In order to launch a successful startup, you need to stack your team with the best and brightest talent available in your industry. You need to find great candidates, but let’s face it, startup recruiting is anything but easy. In theory, it should be simple: you create a job post, advertise the available position, and get a ton of resumes from interested, qualified candidates. Unfortunately, that’s just not the way it works.
Recruiting a great team takes time, costs money, and is often wrought with peril and false starts. Making a bad hiring decision isn’t something that most startups can afford to do; it’s not something that any company wants to do, but small companies and startups can’t absorb the time and money lost on a bad hire. And yet, hiring the wrong people happens every day. The good news is that whether you need to hire one great employee or build a whole team, there is an excellent solution available that can solve all of your recruitment problems.
In this article, we will look at the top 8 signs that your startup needs a recruiting solution, and we’ll go over some of the best startup hiring solutions available so that you can worry less about recruitment and focus on the things that matter most, like promoting your business, growing your brand, and managing your company.
8 Signs You Need a Startup Recruiting Solution
As you go through this list, ask yourself if each one of the items sounds familiar to you. If it does, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Recruitment is a serious challenge for every company, and especially for startups. Rest assured that there is a great solution available whereby you can automate your recruitment process and handle everything to do with sourcing and vetting qualified candidates easily.
But before we get into that, let’s first look at why you might want to consider going this route instead of handling your recruitment the way you currently do.
1. It’s taking way too long to find candidates
One of the biggest challenges for any employer is finding qualified candidates. When you post a job ad, it’s not uncommon to receive a ton of resumes; the problem is that, in most cases, the majority of applicants don’t have the relevant skills and experience needed to excel in the role. It takes a ton of time to pour through and dismiss all of these resumes, and that’s time that would be much better spent doing other, more important tasks.
2. Your HR team is at capacity or is overburdened
Now, chances are that you have an employee who you’ve entrusted with the HR task of recruiting for the roles you need filled within your company. But that person also needs to spend the same amount of time scouring through all of the resumes sent in and subsequently dismissing them.
The problem is that for every great candidate who applies, there can be 20 unqualified applicants, and sorting through all of that paperwork can put a huge strain on your HR team and end up costing you a lot of money, for not a lot of success. If this sounds familiar, then you should consider looking into external startup recruiting tools.
3. It’s proving difficult to recruit for specialist positions
Things get even trickier when you’re trying to hire for specialist positions rather than just entry-level careers. When recruiting employees with special skills, it’s necessary to vet their references, verify their education, confirm their previous experience, and otherwise scrutinize their application, and all of this takes a massive amount of time and effort that may or may not ever pay off. Job applicants may say they have the specific skills you are looking for, but you must be sure because in a startup there is little overlap to pick up the slack if your new hire doesn’t know what they are doing.
4. You need to hire for many positions ASAP
Hiring for even one position can be difficult and take a long time. But, when you need to hire a whole team or fill multiple positions quickly, well, let’s just say it’s much easier said than done. If you don’t have a huge HR team, then it can seem like an impossible task to find, vet, interview, and hire employees. The entire process can take months, and you may not have the luxury of being able to wait that long. The trick is to have a steady pipeline of qualified candidates, which is something startup recruitment tools can provide.
5. You don’t have an applicant tracking system
Finding candidates is one problem, but actually tracking their application throughout the recruitment process is another issue entirely. Keeping track of where each candidate is at in the hiring process requires you to maintain accurate records about each applicant, and that sort of record-keeping can quickly become disorganized, confusing, and stressful. Having an automated applicant tracking system can make the task much easier, so if you don’t have one, that’s a clear sign you might need some help with your recruitment efforts.
6. Bad hires have hurt your business
It can be incredibly frustrating when you do finally manage to find a great candidate, they go through the whole process, and you hire them, only to find out after the fact that your new employee doesn’t know what they’re doing, isn’t showing up on-time, or is delivering subpar work. Your cost-per-hire is a critical metric that needs to be kept as low as possible, especially for startups that need to stay lean. So, if bad hiring decisions are hurting your bottom line, then you may need some recruitment help.
7. Your hiring process isn’t clearly defined
In order to streamline your recruitment and onboarding processes, you first need to define how those systems will function within the parameters of your company. Posting a job ad and then hoping for the best is unlikely to bring you a ton of success, but when you have a clearly defined process for attracting, interviewing, hiring, and training your new employees, the whole process becomes much easier and more straightforward.
8. The job requirements have suddenly changed
Finally, when startups are first trying to get off the ground, it’s not uncommon for job requirements to change. You may have posted a job listing outlining a number of key tasks the applicant would be responsible for only to realize after the fact that you actually need them to do something else or something above and beyond what you specified in your job listing.
In most cases, this means that you’ll need to scrap your entire job ad and start all over from scratch. The good thing is that by working with automated startup recruitment tools, you can adjust and amend your job listings on the fly without having to spend time recreating a whole new, updated job listing.
The Solution
Startup recruitment can be difficult. It can take a ton of time to find qualified candidates, especially when you need to fill specialist roles or hire for multiple positions ASAP, and it can also cost a lot of money to fund your recruitment efforts in-house.
Fortunately, there are startup recruitment tools that can help automate the process so that you can focus on doing the things you love while having peace of mind knowing that your team will always be staffed with experienced, dedicated talent.
