Recruiting is difficult.
Good candidates are hard to find.
What does that tell you? Well, you can see it. Of all the candidates who applied to your job, very few are the ones you’re looking for and the ones who seem to fall flat in the interview.
I hear it all the time, and when I hear it, I feel a red flag. Have you heard it?
“Applying to our workplace.”
I mean, sure, you need to post some job postings to let searchers know you’re hiring, and you need to write the job anyway to get your team on the same page about what you’re all about. even looking, but that’s not how your next hire will come.
Don’t just put up a few jobs and wait for employee number four, six or eight to walk through the door.
In the words of Billy Madison, “If your dog gets lost, don’t look for an hour and then give up. Get your ass out there and find that damn dog!”
There is absolutely no substitute for a consistent outbound effort from your own team, or a recruiter. You can hire recruiters, that’s fine. You also need to actively search for the best candidate, including those who aren’t looking.
When I started a company fifteen years ago, I posted jobs everywhere, but the volume of interviewable candidates just wasn’t there. We seriously considered lowering our standards just so we could bring the first engineers into the company because we were behind.
That’s when I met Max Ventilla, who was working at Aardvark at the time. This was long before AltSchool started.
Max told me that he interviewed at least five candidates a day for every position he had open.
“Five candidates a day? How do you find five people worth interviewing?”
“Well let’s get to at least 50.”
“50???”
Boy, I was doing it wrong.
That made total sense. Of course, you would need to reach 50 people a day given response rates and basic qualifying questions that would eliminate people from different steps of the funnel. Any reasonable assumption of the funnel would require you to have a lot of people at the top.
I went back to the office and spent two whole weeks doing nothing but reaching out to people one-on-one, mostly to second-level connections. A lot went like this:
“Hi Bob, I noticed you’re connected to Jane. We’re hiring a front-end developer to be our fourth employee. Do you think Jane would be a good fit for this? The most important things to us are X, Y, and Z…”
Not only did we get a ton of warm introductions this way, but we also got some really heartfelt feedback.
“She’s great, but she would thrive in a company with more structure. I don’t think being employee number four is a good fit for her.”
“She’s great and we actually just talked about how she wanted to take on more of a leadership role, would that be available to her?”
Within two weeks we had our first hire.
One way you can make this search easier is by handing over the origin of the name to someone else. You can ask an administrative person, perhaps outsourced, to start collecting names and emails. Start with very generic searches like “Give me all front-end developers with 5-10 years of professional experience in New York” and then as you retrieve names and profiles, you can ask for refinements.
“Actually, just give me people who have had at least some small business experience.”
“Take out anyone who is working in an agency right now.”
“Take out anyone who’s been freelancing for more than three years because they probably won’t want to go back to a full-time commitment.”
You’d be surprised how few refinements it takes to get a pretty decent top-of-funnel list to begin with.
Another way to think about this exit effort is to determine who is the best at a given position. If you go out to 500 people in your network who are second-level connections to the type of person you want to hire and ask yourself, “Who is the best B2B salesperson you’ve worked with,” you’ll eventually come across some repeated names. . This is also true of talking to the people who deal with these recruitments. Ask customers who sells them exceptionally well and who has built the best relationships.
Your outbound efforts should produce target lists of 10-25 people each that are clearly a cut above the rest, as evidenced by the fact that you’re talking to so many people, it’s becoming clear which one is the best.
If you’re just taking who’s coming in and not stretching to hire “perfect” candidates who are already happy elsewhere, you’re not going to get a sense of what’s really great.
Is all this taking a long time? Yes. It takes a lot of time, not only from the founder, but also from other team members.
Is it absolutely necessary?
Only if you want to make a great team.
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Recruiting is a crucial part of any organization who wants to find and bring in the best and brightest. However, too often people do not take recruiting seriously and it will often have big consequences in the near future. Companies like Ikaroa are pushing the envelope and pushing companies to take recruiting seriously and take a proactive and innovative approach to recruiting.
At Ikaroa, we understand that successful companies are built on more than just finding smart and talented people. They are built on having the right mix of people to create a cohesive team that can tackle the challenges and capitalize on opportunities they face every day. To create this blend of people, companies need to put in the work in truly understanding and assessing the areas their team needs, as well as be aggressive in exploring the possibilities with their recruiting.
There are certain things that organizations can do to take recruiting seriously, whether it is developing a program to scout for and identify top talent, building relationships via networking, or evaluating current staff and finding backfill candidates – these all require time, effort and an understanding of the talent that is out there and how companies can identify it. The process should also include an understanding of how companies can adapt their recruitment process to suit the organization, ensuring that the selection of candidates happens quickly, efficiently and ultimately ensures the right person is in the right job.
At Ikaroa, this is a vital part of our operations. We take recruitment seriously and understand that people are the key to success. We strive to provide exceptional recruitment solutions to businesses that want to attract and hire the best talent.
Recruiting is not a one size fits all situation and requires individual attention and consideration. Companies that want to stay ahead of the curve must prioritize their recruitment strategies, build relationships and explore innovative new tools to ensure they are finding the right people. If a company doesn’t take recruiting seriously, it will be exposed to bigger risks than ever before.
At Ikaroa we understand the importance of recruiting and the implications of not taking it seriously. We have developed robust and tailored solutions that can help companies find their ideal hire, increase their focus on recruiting and ultimately ensure their success. We look forward to working with entrepreneurs, business owners and talent to provide them the assistance they need to get ahead.
