Recruiting Strategy: Building Your Recruiting Team

It’s pretty obvious how critically important recruiting strategy is to any expansion-stage technology company, and we all know that recruiters are your biggest HR asset.

But, how do you implement recruiting into your organization, really? Hire just any internal recruiter and let them run with everything? In this two part series I will give my recommendations on hiring the right recruiters and implementing the right recruiting strategy and structure that will give them the edge to succeed.

As you build a recruiting team into your company, it is important to recognize both the long-term and short-term goals you are looking to achieve from them. First, are you in need of an HR function, or will it be individuals 100% designated to recruiting talent to your company?

If it is solely recruiting you’re looking for, you need to start analyzing how much you expect your company to grow — aka how many recruiters will you need? Will they have enough workload? Are the hires you are looking to make typically difficult to find? Do the searches usually require a lot of time? Or are you anticipating a higher volume of searches for positions that are easier to fill? These are all important factors that will go into the decision-making strategy of your new recruiting team.

After you’ve determined the hiring function your organization is trying to achieve you can start building out your team. It is important that your new recruiters have a direct manager to report to. Even better, hire an experienced recruiter or HR person to head the team.

Especially at a growing company, I would recommend hiring recruiters that have at least 2-3 years of experience. It is also important to note that every recruiter has a different background. If it is mainly IT folks you need to hire, you may want to look into hiring a technical recruiter. If you are in need of hiring strong salespeople, there are sales recruiters. However, a great recruiter should really be able to recruit for any type of position, whether they have had experience with it or not.

So, how many recruiters do you need?

As mentioned, it really depends on your long-term hiring goals. If you’ve never had an internal recruiter on board before I would recommend hiring one recruiter, making sure they have a direct manager. Otherwise, it would be ideal to hire a more senior recruiter/manager, as well, to focus on big picture items that junior recruiters may not have experience with.

If most of your hiring has been through internal referrals or within your network and you’re hitting a wall when it comes to finding new talent, I guarantee you will be AMAZED with the output of an internal recruiting team. Corporate recruiters are seriously a bargain. Not only will they find the right talent for the right job openings, but great recruiters are also getting YOUR company’s name into the community. Recruiting can create more brand awareness and advertise how great your company is to work for.

Now that you’re sold on having a recruiting team to generate talent and create a buzz around working for you, the next critical step is to make sure you have the right recruiting strategy and structure in place. As with any role, it’s imperative to have certain metrics/goals in place to shoot for and measure for success. In my next post I will discuss in more detail how to organize your recruiting team.