Hooked on Recruiting Readiness - Issue 39

Happy birthday to Hooked! Our baby is one year old this week. 🎉

“Prepare while others are daydreaming.” — William Arthur Ward

What does hiring look like in 2024 at your startup? If you're like so many other companies over the last year and a half, you've tightened the belt, reduced your workforce, and limited hiring headcount. But when net-new hiring is limited to only a few high-impact roles for the year, it's easy for everyone to fall out of shape or be unprepared for "go time" when it comes.

What's going on?
When you and your team aren't hiring regularly, your recruiting muscles tend to atrophy. And while it may feel great to have a respite from the hiring treadmill, you can get out of practice and forget just how much time, effort, and planning it takes to engage great talent and get them in the door. This may be especially true now if you and your leaders are stepping into the new year, only planning to hire for specific pockets of the business. But sporadic hiring can bring a lot of pain — going through periods of time without net-new hiring only to "kick off the rust" and attempt to start up the ol' recruiting engine later on. Your team is out of interviewing practice and can't competitively frame your startup's value prop or deliver a great candidate experience. They've also forgotten how to plan and reprioritize their time to compensate for interview prep, interviewing, debriefs, and onboarding. Time becomes condensed, creating a lot of pressure on the people in the system and the system itself. This pressure is only amplified at a startup where there are fewer people to do all the things.

Why does it matter?
Recruiting isn't a faucet you turn off or on — it's a drip or trickle that ebbs and flows but is always constant. When you don't use it, you lose muscle and momentum. That's why it's critical to ensure your recruiting engine isn't coming to a grinding halt when hiring less (or not at all) over specific timeframes. When you start at zero, you waste valuable time getting the system humming again and working the kinks out. And every minute counts. Besides, even with a decrease in hiring net new talent, there will always be a need to fine-tune and level up your team, requiring you always be recruiting. Plus, regrettable and un-regrettable churn is the reality of any business. Keeping your team in a constant state of good recruiting health ensures readiness for every hiring encounter and an understanding of the impact of time and commitment those encounters will have on the business, the team, and anyone you are recruiting to your startup.

What do others think?

“Keeping talent top of mind is my number one priority as CEO. We’re always talking about recruiting and what we learn through success and failure. A constant stop/start motion can be really painful at a startup — especially when you don’t have a well-defined interview process to follow. We didn’t have that at first — only a loosely understood set of steps that some people knew, making it hard to step back into hiring when we needed to. In the current market, you may have better access to talent, but having access doesn’t automatically equal getting the right person in a seat. The right process serves as an enabler so everyone knows what to do when it's time to hire.” - Linda Lian, CEO and Co-founder at Common Room

What do we think?
Recruiting is a lot like surfing. You paddle, paddle, paddle, paddle (connect, plan, prepare, keep sharp, ready the business) until you finally catch a great wave. Riding the wave (interview, offer, hire, onboard) is the exciting part. But you have to paddle to reach the wave. You have to do the work. When it comes to landing great talent, teams that are always ready and in motion will have an advantage over those that aren't.

What do YOU think?

Take Action

HIRING A HANDFUL

• Kick off the year by setting the tone. As the founder, reiterate your hiring principles, your bar, and why these are important at your first company update. Reiterate your hiring value prop and set the expectation for everyone to build their networks and connect with great talent. #alwaysberecruiting

• Interview process retrospective. What the business needs now is different from last year. Identify how changes in business and direction alter what great looks like in candidates. Even if you've hired the role before — what you need will be in flux. Stop and take a step back. Rethink your process to validate key attributes and what skills are necessary for the team to reach the next milestone and flourish in the coming months.

• Two-way accountability. Pull hiring teams together early and set up an action plan — getting crystal clear about hiring goals and process. Identify what you are looking for, what has shifted from the last time, clarity on everyone's role in the process, and how you expect people to show up. Be planful about “projects in flight” and the impact recruiting will have on people attached to these projects.

• Involve your top performers in role-scoping. We addressed this in Hooked on Hiring Adjustments. Doing work is one thing, but working through an exercise to think about what you do and why, brings a whole new level of understanding, connection, and purpose to your work.

• Cross-shadow interview sessions. For teams not currently hiring, keep them fresh and in tune with the business by involving them in cross-functional shadowing exercises from time to time.

HIRING MANY

In addition to the above,

• Interactive hiring discussions. Everyone has witnessed All Hands or Town Halls where hiring is framed as "We've got these openings -- who do you know?" Take this a step further. Have the hiring leader or team highlight what problem this role will solve and why it's one of the few chosen for the year. Ask for ideas and feedback from cross-functional areas of the business about what great looks like to them.

• Ready your bench. Relying on the same interviewers over and over will lead to burnout. Create a scalable shadowing and training program for your next wave of interviewers. An excellent way to measure your confidence in interviewing capability is to identify "single points of failure" across your interview team. If one key person can't be involved, do you lack the confidence that somebody else can seamlessly take their place? Identify these points and create redundancies through shadowing and training.

ALWAYS BE CULTIVATING

• Always be recruiting. Plant seeds by introducing yourself (now) to people you’d love to recruit in a year. And don’t go dark with people you already know who would make up your future dream team (your wish list). Remember, these people can be recruited, but they aren’t going to say “yes” the first time you call. Consistency breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds confidence.  

• Remember to nurture your search firm partnerships. If you wait until you need them, it’s already too late. Keep in touch and let them know you value their role in your company’s journey.

ALWAYS BE LEARNING

• Share recruiting success stories with the extended team, emphasizing the new recruit and the collective effort it took to get them in the door. Your team hears about the Herculean effort company projects or customer wins take, but rarely do they hear about the blood, sweat, and happy tears of a recruiting win.

• Share recruiting fail retrospectives more broadly. When was the last time you made an offer that got declined at the 11th hour for reasons the team could have realized far sooner in the process? No one can learn if they don't know failure has happened in the background. Help everyone sharpen their spear. See Hooked on Pre-Closing for more tips about ongoing closing tactics and must-dos.

Tools, Events, Resources
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