Welcome to part 9, where we discuss recruiting strategies that work well for larger companies but not so well for smaller startups.
Unfortunately, most other tactics that work for larger companies don’t work when recruiting early stage teams because they don’t have a talent brand — developing a talent brand is a long-term investment they don’t have the time or resources to make.
Inbound Applications and Career Sites
Many founders think that the first step in recruiting is to set up a career site and post a few job listings. But most of the time, this is a waste of time. If you’re a small startup, no one knows you exist. So how are candidates going to find your career site?
What’s worse, even if candidates do find your career site, the chances of them finding you are slim. right Candidates. We don’t recommend spending a lot of time on a career site to recruit your early stage team, or even considering not having one at all. At Gem, we didn’t have a career site until we were 40 employees and had raised a Series B.
The only exception to this rule is if you’re starting a company that many candidates know about – a fast-growing B2C social app, or a company started by the founder of a hugely successful open source project – but realistically, that’s not 99% of startups.
As a litmus test for prioritizing a career site, ask yourself how many applicants you currently have (e.g. inquiries to info@ or work email) If you get no applications without a career site, then you probably won’t get any with a career site.
Campus Recruiting
For startups, campus recruiting may not be the highest ROI use of time.
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It takes multiple campus visits to feel at home at a new school, and it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: you need to hire one really good recruit to earn the trust of the rest of the student body.
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It takes a long time to start. Many of our best students secure full-time offers in the fall but don’t start until the following summer (9 months away). We need people now.
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The most successful campus recruiting strategies include an internship program. An internship program helps evaluate students while giving them valuable experience and exposure to what it’s like to work at a company. Without an internship program, your hiring rate would likely be significantly lower because new graduates would know less about startups. An internship program makes campus recruiting a bigger investment with a longer payback period.
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Finally, most new graduates will be relatively inexperienced, so you will spend a lot of time training them.
Considering how long it takes to get hired by a school, start delays, and increased time, campus recruiting may not be the best bet for recruiting your early-stage team.
The big exception is if you’re a recent graduate. In that case, you should definitely recruit people you knew at school. But the best way to do that is to: Obtaining a First-Order Connection From your school Developing passive talent from networksAn on-campus booth may have a lower ROI.
Meetups and Industry Events
Meetups are incredibly diverse, and there are many reasons why it’s hard for startups to recruit from them.
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Industry conferences where the sponsor sends a few department members are almost always a waste of time. The quality of the talent varies.
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Not all founders have the right personality – you need a very charismatic person to start a conversation at a conference or meeting.
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You may not have the credibility to recruit at top meetups. The best meetups are often small and highly specialized. If you’re not an expert on the topic, it’s hard to gain the trust and respect of attendees.
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Even if you do manage to find a great meetup that you can trust, it’s unlikely you’ll get hired right away – again, the best meetups usually have low attendance (e.g. they’re not industry conferences) and attendees aren’t there to get hired.
Meetups are an effective way for big companies to build their employment brand, and it’s a long-term strategy that pays off over years, but as a small startup, we need to focus on recruiting our team now – we might not even be around in 5 years, so don’t put it off.
Next
Can you believe it? Soon Recruiting Guide Part 10In the next chapter, we’ll provide some real-world examples of how Gem recruited its initial founding team, including its strategy and where they actually found each member.
Meanwhile…
