Recruiting Strategy
When are the best times to hire within your startup?
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Resources can be pretty limited in a startup and competition for talent is as intense as ever. With those challenges in mind, when is the right time to hire in a startup?
Knowing when to hire in a startup can be tough. Resources are tight and the competition for talent is even tighter, so making the right hires can be tough. As the old adage goes, sometimes you need to spend money to make money, so making strategic hires is essential to get your startup and product off the ground.
Taking on the task of recruiting staff can be challenging, especially if you do not have experience in this area, but investing in scalable recruiting software certainly helps. It can help you manage recruiting and can assist you through this swift learning curve.
So who should be first in the door at your organisation?
Having a loose recruiting plan will help you recruit the hires you need at the most logical point in the development of your startup. So who should be first in the door at your organisation? Where do you need the most support? What are your key requirements? Here are three key recruiting phases that your startup is likely to go through.
At the early stages of setting up your startup, product should be at the forefront of your mind. For that reason, your first hire should be a lead developer. Even if you are taking the responsibility of business development on initially, your product should be able to speak for itself.
Following that should be back and front end developers or hires with very strong design skills. UI and effective design are essential and good usability can even help you avoid support costs. Development and design are essential early investments.
Your recruiting patterns will be very closely linked to your product development cycle
Recruiting batch 2:
Your recruiting patterns will be very closely linked to your product development cycle, so the next area you will need to hire in is marketing and sales. Not only will they help reach your first key customers, but they will develop market insight and determine what customer needs you should be catering to going forward.
Sales and marketing leads will be very significant hires as this phase. Multilingual employees may also key key here, to reach international markets. Building your brand and reaching your key customer base are absolutely essential for the growth of your startup.
Operations! When you have a significant number of employees close to the product, you will need to ensure that structure and process are at the center of what you do. If your company is scaling up at a significant rate, you will need these constants to ensure you are going into the right direction.
If your team has grown to 10 or so employees, you will need dedicated staff in the areas of finance, HR and other key support areas. Again, if your company is growing quickly you will need someone to ensure you have the resources needed in place. But if you are not ready to hire HR staff, recruiting software can really help.
“HireHive makes the team a lot more productive. We’d be lost without it. Team Leaders can do it all themselves if needed or jump in at the right time and know exactly where everything is and what’s happening.”
Hilary Dempsey Head of HR at Life Credit union
