Why recruitment agencies can’t help startups to grow and how to solve it 🚀
“We don’t have candidates! We need more candidates. Let’s invite an agency to work with us”.
Every time I hear it, I start to feel like having a toothache. I understand that this is not a good decision. But why? Here are some thoughts and a recipe for this specific “toothache” at the end of the article.
The key is that companies don’t need candidates, they need offers! They need closed positions.
So, it seems so obvious: a company doesn’t have candidates, then an agency sends some candidates but usually the company don’t hire as much as they need and without the needed speed that’s crucial for a startup.
Why? Let’s go step by step.
So the first thing that you can do is your internal research. You really need such folk in the Team. Could you check if you already have it?
Could you promote your senior developer to a Lead role? And to open 2 seniors roles instead of a Lead and a Senior?
If you checked it and now clearly see that you don’t have this specialist/manager in the team, let’s go further, to the hiring process.
Recruiting is a system, and like any other system, it is more than its part:
- system structure
- composition (subsystems, elements);
- the current global state of system conditioning;
- an environment within which all its organising processes are deployed.
The key point is candidates are just one of the elements of the system, although it is the most “visible” element.
Let’s assume by default that the environment is quite aggressive and competitive, otherwise we simply wouldn’t be here and we would just stick ads (post & pray) and discuss what is the best way to qualify candidates.
Other elements of the recruiting system:
- Stages of the recruiting process
- Interaction between members of the hiring team (and it also has own measures: speed, transparency)
- The value of the offer that you propose to a candidate
It means that even if we have this element (candidates) enough (or even over enough), but if at the same time we don’t have other elements settled and we don’t have rules that drive the whole system, we can’t expect to get the needed result.
A simple check: if the system works it gives us the result we want.
You can make a quick audit of your recruiting system. Ping me if you want to get a free audit template.
Audit scheme
- What steps of the hiring process do you have?
- Who is responsible for the each step?
- What rules/agreements do you have about providing conclusions and giving feedback after each step?
- What are the selling point of the role?
After you wrote everything down you can make your system visible and you can start to work from it. I promise that you will find a lot of lacunas, but it’s a good point: now you can start to work with a system not with symptoms.
At Nica Recruiting we have experience to solve hiring questions of any level to complexity and build a recruitment machine.
😊 If you’re a CEO or a CTO feel free to get a free 30’ consultation about hiring for you startup. Book a call here ⏱️
Our Team is ready to help to build your successful hiring process 🥳
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2yI have to say, being fully distributed and open to the world this is not really much of a problem, every job post we get tens of great candidates, I wish we were much bigger to take them all ! Will work for that to happen soon ;) One might start by not limiting their choice : - expand geography => distributed workforce - expand profile => look for self-learners - expand industry => thought of recruiting in another space - expand seniority => look at all ages admittedly, it requires a very open minded and diverse-aware management team.