Scaling your start-up is an exciting undertaking. It can represent the implementation and execution of your vision, but be aware: an ill-envisioned recruitment effort could bring the ability to accomplish that dream to a screeching halt. Hiring new team members involves a significant investment of time and money, and as companies expand rapidly, a poorly coordinated recruitment process can easily cause growing companies to lose sight of their core identities.
So, how do you properly coordinate your recruitment strategy while still staying true to your initial vision? Here are four tactics I recommend based on my own experiences:
Hire for core traits
Before you begin recruiting, step one is to clearly define the roles, responsibilities, and qualifications for open positions. Are you searching for a candidate who can skillfully manage multiple projects? Or an individual who demonstrates warmth, energy, and sincerity? The more specific you are when writing a job description, the more effective it will be in attracting the type of applicants you are seeking.
An important step that is often overlooked is to distill the core characteristics you are searching for in a candidate into a few discrete buckets. For instance, when trying to fill a role that is not extremely common, you should not limit yourself to only considering people who have held that specific role before – that will present you with far too narrow of an applicant pool and make it incredibly difficult to fill the position. Instead, you should identify the core characteristics that all successful people in that role at your company exemplify. When evaluating applicants for one common role at my company, we assess them based on communication skills, professionalism, commitment level, energy and enthusiasm and relevancy of past job experiences. These are the five core characteristics that we believe are critical for success in that particular job. Even if a candidate has not held a comparable role before, we can still consider them if we believe they have the underlying skills necessary to succeed in the position.
Build a consensus among your team
Ensuring you have identified specific attributes as described above is critical for this next step in the recruitment process. Your company’s recruitment efforts should involve multiple people within the organization attempting to evaluate and assess applicants, but how can you ensure each person is objectively measuring these applicants on the same scale? Implementing such a scale can help you avoid a common situation that occurs in poorly executed recruitment processes where interviewers are only able to articulate whether they liked or disliked a candidate. If your team agrees on what those aforementioned core traits are, it becomes far easier to evaluate all applicants fairly and understand why each person in your organization approved or disapproved of the candidate. This also helps you highlight follow-up questions and concerns that need to be addressed in subsequent interviews in order to better understand any potential risks that may be associated with a particular candidate. The specific attributes you use to assess applicants should vary by role, but each person in your organization needs to be using the same grading sheet to evaluate said applicants.
Align your processes to your core traits
Developing a set of standardized interview questions can help ensure you adequately assess each of the core attributes you have identified. Before my company started doing this for each role, we would often find we had forgotten to ask important questions during the interview or had failed to sufficiently discuss an important topic that would have allowed us to better evaluate the candidate’s fit for the role. These interview questions will serve as a formal checklist to ensure you are diligent and consistent in each and every one of your interviews. While your conversations with job applicants will not and should not be identical, a core set of questions provides you with a strong foundation to effectively assess them in a fair manner.
Leverage technology to simplify your processes
Cloud software and other technology solutions are a recruitment boon. Applicant tracking systems and scheduling tools can help you track a candidate’s status in your recruitment pipeline, and a dedicated recruitment system is a key component in scaling up your hiring efforts. Cloud software is particularly useful because it enables every recruiter to view and manage individuals in the pipeline. At Varsity Tutors, we rely on a back-end platform that we have built that allows us to track each candidate’s status in real time and see how each interviewer has evaluated each candidate.
Technology can also have a tremendous impact on the interview process. Utilize video conferencing software, like Skype, to communicate with candidates and team members who are involved in the recruitment process. Ideally, you should limit in-person interviews to only the best candidates, so make the most of your technology to streamline early hiring processes and to maximize your resources.
When you plan your recruitment efforts with care, you not only increase your yield of high-quality candidates, you also clarify your business vision for current team members and ensure it survives an expansion. With a properly designed recruitment strategy, you can standardize your practices, reduce costs, and grow in an efficient and thoughtful manner.
Chuck Cohn is the CEO and founder of Varsity Tutors, a technology platform for private academic tutoring and test prep designed to help students at all levels of education achieve academic excellence.
