When you’re trying to scale your tech business, it’s undeniably a balancing act. Your relatively small team has to wear many hats and take on many jobs to ensure your product, service, or offering can reach more people and grow to reach its true potential. There is so much to think about when scaling a company, from finding funding to perfecting your craft so it’s ready to take to market. Whether it’s refining your tech stack, conducting market research to ensure you’re hitting a sweet spot, or developing your idea to suit a broader market, there are so many priorities it’s hard to know where to begin.
Then an issue arises. You need more people to help you manage the mammoth task of growing your business, but your existing team does not have the time or expertise to manage this. So what do you do?
Many scale-up founders and entrepreneurs struggle with this issue every day. How can they go from 10 to 100 team members while managing the day-to-day aspects of a business, never mind trying to grow it on a national or even global scale?
We all know that recruitment is time-consuming; your teams must advertise vacancies, screen candidates, take the time to interview multiple candidates and sometimes even give a skills assessment. Therefore, talent acquisition in large volumes requires a significant headcount to be manageable, and sometimes this isn’t achievable. Scaling businesses often don’t have the HR resource resulting in senior team members having to take time out to recruit when their efforts may be needed elsewhere. Even established HR teams can struggle to hire large numbers of people whilst maintaining their daily responsibilities and caring for existing staff.
So here’s our advice on how to balance scaling your business and recruiting the best tech candidates to support your growth.
Create a plan
Firstly, all great entrepreneurs and startup founders know there’s no use in diving into a task without a plan. When you’re trying to grow a business, whether it’s expanding globally or simply growing your product and offering, there needs to be research, planning, and consideration. You need to think about where to get that all-important series funding, how to raise awareness of your brand, and which markets to take your product to, amongst many other things. So, planning should be second nature if you’re already planning to grow.
The same goes for recruiting. If your team is trying to juggle many things and perform a delicate balancing act, you can’t jump in headfirst and recruit the first fifty people that come to mind. Instead, it would help if you had a clear plan and vision to keep you on track. Then, when your team has other priorities and is less experienced in the recruitment landscape, a clear vision and outline will ensure people don’t get carried away and make the wrong hires as a spur of the moment decision.
Gather your leadership team and think about all aspects of growing your business and create a step-by-step plan, tracking your goals and milestones. Then, consider the skills and potential roles that you may need to hire along the way to help you meet them. This way, you have a map of your growth journey and a clear idea of the people needed to help you get there. Next, conduct some market research and talent mapping to help you understand the talent market within your industry, how you can compete, and the roles you should be competing for. This will help you identify where talent is and mean that when the time is right, you’re ready to reach out to relevant people and make strategic, intelligent hires that could significantly reduce your recruitment costs. In addition, you’ll know what appeals and be able to showcase an employer brand that resonates and cuts through the noise.
Of course, your plan doesn’t need to be set in stone—the world of tech recruitment updates almost as regularly as a windows computer. As technologies change or priorities alter, you may find new roles which become essential hires. However, having a rough guide in place from the outset of your growth plans will help everything else fall into place.
Set aside some budget
For a business trying to grow, funding is one of the most crucial and essential elements to get right. Above all else, funding is exciting. It shows someone believes in your mission enough to invest and provides endless possibilities for your growing tech company. When your startup receives a series of funding, it can be easy to get caught up in the moment and invest all of this funding into your product and offers. You can’t be blamed for wanting to do everything at once to ensure business success. However, it’s important to remember that it’s people who will help drive your business forward and ultimately help you grow.
Therefore, you should try to set aside some of this funding as a recruitment budget. Even if you don’t have a specific role in mind right now, you’ll thank yourself eventually for having some budget to spend on hiring tech talent when the time is right. Otherwise, you could have a considerable workload and desperate need for new hires but no budget to facilitate them, which will significantly halt your growth.
Know when to outsource
For many entrepreneurs and scaling tech businesses, the temptation is there to do everything yourself.
As a scaling business or a growing HR team, outsourcing your recruitment process can feel a bit like an easy option, like you’re pushing your responsibility onto someone else. It’s often something leaders shy away from as if it’s a sign of weakness. However, people are the lifeblood of an organization. Therefore it’s no surprise that leaders want to take ownership of the hiring process. They often believe that being in control can ensure they’re getting the best and most suitable candidates for their business. After all, no one knows a business like its leadership team, right?
Wrong. No matter what size or stage of growth they’re in, it’s time for business leaders to realize they simply can’t do everything themselves. As a result, it often makes business sense to outsource your recruitment.
Outsourcing recruitment doesn’t mean you’re unable to find and attract talent yourself, but more that you recognize your senior leadership team is needed to help the business in other ways. Rather than a sign of weakness, I believe it shows leaders are more sophisticated and commercially savvy. They know that they don’t have the time or the expertise to recruit the best talent effectively at the rate they need alongside growing other aspects of the business. Outsourcing means you get expert talent attraction and free up your time to work on what matters to your business.
It’s important to remember that outsourcing recruitment isn’t a competition to find the right talent. Instead, the right RPO provider works in partnership with a business.
Collaborating means sharing years of industry expertise and recruitment knowledge to build intelligent recruitment strategies that will not only fill vacancies but build your employer brand recognition and pipeline talent for future hires.
External recruiters have the time to research your company and its culture and user experiences, talent markets, and build candidate journeys that can improve your employer brand. Whereas teams who are preoccupied with other business areas may simply advertise a vacancy on a job board, RPO providers can provide a more strategic and sophisticated approach to hiring talent. A process that when competition for candidates is fierce, like in the tech sector, could be the difference between hiring and not.
Leaders need to remember that the talent market has become a lot more competitive, tech being the obvious example. To hire the best tech talent out there, employers must go the extra mile which again takes time and knowledge internal teams may not possess. But, again, reaching for support will give you a competitive edge.
As an RPO provider, Talent Works has a uniquely flexible approach to outsourcing tech recruitment, making our services adaptable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. Our subscription-based approach to tech RPO comes with less risk than traditional models, and it is ideally suited to the nature of growing companies.
To find out more about how we can help with your hiring projects, build employer brands, execute intelligent recruitment marketing campaigns, contact our team, and start a conversation.
