Managing growth can be an excitingly tough challenge — no matter what size your business is. Hypergrowth is all about maintaining a delicate balance between operations, management, and personnel. It can be increasingly difficult to navigate if you do not have the right talent in place.
Recruiting is one of your biggest challenges during this phase of growth. However, many companies do not even realize the hiring challenges they will face and they fail to prepare for them.
Trying to keep up with everything while maintaining a rapid pace is not impossible, but there are definite signs to look for that indicate that you might need some outside help.
What are your hypergrowth recruiting strategies?
If you find that some of these signs resonate for your current state of business when it comes to recruitment, it might be time to seek some outside help.
1. Is finding suitable candidates a one-man job?
Are you the only one really trying to fill the many gaps in current teams? Do you find that your internal team is not quite keeping up with hiring demands? Is there is not enough personnel to really look for candidates?
If hiring is becoming a one-man show, it will become incredibly difficult to find and retain top-tier candidates.
Recruiting is a full-cycle effort that requires a lot of follow-ups and rapport with candidates. In order for it to be successful, there needs to be consistency in how it is managed. If your current HR team seems to be overwhelmed with the amount of sourcing and hiring they need to do, it might be time to consider having an extra pair of hands on board to develop an effective hypergrowth recruiting strategy.
2. Do you have a clear hiring strategy?
After establishing who is going to be doing the hiring, have you considered the hiring strategy itself? In hypergrowth phase, many companies fail to put a hiring strategy in place. The result a system based on a first come, first serve philosophy for recruiting and hiring.
While it may solve immediate gaps in the workforce, this is detrimental in the long run.
First come, first serve hiring does not take into account the areas where business is growing, and which teams need to be prioritized in terms of recruitment. Without a strategy, recruiting and hiring tends to take on a life of its own and it can be difficult to get it back on track to ensure the business is running as productively as possible.
Sit down with your teams and understand the full volume of new hires that are needed for productivity, and which teams are struggling more.
These teams can be prioritized for their recruitment cycle. Prioritizing will help the internal hiring team to understand where to focus their efforts. If you find that coming up with a strategy — or ensuring that it is followed — is a difficult task, then consider getting external help to move you through this phase.
3. Do candidates seem to drop off after the interview stage?
For some companies in hypergrowth stages, it is easy to find candidates but not as easy to actually get them through the cycle and hire them. Look at your current recruiting stats to understand what areas need to be improved in order for candidates to actually be hired.
Most of the time, candidates will make it through the initial screening and interview process and do great. Then they drop off before going into further rounds. This can be frustrating, and also slows down the overall recruitment cycle and hampers hypergrowth.
If this happening too often, it is time to evaluate your current recruitment practices and try to improve these to prevent candidates from dropping off.
It might be that too little communication from the internal hiring team is putting candidates off, or maybe the hiring process itself is too complicated and candidates lose interest.
If this is the case, having an external staffing team in place can be incredibly insightful since they see your process from the outside, and are able to provide constructive feedback for improvement to keep candidates from dropping off.
4. Do the interviews seem to be uncoordinated?
Every staff member is typically very expressive about how they need more members on their team to keep up with growth, but they are too busy to help with the process of filling those gaps.
Unfortunately, this often means that signals get crossed when it comes to actual interviews. People get busy and have to cancel interviews, or have someone else come in their place.
This leaves candidates confused and unhappy if they are not able to meet with who they were prepared to meet with. While that might be a good way to test a candidate’s adaptiveness, it does not always leave a good impression.
Take a look at interviews over the past few months and really evaluate them. Gather team feedback on why candidates were successful and unsuccessful. If it seems people are constantly switching interview times or sending others in their place, this is likely a reason why hiring is hampered.
Work together with teams, and maybe enlist some outside help to ensure that interviews go off smoothly and that there is ample time for candidates to prep.
5. Do you have hiring timelines defined?
Not having clear hiring timelines is another factor that can derail hypergrowth hiring. If every placement is seen as a top priority, then internal teams are so focused on trying to get as many candidates through the door as possible. Teams end up having a mishmash of people instead of qualified and vetted new hires.
Instead, there needs to be clear timelines in place to help internal hiring teams understand where placements are crucial and how long teams can go without staff in place. Some teams might be better equipped to handle slower recruitment cycles, while others need staff more urgently.
This will require doing a deep dive with departments to understand their limitations and what they need in terms of staffing. Some might want team members in place next month, while others may not need someone for another two or three.
Having an external staffing team to conduct these forms of audits and recommend timelines will not only save you time and effort but also ensures that you are hiring as efficiently as possible during this period of hypergrowth.
6. Do you know your hiring costs?
Each unfulfilled job opening represents a lost is potential profit and productivity. Having slow and inefficient recruitment practices in place will only serve to exacerbate these costs.
Calculating hiring costs will help set priorities for internal hiring teams while also allowing you to better prepare for future revenue projections based on these costs.
If you compare this cost to hiring an external staffing team or having more recruiters in place, you will quickly find that is far better to have an effective team in place to cut down your hiring costs while ensuring you get the best candidates as possible to fill these teams.
7. Do you have sources for new candidates?
Do you know where you source your candidates from? Do you have a backup plan if those sources fail?
Hypergrowth means having a diverse set of candidate pools in place so that you can quickly find and retain the talent you need. If your usual wells dry up, you need to be prepared to find other sources that will help keep a rapid pace of hiring.
If you are starting to see that you do not have a diverse set of candidate sources in place and you are not sure how to fix that, this is where an external staffing company can really provide value. They can help you find a more diverse array of candidates that fit your requirements.
8. Do internal hiring teams understand the positions?
Recruitment might be slowing down simply because internal hiring teams are not entirely aware of what the department needs are and how these positions fit into the wider scheme of things.
If they do not understand where new hires fit in, they will have difficulty communicating this to candidates and/or might end up sending candidates through the door that are not relevant or do not have the right skill set necessary.
In order to make recruiting more efficient, it is vital for internal teams to have a thorough understanding and knowledge of what each department needs from candidates. If this is difficult to maintain in a hypergrowth phase, then it is worth enlisting an external staffing agency that can craft hypergrowth recruiting strategies and better articulate what the department needs from candidates.
9. Do you have candidate pre-selection tools in place?
Similar to the last point, hypergrowth recruiting strategies must also take into account how candidates are filtered. If each candidate is screened with a phone interview right off the bat, that eats up into hiring time — especially if the candidates do not have the right background or experience.
To keep growth efficient while still finding great talent, consider having pre-selection tools in place during the application process.
This might include short logic and reasoning tests and behavior quizzes — just to name a few. If you are not sure which positions would be best suited for these pre-selection tools, or how to implement pre-selection filters, it might be best to work with an external agency that can help ensure that you have the right tools in place to find great candidates.
Effective Hiring for Hypergrowth
To learn more about how we can help you recruit the best possible talent and craft effective hypergrowth recruiting strategies for your company, please contact us today.
Written by Christine
Christine has a comprehensive understanding of the people, processes, and operations involved in talent acquisition and Recruitment Process Outsourcing. She refuses to settle for simply meeting expectations of her clients, instead she has a reputation for exceeding them.
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