How to Build a Company with Recruiting
“The 1st thing I look for in a Founder is an Ability to Recruit!”
Dan Levitan, VC Co-Founder of Maveron LLC w/ Howard Schultz (Ebay, Groupon, Zulily)
Recruiters are Grassroots PR, targeting the most relative parties in your industry. Almost every conversation a recruiter has throughout their day is with a potential candidate. Hopefully the reason they've reached out is to verify the potential for that person to contribute to your company. It is essential that the recruiter believes the person they're calling will be interested in the company. Most of the time your recruiter will need to educate the prospective candidate about what you do and who you are, at least on some level. This is the first opportunity to tell a compelling story of what the company is, what new projects you're working on, and why the culture is so compelling. Chances are this information is extremely relevant to their work and their life. You better believe this person will tell their friends about your call, but only if your story is worth telling. You must hire and train your recruiting team to tell your story in a compelling way that applies directly to the person they are speaking with.
Once a candidate has your story, they could tell no one or they could tell dozens about the exciting project your working on that will either change the industry, the company, or the world. Now imagine you have a team of 5 recruiters who each speak with 20 candidates a week equally 400 relevant people every month. If your story is an interesting one you can be sure that those 400 people will be excited to tell their friends about your game changing AI project that will bring autonomous cars to the market 3 years faster than planned. This buzz will be more valuable than any stockbroker calling clients pitching your stock. Within months you can be sure that candidates, brokers, and your own employees will feel the buzz.
Now contrast this with a dull, function only recruiting team. This team is not interested in telling your story. They simply want to process applications and move candidates through their process. They do not understand that they are the first line of representation to the most important demographic in the market, potential employees. Every candidate they speak with hears a deflated, bored, and unfocused voice when your company calls. This quickly becomes your reputation in the marketplace. Even worse, it takes longer to fill roles while the employees you do hire are subpar because your story is not being shared in a compelling way. This all has a dramatic effect on your current teams. It will not be long before another company contacts your senior engineer and shares a vivid story of how they can contribute to game changing work. It doesn't matter that you invented the wheel if your team doesn't know how to share that story.
It is safe to say that recruiting plays a much bigger role than most of us realize. They ensure you ramp for critical projects, build a great company culture, and increase your stock price in the market.
Invest in your recruiting team and that means more than hiring senior recruiters from great companies. It means wrapping them into the Marketing team, the Engineering team, and the Executive team. The Marketing team will ensure that recruiters share the PR and Branding information in a way that aligns with company strategy. The Engineering teams will teach recruiters about the new projects poised to change the industry and the Executive team will provide a vision which recruiters can dissect for each candidate they speak with.
This must be why many of the World's top Venture Capitalists look for recruiting skills in every Founder they consider investing in, because recruiters directly impact stock prices and the bottom line.
