you and a candidate are a great match
- The willingness to hustle and find the best people however you possibly can
- Ability to communicate the exciting challenges you're seeking to solve and articulate your vision for how you and said candidate will be able to make a huge impact
You have to mass-message people to get enough candidates in your pipeline
I've heard this from many recruiters, and it makes sense why they do this. Everyone wants the absolute best talent, but not everyone will be able to succeed, so many resort to mass messaging. Our founder, Jon Bischke, writes a great answer about how this feature with Linkedin's InMails had unfortunate side effects:LinkedIn: Why are LinkedIn inmail response rates low?
But there's two options if you're not getting enough people into the pipeline:
- Increase volume to compensate for low response rates: While this can work in the short term, if everyone is doing this (and there are many who are), we arrive at a scenario where response rates get driven down further and further, hurting the entire community, recruiters and engineers alike.
- Increase your response rates: Do the legwork upfront and do your due diligence on candidates at the top of the funnel. There's little excuse anymore as many candidates display much of their work online (via Linkedin, Github, Portfolios, etc.). Doing your research upfront allows you to specifically target the people you know are good fits, and when reaching out, the time you spent researching that person will show in your messaging. I've told many people this already, spending even a little extra time reading a candidate's blog post or taking a look at some of their work will go a long ways towards increasing your response rate. While reaching out to fewer candidates you'll be able to get just as many quality candidates, if not more, than with approach #1.
Another reason I strongly encourage option #2 for startups is that mass form emails can adversely affect your brand. You want to make sure you exude the right image for your company and sometimes that means rethinking your approach to finding the best people.
Recruiting is not as important as product, sales, etc.
How will you continue building a great product, increase revenues and spread your brand without hiring the right people to do so?
Recruiting is by far one of the most important aspects of growing a company. There's a reason why almost every successful Founder/CEO spends nearly half their time recruiting: you need to bring on the right people to help you realize your company's vision.
Do recruiting right, and it'll fuel all other aspects of your company to excel to the highest degree.
