This is the seventh and final post in a seven-part series entitled "The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations" covering some subtle tactics for how to use social media to recruit candidates. You can read the previous posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Secret #7: Make recruiting priority #1. From the people we’ve talked to it’s very clear, all of them view recruiting as Job #1. Their CEOs spend significant amounts of time recruiting. They invest in the right tools and make sure their teams are fully staffed for the challenge in front of them. Recruiting high-quality candidates is not a “nice to have”. It’s an absolute must have.
Don't believe us? The late Steve Jobs consistently placed a premium on recruiting. To those who suggest they don't have time to recruit, Jobs offered the following gem:
I disagree totally. I think it’s the most important job. Assume you’re by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You’d take a lot of time finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great?
And the Silicon Valley legend, Vinod Khosla, also suggests that one of the most important aspects of building a startup is finding the right team.
I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not let it get distorted by what pundits and experts tell you. But the second most important thing is finding the right team, and that’s really, really hard, because people tend to look for people around them…You know, I was relentless… really spent well over 50% of my time recruiting, and I encourage all entrepreneurs to try and do that.
In our experience that more than anything separates the winners from the losers. Which side is your organization on? Our hope is that increasingly you’re in the former camp and we’re working tirelessly on our end to help in any way that we can.
And to that extent, we’d love to hear how we can help you even more. Send us an email at contact@entelo.com and tell us what you want to see, be it improvements to Entelo, subjects you’d like to see us write about, borrowing one of our engineers to your team for a day or two...OK, we can’tdo that last one but we hope to do whatever else we can to help you build an incredible team. :)
