I’ve advised recruiting operations at close to 300 startups, ranging from a five-person team at Scalyr to a several-hundred-person team at Gusto. Most startups share a common theme: Technical recruiting is often a top business priority — and every startup wants to improve its recruiting operations.
In an increasingly competitive environment for technical talent, and with the average time to hire for software engineers now over 35 days at best, startups need to consider faster, more efficient strategies to recruit the best talent. Whether you’re building an in-house recruiting team from scratch or looking to maximize the efficiency of your existing recruiting team, read on for five strategies that will take your recruiting operations to the next level.
Hire a tech recruiter who understands your technology. You would be surprised to learn how many startups hire tech recruiters that only have a cursory understanding of technology. A technical recruiter should be able to explain at a high level what a distributed system is, or the difference between a native mobile app and a web mobile app.
Having a good general grasp of technology is a core differentiator between an average tech recruiter and a great tech recruiter. Tech recruiters with a solid grasp of technology are more effective in understanding the complexity and relevance of the problem sets that technical candidates have encountered and solved. More importantly, they are in a much better position to determine whether or not those experiences and skills translate well and fill the technical gaps the new position is intended to address.
Edward Avila, head of global talent acquisition at Synaptics , stresses this point. “Effective recruiters are the ones who are able to go beyond the buzzwords of job description,” he says. “By having working knowledge of the company’s creation process, they are well-informed about the opportunities that they are sourcing for. They possess the advanced skills that allow them to appropriately engage and screen candidates. This is value that they add to hiring managers. Anything less is just being too administrative.”
Here are some questions to ask a tech recruiter to get a sense of how technical they are:
Ensure that recruiters attend product meetings that involve roles for which they are hiring. The effectiveness of recruiting operations begin to unravel when recruiters don’t have a seat at the table where product discussions are happening. Recruiters who are part of these discussions will be much better prepared to manage the inevitable pivots, get ahead of shifting priorities and have a deeper understanding of the technical challenges the team is facing.
Maryanne Brown, head of recruiting at Gusto, reinforces this idea. “At Gusto, one of our values is that we are all owners in the business. With that value in mind, our recruiters are expected to be thought partners to the functions they specialize in,” Brown says. “They attend all team meetings, and sit by their counterparts regularly to understand the daily needs of the team they work with. Organically they’ve grown into a more hybrid Recruiter and HRBP role where they help to predict the future needs of the team. This enables the recruiter to be in the driver’s seat and think further out in regards to the impact they can make.
