Over the last decade or so the recruitment sector has experienced vast changes. Gone are the days of exclusive databases; today it’s all about transparency in the market with companies forced to battle it out for the best candidates.

 

Inhouse direct recruitment vs. external agency recruitment has long been a widely debated topic. Whilst some companies find it beneficial to capitalise on the experience and network of recruitment agencies, we firmly believe that investing in direct recruitment is the best way for startups to hire. Why? Take a look at some of the benefits below…

 

Offers a better return on investment

Rather than paying out money to a third party each month, it makes far more sense to invest in your own brand. Building up a strong employer brand will have a positive PR effect on your company and will get people talking about you for all the right reasons.

 

In competitive recruitment markets, a strong employer brand will help you stand out and give job seekers compelling reasons to join your company over one of your competitors. It will help you to market you values and personality to candidates, which will result in increased engagement, something that contributes to greater productivity and higher retention rates.

 



Do your own recruitment and you’re more likely to find the right candidate for the job!

Image source: https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3788/13106551254_9c5261b55f.jpg

 

Acquire quality candidates

By conducting direct recruitment, you also stand a much higher chance of hiring quality candidates that are a perfect fit for the job. With recruitment agencies, there’s always a risk of them sending through a ‘closest match’ rather than a candidate that has the ideal skills, experience and personality for the advertised role. Acquiring quality candidates first time round can save you huge financial implications, as you won’t have to repeat the recruitment and on boarding process multiple times.

 

Control over the recruitment message and experience

Investing in your own direct recruitment will give you greater control over the recruitment message and experience for candidates. You will be able to represent your company accurately and craft a recruitment process that will allow you to find the perfect candidates for your advertised roles.

 

Recruitment agencies tend to use a one size fits all approach to hiring candidates and this process doesn’t always churn out the right people at the end. The more control you have over recruitment, the more likely you are to end up with great candidates who go onto become loyal members of staff.

 

Build a talent pool for the future

One of the major downsides of using a recruitment agency is that you have no communication with the candidates that just miss out on the role. This means there’s no opportunity for you to build a talent pool or pipeline that you can source from in the future.

 

By doing your own direct recruitment, you can effectively build a talent pool for your startup. This basically involves keeping in contact with candidates who missed out on previous roles, as well as graduates and other talent, who you may be able to use to fill job roles that come up in the future. Having a talent pool at your fingertips can greatly reduce recruitment costs and allow for a far more efficient process.

 



Conducting direct recruitment gives you the chance to build a talent pool so you can build professional relationships with potential future employees.

Image source: https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3798/12547460034_6c9836d704.jpg

 

Outsourced direct recruitment

It’s important to remember that just because you choose direct recruitment over agency recruitment, it doesn’t mean you have to do it all yourself. The work can still be outsourced and done remotely by companies like The Talent Hackers. We work closely with businesses to conduct direct recruitment, using our wide talent pool and top of the range recruitment technology to help them find the right candidates to fill their roles.

 

Interested in finding out more? Give us a call today!

 

Image credits: Images from SumAll and uberof202

Top 10 things for startups and founders to think about when choosing their technology platform and hiring.

As a founder or senior leader within your startup, have you asked yourself these questions and got answers you are happy with, if not make the time to work through them, you could regret it later down the line especially when you do finally get investment.

1. Are there staff available in the local area?
It might be obvious but it is amazing how many startups will go with the latest technology like Scala, paper.js, Clojure or Slate, Faust or Squirrel and build an amazing new product but then when they try to recruit the extra programmer they really struggle to hire. Spend some time thinking about where you can find the skills locally or will you have to cross train or relocate talent. Even languages that are becoming more mainstream like Ruby can be difficult to obtain. Resources like IT jobswatch can give you an idea of demand, a quick search on Linkedin might give an indication of supply.


2. What are the rates for permanent/contract staff for your technology stack?
Assuming you are going with your favoured technology when you are preparing your cashflow and hiring plans, take a look at salaries/contract margins. Many startups are amazed at what they might have to pay to get that right skillset especially outside of London where the assumption is to pay less, but competition is really hot for tech skills right now.

3. Where are the big technology companies that use your skillset?
One of the reasons that clusters grow especially around technologies is that there happens to be a large employer of that skillset locally. The reason there were so many start ups in California was Xerox Parc, so many embedded software companies in Cambridge was Acorn and networking technologies in Scotland was NCR and 3Com. Have you looked at the local big tech employers and their tech stack to see if its easy to get people from there.


