5 ways to increase ROI on recruitment

No investment has a bigger impact on your business than recruiting your founding team.

Each person in an early-stage startup has an outsized influence on your product’s direction and company culture, so it’s important to hire well-rounded talent that is a good fit for your goals and values.

Recruiting is expensive, especially early on. Early-stage startups need to attract candidates with the experience to work independently, and the maturity to navigate ambiguous situations. The more candidates pass through your pipeline before filling a position, the more person-hours, payroll, and lost productivity your recruiting operations cost. Think about the budget for your recruiting efforts not in salary, but in operational overhead.

• 💸 Opportunity cost: The time you and your team spend on recruitment is time you’re not spending on your product. When the Founder is responsible for sourcing, candidate communication, and interview scheduling, it takes the most highly-leveraged member of the company away from work that could lead more directly to revenue. Contact me for ideas about how to reduce your recruiting overhead with better candidate communication, scheduling SOPs, and strategic candidate screening.
  

• 💭 Intentionality reduces costs: Recruiting takes a larger portion of your resources on a small team, so make sure you’re investing those resources wisely. Being intentional about what you’re looking for, executing efficiently, and only pursuing the candidates that are likely to accept your offer will help you reduce both the payroll and opportunity cost of recruitment. Contact me for ideas about how to improve the efficiency of your recruitment operations with well-crafted job descriptions and structured evaluations.
  

• 🥰 Demonstrate why this is a great place to work: Early-stage startups can’t compete with established companies on salary, but the challenge of company-building can be quite attractive to senior candidates looking for the creative freedom that they can’t find at larger companies. When scheduling and preparing for interviews is effortless, the operational mechanics fade into the background, turning every interaction with the candidate into an opportunity to showcase why your company is such a fulfilling place to work. Contact me for ideas about how to show candidates that they would be happiest working with you by crafting motivating job descriptions, outstanding candidate communication, and white-glove scheduling.
  

• 😗 Kiss fewer frogs: When you’ve identified the traits and skills you’re looking for through a structured hiring process, and execute efficiently with a polished interview process, it takes less time to identify the candidates that are the best fit for you. When the candidate had a great experience working with you through a smooth and friendly interview process, they are more likely to accept your offer. Contact me for ideas about how to decrease your time-to-hire and total interview volume with better screening, thoughtful candidate communication, and structured hiring.
  

🧑‍🏫 Example time:

A typical seed-stage or series A startup’s recruiting metrics might look like this:

If each member of the hiring team makes $100,000/year, then each hire costs approximately $5,000 & 100 person-hours per hire! Spending less time with the candidate is unlikely to help you hire the right people faster, so how else do you lower your recruiting overhead?

How do you increase ROI on recruitment?

Here are 5 ways to recruit more with less:

1. Screen out more candidates early in the process. The sooner you suss out underqualified candidates and those unlikely to accept your offer, the less time you invest in lost causes. More about screening strategies coming soon!

2. Reduce no-shows with skillful scheduling. No-shows suck, regardless of the reason. Polishing your scheduling communication will ensure that the candidate prioritizes the time. Checking in the day before gives candidates who aren’t that into you a less disruptive way to back out. More about scheduling strategies coming soon!

3. Keep candidates excited by communicating like a human. If you leave your communication between interviews up to auto-generated emails from your ATS, you’re neglecting a huge opportunity to build rapport with the candidate and stand out against their other opportunities. Tweaking your email templates with a few sentences unique to the candidate before sending will make them more likely to read your message, and gives you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship. I’ll have lots more to say about candidate communication in a future post.

4. Make fewer mishires with structured interviews. You can’t know what a great candidate looks like until you define what “great” means in the role you’re trying to fill, and test candidates against that standard. Yet many companies don’t create their interviews to target and evaluate any specific skills, leaving them to make hiring decisions by gut. More about structured hiring coming soon!

5. Decrease overhead with polished recruiting SOPs. Don’t reinvent the wheel with every candidate. Create SOPs, runbooks, and assets like templates and boilerplate to save yourself time. Contact me if you’d like help building your recruiting procedures and assets.

Want to learn more about creating a great candidate experience? Check out these related articles:

• How to write job descriptions that get candidates excited

• Are you turning off candidates between interviews?

• Coming soon! Creating a compelling interview experience

• Coming soon! Are you screening out the right candidates?

• Coming soon! Are your interviews helping or harming diversity?