How to make your Recruiting Function a better Business Partner - it's not what you think.

The number of fast-growing startups is increasing every day.  Each is unique, with different goals, and missions, and values, but there’s one thing they all have in common: they need people to help them reach their goals and they often need a lot of people, very quickly.  Because of this, recruiting functions are growing to account for this massive surge. A strong recruiting team is critical to successful hiring and growth, but what actually makes a great recruiting function?

A lot comes to mind when thinking about what makes a recruiting function strong.  There are the very obvious things around the funnel; an active pipeline of quality candidates, strong phone interview to onsite ratios, high onsite to offer ratios, high offer acceptance rates.  There are the “external” factors, like a well-measured and positive candidate experience, and the “internal” factors like a positive hiring manager experience and building a recruiting culture.  You need an appropriately staffed and leveled team, and a slate of tools and systems to help automate the process where possible.   And then, there’s the “bottom-line” aspect of making sure that you are filling roles and forecasting hire dates effectively for your FP&A team.  Many teams focus a lot of energy calculating and tracking cost per hire, time to fill, and the ever-elusive quality of hire. The list is endless.  There are a LOT of things that go into building an effectively run recruiting organization, and I see a number of companies doing this really well.  

However, I think there’s one critical thing that many recruiting functions at fast growth startups don't do which keeps them from being true business partners: quantifying how much time interviewing and hiring takes and overlaying that with the product roadmap. Refer to my previous post about the number of hours it takes to conduct interviews.  At Zenefits, we’re growing like crazy which is a situation that many startups are facing right now and that's a difficult challenge to manage with grace.  To overcome growth gracefully, you should start the process of quantifying the amount of time it takes to get to your headcount asks, and what that means in terms of employee “man-hours” and, of course, dollars.  

 Before committing to headcount targets, first analyze how many candidates will need to go through the pipeline to hit those targets, and model out how much time it will take to get to the total headcount ask. I’ve seen the most success in approaching this not from a recruiting team capacity-modeling perspective, but from a true business partner perspective.  

Let’s consider this through the lens of engineering.  The data could be used to tell the narrative of how much time engineers would spend doing hiring related work, which has a large impact on the product roadmap and its prioritization.

Now, let’s look at the same data in reverse. The information can be used to guide a conversation with the team that aligns the current hiring asks with roadmap deliverables. If the two aren’t possible in tandem, concessions need to be made. This approach will result in an intuitive headcount plan and a more accurate financial forecast, which can also inform a more accurate burn rate.  Think about it - you’d be utilizing critical data on the front end to forecast any issues in advance and solve for them in terms of actual deliverables for your recruiters and your interviewers.  No more falling short of headcount targets and deliverables; no more over or under shooting on your FP&A forecasts, no more unexpected interviewer fatigue, no more reactively staffing your recruiting teams - because your data played an integral role in deciding what those targets would be. 

Now consider this from a sales team perspective.  Assume you’ve been given headcount targets for sales hires.  If you don’t hit those targets it means that revenue numbers will ultimately fall short of a projected goal.  That’s bad, no one would argue otherwise.  Now assume you went through the exercise of backing into the hours required to get to those hires.  It would provide insight into what’s actually possible with your current team, and you and sales leadership can work together to set up a more predictive headcount model.  A likely plan is that you would utilize the current team for interviews as much as possible and create a graduated headcount target where you hire people, ramp them as interviewers thereby increasing your interviewer pool, and then increasing your hiring targets accordingly month over month.  Eventually, you’d get to the same amount of hires, but would smooth the potential fluctuation in hitting revenue targets that came from having out-of-reach sales hiring targets.  In the cases of very rapid growth, it would also be helpful to project decreased output from the existing salespeople in terms of revenue. All the time spent interviewing is time NOT spent producing.  The connection of these two goals - hiring goals and business goals - is important, and consistently overlooked.

I think many recruiting functions at startups fall into the trap of wanting to deliver on any and all asks from their teams.  But recruiting is at it’s very best, when it’s an actual business partner for the organization and not just a service organization that tries to deliver on headcount asks blindly.  Use industry data, and any company specific data you have at your disposal, to quantify output from the teams and its impact on their headcount needs.  Use your position and experience to help effectively drive the business and take your recruiting function from strong, to off-the-charts.  

 If you’d like to chat, I can be reached at mdelcambre@zenefits.com.

(Special thanks to Lauren Ryan at Greenhouse for helping me wordsmith)