Welcome to part 12 of the series, “Developing Passive Talent from Your Network.” Let’s get started.
Once you’ve identified who to engage with, reached out to them, and started your initial sales conversations, you need to nurture these relationships and get them interested in your startup. Nurture can apply to anyone you’re interested in recruiting, but it’s especially important for 1st and 2nd degree connections in your network.
Some of the people you speak to may already be looking for a job and will move straight into the interview process (active candidates). Still, most aren’t considering new opportunities (passive candidates). With passive candidates, your goal is to build momentum and excitement over time through multiple touchpoints (texts, phone calls, coffee chats, lunches, happy hours, etc.) to continually read their interest level and timing.
Types of development touchpoints
The key to developing a passive workforce is to have a wide range of touchpoints depending on the situation. As a rule of thumb, you should have a mix of indirect and direct touchpoints, low and high touches.
Indirect touch points
Indirect touchpoints are ways to spend time with passive candidates that aren’t necessarily related to the hiring process (e.g. regular happy hours, game nights, chatting over coffee). The more passive your candidate is, the more indirect touchpoints you should deploy. After all, you don’t want to jump straight into a “hiring” conversation before they’re ready. Chatting over coffee, calling, emailing, or texting to catch up are great indirect touchpoints.
Consider setting up regular indirect touchpoints with your entire team, like happy hours or game nights, and inviting passive candidates as well. This will accomplish two things:
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Doing these regularly and consistently will ensure there is always a low-pressure, easy default option for co-founders and teams to engage with friends and referrals.
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Since the whole team will be there, it’s a great way for passive candidates to meet co-founders and other team members without feeling like they’re being “hired.”
Gem hosted social events every 2-4 weeks. Although there was usually wine or beer, the events were never centered around drinking, as everyone could participate. Instead, they hosted creative food-themed events, such as chocolate, cheese, and hot sauce tastings, and make-your-own pizzas and sundaes. They also hosted a lot of game nights. Puppy petting eventwas a huge success. Team members took turns planning each social event to distribute the load. A big factor in making the events successful was a 30-minute meeting with the team a week before, inviting friends and referrals (via a Facebook event), and following up with invitees two days before the event.
Not only was this a great way to spend time together as a team, but the social events ensured that there was always a low-pressure excuse to hang out with our first-level contacts and introducers. This was especially important for introducers, who the team wasn’t necessarily comfortable having hiring conversations with their friends in the first place. It also gave us a great opportunity to spend more time with candidates during the interview process. And the fact that passive candidates met active candidates who were also being interviewed was a nice social validation, showing them that they actually took our startup seriously.
Note: If your company is remote, consider a virtual game night on Zoom. Jackbox Games, Code Name (Online version is here), and graffiti.
Direct touch points
Direct touchpoints are where it becomes more clear that you are trying to hire the candidate. This can be a coffee with another co-founder/founding engineer, or a lunch with your team. If you find out that the candidate is actively interviewing with other companies, or if you feel that the candidate is starting to become interested during the indirect touchpoint, then you roll out a direct touchpoint. The goal of the direct touchpoint is to get the candidate excited enough to start interviewing with your startup.
Low-touch vs. high-touch engagement
It’s also a good idea to have a variety of touchpoints across all areas to keep candidates engaged. For example:
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Low touch – quick emails, texts, calls.
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Medium touch – chat over coffee, video call.
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High fives — happy hours, game nights, lunches with the team, coffees with other founders/engineers.
Rhythm of Development
As a best practice, set up touchpoints every 1-3 months, increasing the frequency if you feel someone is engaged. If you have candidates you are actively interviewing, aim to actively touchpoint at least once a week until they are eager to interview. Conversely, if candidates start to slow down, consider tapering off to every 3-6 months.
High-level best practices
Development best practices are primarily a continuation of the following best practices: First sales conversationHowever, it is spread across multiple touchpoints.
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Before touchpoint – Review your notes from previous touchpoints and have some next steps prepared as the conversation unfolds.
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Stay informed about your candidates – Every conversation is a chance to learn something new about a candidate, which helps you explain the opportunity in a way that is meaningful to them.
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Excited – Excitement is contagious. Share exciting updates about your business, products, key hires, funding, etc.
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Demonstrate momentum through multiple conversations – Always share exciting things you’re working on that will come to fruition in the coming weeks (revenue milestones, big-name accounts you’re closing, new product launches, etc.). We recommend sharing things you’re pretty sure you can achieve, or speaking in general terms, so you don’t over-promise and under-deliver. The next time you chat, bring up these things again to get multiple conversations going.
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Get the timing right – To get the timing right, I always try to find out if they’re starting to think about new opportunities. This helps me decide if my next touchpoint should be more direct or indirect. “How are things going for you at XYZ? Are you possibly starting to think about the next thing?”
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Always suggest the next step – Consider opening your calendar and scheduling a gig.
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If you feel like they’re ready or willing to take action, consider asking them directly: “Would you be interested in working together?” If they’re ready for an interview, great. If not, maybe a lunch with the team or coffee with a co-founder is the spark to get them going.
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If you feel like it needs a bit more effort, ask if they’d be willing to meet again in a few weeks/months, or suggest an indirect touchpoint (like stopping by for happy hour) to keep the momentum going.
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After touchpoint – While it’s fresh in your mind, write down what you learned and schedule a follow-up task to redo it at your next touchpoint. Consider sending a quick email or text after the fact, maybe sharing an interesting learning or letting them know you look forward to spending time together soon.
How Gem Grew its Unique Founding Team
At Gem, 25% of our recruits were already searching for jobs and we were able to convert them into candidates quickly. 75% of our founding team was passive and we had to nurture them over 3 months with multiple touchpoints. Some took over 9 months to finally convert into candidates.
Nurturing passive talent is hard work and takes time to see results. It’s important to be persistent and have a system to ensure you follow up. At Gem, we nurtured 100+ candidates from our network with consistent touchpoints every 1-3 months. It took us 3-6 months to hire our first 4 founding engineers. This was a combination of indirect touchpoints (coffee chats and happy hours) and direct touchpoints (lunches with the team and coffees with other co-founders and engineers). In total, it took 500 touchpoints.
But it’s definitely worth cultivating talent from your network: once they convert into candidates, they’ll perform better in the interview process and be much more likely to accept an offer because they’re in your network. And even if the timing isn’t right in the short term, many of the people you cultivate in the first 3-9 months will continue to convert into candidates in the mid-to-long term, making it gradually easier to hire the rest of your founding team.
Next
Once you have developed a strong candidate, you need to move on to the next step: the interview. Part 13 In the third installment of this series, we’ll cover everything from the interview process to reference checks, interview dos and don’ts, and everything in between.
Meanwhile…