4. Are you part of a community already?
Have you joined and are active in the local User Groups, Meetups?This will give you an idea of the quality and depth of local talent.

5. Universities
Have you made links with the local universities, especially the Computer Science courses? One reason for successful startups around York was the quality of their C Science course especially around AI and Vision.

6. What happens when you get funded? Do you have a plan
One of the key bottlenecks for startups is planning, from building and launching a product, creating great customer service and doing the investment rounds when you finally get that magic funding, typically a lot of it will go on hiring. If you have not pipelined and thought about how to do this it can create a major challenge for companies.

7. It's OK, we will just bring in overseas candidates!
Think again, the average time to hire, process and gain a work permit is likely to be around 3-6 months especially if they are not in the country already. On top of which, Visa's are becoming much scarcer now under new legislation. Yes you can still hire from within the EU, but the competition is fierce and most candidates want to live in London as that is the area they know.

8. Beware the unicorn!

While research suggests that recruiting the top 5% of programmers will have a disproportionate effect on your productivity, the reality is they are few and far between for a reason and you have to pay disproportionate salaries and benefits to attract them and present them with the right challenges otherwise they will move on swiftly. A good solid team to start will pay good dividends and if you see one them make a decision then otherwise you could miss delivering waiting for the unicorn.

9. Are you attractive compared to your peers?

Have you undertaken a review of your hiring competition? Not just the local startups but major employers, startups within 1 hours commute which if you are in Nottingham, Birmingham or Manchester could almost be London to see how you stack up on benefits, culture and salaries?

10. Do you actually tell people you are hiring!

A common issue for startups is to focus on their product and sales and not have their website telling people they are hiring or what they are looking for in the future. The key is to make sure that its very visible on the front page.




If you would like to get a free review of hiring practices at your startup or just advice on where you might be able to improve then pick up the phone to Peter on 01299 833980 

One of the hardest things to do as a Non-Technical Co-founder is to recruit a CTO who can join the company later but still share in the passion that you have for the product. With the rise of accelerators, hands-on investors and easy options to build a MVP and launch, many CEO’s are finding that they have so much to run from the business and client end, that they are in difficulty when it comes time to find the CTO.

Launching through having your product built by a third party, or a friend is great and is a really cost effective way to get to MVP, however it creates a legacy of technical debt and potentially difficult code or technology stacks that might not be right to scale the product. This is where the CTO or Lead Developer is really key to taking you through to the next level.

At this point the CEO or COO will be heavily engaged in running teams, working with clients, mapping feature sets and reporting to the board and their main constraints are around time as well as funding the hiring of a new CTO. Using agencies can be costly, 25% of salary is not a small amount, doing it through friends, referrals and networking can take forever with the board increasing the pressure to hire every month.

I recently worked on a project for a client to do exactly this and though it might be useful to share our experience of this.

The total amount of time to hire was 55 hours, this included setting up job postings, reaching out through LinkedIn, searching job boards, tele screening candidates, organising technical screens and skype interviews with the CEO, COO, investors and finally closing the deal with the candidate. 

That’s probably the average week for a CEO but ask one you know if they could afford the time to do this.

We reached out to over 250 candidates directly, managed over 80 advertising responses, had over 10 direct referrals across multiple sources.

We posted across Europe, headhunted, networked and drove the process on, keeping our candidates in the process during August when everyone was on holiday, giving consistent feedback to candidates and managing communications.

What did the company gain, we hope that candidates got a better view of the company, had a better experience and due to implementing a workflow system called Workable are able to build a talent pool that will be receptive to them the next time they hire.

What were the learning points.

• ·         Hiring from Europe can mean great candidates who are prepared to work for less, but the           advertising platforms are not great yet to attract them.
• ·         Referrals are great especially from investors.
• ·         You can spend a lot of money with little ROI on new platforms.
• ·         Speed is of the essence, having a streamlined process is ultra-effective, longer than 2 weeks         to hire means you lose candidates
• ·         Everybody needs to be bought into the process.
• ·         Reaching out through Linkedin or other platforms is more effective than anything.

What was the end result? For under 30% of the cost of an agency, a slick process and the opportunity to build an ATS, we hired a great CTO, did it in a reasonable time frame and the CEO spent less than 5 hours in actual interviewing. That’s a good result!

TheTalentHackers.com are a inhouse recruitment service for startups and fastgrowth companies in the Technology, Bio and Mobile world. To find out more visit www.thetalenthackers.com