4 Ways To Remove Bottlenecks When Recruiting For Your Startup.
Sometimes startups have bottlenecks when they are finding qualified talent for their business. Whether you are looking for a strong marketer, developer, or designer you should have a clear ideal candidate profile and recruiting strategy to execute this.
Build your ideal candidate profile. What are the essential hard skills, soft skills, level of experience, and temperaments required? How is this candidate going to fit within the organization? How are they going to be adding value? Here is an example of what a profile could look like. It is not necessarily the job description, but it is more of a framework to base your search on.
Example:
Job Title: Lead iOS Engineer
Level of Experience: Ideally, 7-10 years of experience.
Has been in leadership positions before and managed teams.
Interest in being hands-on with the technology, interested in building and not just delegation.
Industry experience: preferably has been in both large enterprise companies, in addition to prior experience in startup environments, or has been a founding engineer on a team before.
Has experience in the FinTech industry and adheres to best practices for iOS development and security.
Has experience building and maintaining finance or bank apps.
Needs strong client-facing and shareholder-facing communication skills.
Does not need to necessarily have hands-on Android experience but needs to understand how to collaborate with Android developers.
Has to be able to work remotely and autonomously.
Budget: 140,000 USD - 180,000 USD preferably in Eastern Standard Time or Central Standard Time.
Once you have your ideal candidate profile you can create your job description from this that includes your employer's value proposition, benefits, and requirements.
2. Use targeted searches and filters on LinkedIn. Narrow down your search using LinkedIn’s powerful filters and search tool. You can use boolean searches in conjunction with filters to search for leadership, title, geographic location if they post to LinkedIn or not, and hard skills. Once you narrow down your search you will be able to put candidates into talent pools. I usually recommend at least a short list of 40-50 candidates to potentially reach out to so you can have a variety to choose from.
3. You can use filters in your job posts within your applicant tracking system, to automatically disqualify candidates that don’t align with your job’s requirements. I recommend open-ended short answers versus answers closed (yes/no) answers. I recommend placing a healthy amount of disqualifying questions when you use job posts. Job posts like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Monster are paid per click, and you don’t want to burn your budget on candidates who are not qualified let alone don’t meet basic requirements like geographic location, work authorization, okay with hybrid/on-sight, etc.
4. You can utilize 3rd party recruiters, talent acquisition partners, and headhunters to expedite the search. A 3rd party talent acquisition partner who understands your business can do the heavy lifting and funnel qualified candidates who have been screened while offering tailored solutions to your startup. It is in their best interest to make sure the candidate provided is in proper alignment with the startup so everyone mutually benefits.
