If you are a real estate or high-tech start-up company with plans to grow quickly, your number one priority may be to get your properties built and sold/rented, or your product adopted at scale as quickly as possible. Either way, your #2 or #3 priority will always be recruiting (finding and on-boarding) qualified technical talent to keep your organization going. This is also very likely your biggest challenge, your worst nightmare and the biggest time drain. TalentWoo shares five tips for every start-up company that needs to acquire talent in a hurry:
(1) Use contingency or retained recruiting agencies sparingly.
With fees that range anywhere from 15-25% of an employee’s first year annual salary, these costs can begin to add up quickly. Using extremely conservative estimates, imagine trying to staff a generic technology company and you decide to hire one developer(100K), one QA tester (70K), one systems administrator (90K) and perhaps a sales person (50K base). Your payroll would be $310,000 but your hiring fees would be anywhere from $46,00 -$78,000, for four hires! Now imagine if you needed to hire 20 people… 40 people… 60 people. This approach is too costly for the average start-up
(2) Use a contract recruiter if you must have a recruiter working on board.
Contract recruiters, depending on the market can charge anywhere from $40-80/hr for their time, but they will usually fill multiple jobs per month. Once up and running, depending on the complexity of the jobs they can fill 5 to 10 jobs with relative ease. Even at the high cost of $80/hr, a senior technical recruiter will be able to fill at least one difficult engineering or technical role per month. If you paid him $12,800 per month, this still amounts to less than the cost of a contingency recruiting fee for one engineering hire. And the difference is the contract recruiter will be working on-site, learning and understanding your company culture, understanding your hiring manager needs up-close, and interviewing candidates face to face in your facility, as opposed to over the phone (as is the case with most retained and contingency recruiters).
(3) Leverage employee referrals
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the cheapest way to on-board talent is to leverage existing employee networks or vendor relationships. Statistics show that employee referrals perform better, and turn over less frequently than other employees. Make sure your company reaches out to all its partners, vendors, friends, customers, online followers, fans, etc to spread the word!
(4) Pull Don’t Push!
Make sure you develop a company culture that not only resonates with your employees, but can draw others into the fold. Recruiting and hiring is the same thing as selling. You are trying to get employees to “buy” into working at your company. And like all sales, should be preceded by extensive marketing. What is your presence like in the local market? Online? At trade shows? At professional, networking, or trade events? You should be thinking about how to create a name for yourself so that interested parties will seek YOU out. What can your company do to get free press, get in the newspaper, or on the evening news? You want people saying, “Oh yeah! You’re that company that…” Recruiting is about branding.
(5) Social Media Marketing
Make sure you are leveraging Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin and other tools to the max. These can often be cheaper than paying for online resume databases or online job marketing services.
To find out more about how you can leverage the power of social media, online recruitment advertising, and employee referrals using cutting edge technology at a fraction of the cost of contingency recruiter fees, contact TalentWoo today.