Scaling Your Startup: When Hiring Becomes a Founder Problem
As a startup, you are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to recruiting. You need to hire the best people as fast as possible to grow your company. However, you don’t have an entire team of people to handle the recruiting for you. The founder of the company is typically the one who is also trying to run the company at the same time. So while the founder is trying to interview candidates and decide who to hire, the founder is also trying to fix bugs at midnight, deal with investors, etc. It is a challenging job. Large companies have huge teams of people to handle recruiting, and they also have huge internal mobility. As a founder, you are basically doing all of this by yourself.
Speed is your only moat. The product, the sales organization, and the engineers are among the elements that matter most to you as a founder, as these can help your organization expand as quickly as humanly possible. And, when that number starts to decline dramatically for you as a founder, it’s often because you’ve started to add a lot of processes in order to find more people. This is all for the purpose of adding even more processes just so that you can hire more people, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, at the end of the day, there are parts of the hiring process that are just inherently slow and manually time-consuming. And, these things are not going to scale well for you as a founder. That is where the hiring AI software for recruitment comes in.
The question is, how do you choose the best AI recruitment software solution for you and your growing organization?
The answer is to source candidates without hiring a recruiter, and screening those candidates for who would be worthwhile for your time as a founder.
Sourcing That Scales Without Recruiters
So while these hiring tools may not find 100% of all relevant candidates, they can certainly go through large amounts of relevant information to find sourcing leads that you may have otherwise missed. In addition to finding new leads, founders can also use automation for cold outreach. Rather than sending out a generic email such as “Hope you’re doing well,” and then listing out reasons why a candidate could be a good fit for the company, let an automated hiring tool help. For example, automated hiring tools can create personalized emails based on information found on a candidate’s LinkedIn or GitHub profile (i.e., an open-source contribution that the candidate worked on). These types of emails can achieve high reply rates due to the personalization involved.
Screening That Saves the Founder’s Time
Instead of filtering through resume after resume of under-qualified candidates, hiring software will allow you to sift through resumes and rank candidates by how well they fit core competencies of a job. Additionally, it will summarize past work of job applicants for you to more easily get a feel for what kind of work they can do.
Pipeline Visibility for Distributed Teams
As your startup grows and hires more people, it can become very difficult to manage recruiting as a founder. This is especially true when you have multiple people at the company hiring for similar roles. In order to keep a handle on things, it’s very important to bring your recruiting under control with a centralized pipeline. This will prevent your CTO from interviewing the same candidate for the same job that your head of sales is interviewing them for. It will also prevent you from forgetting to include a top candidate in your calendar and then proceeding to ghost them.
The Criteria That Actually Matter for Startups
Recruiting software is made for large companies. Most large companies have very complex recruiting processes. They have a lot of staff to service their many locations. And, they can afford to spend more of time and money to find the right people for their open jobs. Large companies can even afford to bring people in for many rounds of interviews. In addition to that, they can also keep them on for extended periods of time as the company deliberates.
Many startups are misusing big recruiting software. Their mistake is that they look at the feature list of a lot of recruiting software and think that the more features that a piece of software has, the better it must be for their small startup. But most recruiting software was not built for startups. In this post, we will examine four criteria that any startup must use when looking for the right recruiting software for their company.
Time-to-Value Over Feature Count
Demoing all the recruiting features of an enterprise-class recruiting tool only to realize it didn’t fit within your timing, is not time-to-value. For instance, Workday is an example of a tool that could take six months to implement, in addition to costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up. This would not align well with time-to-value if you were in a time crunch. A startup recruiting tool should instead be able to be set up to start adding value within hours to days of implementation. And, it should not require a full-time administrator. The tool should be able to be set up to work with the startup’s existing tech stack. Generally, this includes tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and an existing Applicant Tracking System (ATs) such as Lever or Ashby.
Pricing for Startups
Be aware that per-user pricing models are usually made for large enterprises with 100+ users. As a bootstrapped or early-stage company with a thin margin, be wary of high recruiting software pricing. Look for tools with transparent pricing models that scale with your usage. This could include information such as number of logins per month, number of job postings per month, etc. Some recruiting vendors will even list out startup-friendly pricing tiers (e.g. companies under $2M in funding) that have dramatically reduced pricing for you.
Integration With Current Technology Stack
Startups are made within the startup environment. It is common that no single technology stack exists at any point in time. Also, recruiting tools create additional workflows for daily tasks, which creates additional friction to what the founders can handle. The founder must verify that the recruiting tool will work within his current stack of tools.
Practical Tips for Getting Started
Run a Single-Role Sprint
A “single-role sprint” is a two-week-long implementation of a new recruiting tool. Specifically, its purpose is to see if it increases qualified pipeline for the hardest role to fill at a startup. A good role to start with for this kind of test is a Senior Product Marketing Manager role.
Involve Your Operators Early
The founder is the person to buy the software. For this reason, the founder should involve the early team members in the evaluation stage. Specifically, founders should designate those who will be using the software for sourcing to help evaluate various tools. The founder could assign one person to the tool setup so they can run a mock test (e.g., 2 weeks) on it. This evaluation should come with a set of criteria to measure success in the test.
The Real Question Is How You Use It
No AI-powered recruitment software will build your company for you. Your company is your culture. It’s also your story for candidates as to why working at your startup is the best idea they’ve ever had. Work to define your culture and story. These tools will merely accelerate your process for finding the best candidates to help you realize your vision for your startup.
The features are going to exist anyway, regardless of whether or not you choose to use them. So, you might as well find a way to make them as operational as the rest of the stack. If you’re currently reading from a bunch of Google Sheets, then it’s time to find a tool that you can integrate with the rest of your stack.
