How to hire and keep great talent in a difficult market
Two tactics and some strategy to stay ahead in the talent wars
That hiring is getting impossible these days is not something you need me to tell you. Well, let me tell you again anyway. It is. Startups and recruiters are getting more and more desperate as salaries get higher and an already small talent pool keeps getting smaller.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend wanted some advice on hiring marketers.
It’s just too tough, she said: I put up JDs, and either the candidates are just plain bad or ask for too much. The people you want, the ones you know are out there and will take the job if offered, just don’t seem to apply. How do I get more candidates to apply, and increase the talent pool? How do I get access to a bunch of great talent no one has tapped yet?
These are universal questions right now. But attempting to solve them involves a willingness to go out-of-the-box and take a few risks. If you can’t do that, stop reading right now. If you are going to do the same things everyone else is doing, you will be stuck with the same talent pool as everyone else and getting into bidding wars.
If you are willing, however, to take a different route, then I have a couple of suggestions.
First, expand your search based on skill, not job description and domain. If you are looking for a content person for say, a finance company, don’t go looking for content writers. You’ll get the same people as everyone else. Go look for people creating great finance content on Instagram or Twitter, and see if they are interested. They most often are. If not, they will have friends, and you will get access to a pool of smart, creative people no one else has talked to.
How about if you want demand generation folks? In a campus interview, figure out who likes ad copy or has been mucking about with Adwords for his blog. The latter will be up to speed in a couple of months easy. And won’t cost as much as the other candidates either. Plus: This works great for the candidates too. They have new avenues opening up for them. When Girish hired me for Freshworks, he saw a college boy writing blogs he could connect with, hired me, and made me a content marketer. I repeat, look for the skill you want, but deliberately look where no one is looking.
Second, hire before you need the people. This was a Freshworks secret, and remains so. The company, even now, hires great talent when they see them, without knowing what they are being hired for. The thinking is that the company has many things to do and problems to solve, and smart people will figure out a way to contribute. It has worked brilliantly!
This glut of talent already available in the company makes it easy to assign folks to roles when they come up, and takes away a bunch of waiting time. Not to mention that all the onboarding and acclimatising is already done, so the candidate can literally hit the ground running.
Right, all this is great when you are that heavily funded and profitable, you might say. Sure, but that’s not an excuse in this market, when funding is so easily available, exactly the reason why good talent is so hard to find. The world is changing, recruiting needs to adapt, not the other way round.
Finally, the way to make sure people want to come to your company and stay for long years of their careers is building a great work culture and a strong employer brand around it. Marketing can help here, of course, but only if the fundamentals already exist.
This is the real work, and can take months, even years to do properly.
But with the balance of power shifting to talent, especially in technology, there simply is no other option. Companies need to pay attention to every signal within and without to make sure that it’s not just a great place to work, but is also seen as a great place to work. Candidates and employees today have information and media at their disposal, and they will not hesitate to wield it. You should not give them reason to. The way to look at this is not to resent it, but accept what is a historical power-shift. The bar for the HR team is higher than ever before, and embracing the challenge will make sure your startup has great talent now, and is also able to continuously attract talent for the future.