10 Recruitment Secrets for Taking a SaaS Company From 10 to 80 People

After a decade in the Rec Agency game, I shifted gears and began my career in Talent Acquisition in January 2021. Determined to hit the ground running, I sought out valuable tips and advice to excel in my new role. And while I came across basic helpful pointers, they didn't fully prepare me for the realities of the role. As always, the best way to learn is through direct experience.?

So, drawing on my time at Lunio, I’ve put together 10 practical insights for those making a similar career move, or for current Talent Acquisition Managers seeking a fresh perspective. These are the things I wish I’d known when starting out - the pitfalls, the time-savers, and the pragmatic solutions. If I’ve missed anything important, let me know in the comments!

What “good looks like” changes (usually in 12-18 month cycles)

This typically will align with funding rounds and also the industry average tenures for employees in the tech industry (especially SaaS startups). Some people will change roles, be promoted, or potentially seek challenges elsewhere.

When you’re a 10-30 person business you often hire those who get stuff off the ground and are happy to help with responsibilities outside what is typically associated with their job titles. As you grow from 35+, the business has to identify and hire specialists in their given fields.?

Your company will scale, and its needs for certain skills and experience will change too. So what “good” looks like in a candidate will naturally evolve.

When going through a requisition process with a hiring manager, make sure you emphasize this so they’re thinking in 12-18 month blocks. Not what good looks like in 3 years… it’ll streamline the process and reduce your Time To Hire - I promise!

What "good looks like" varies greatly across all hiring managers in your organisation?

Your task here is to find the commonalities between hiring managers and then make an objective criteria that everyone can assess against - fitting with your company values, key competencies and experience/skills needed for the next 12-18 month cycle (as mentioned above). Values, competencies, and criteria will change every 12-18 months, so be prepared to adapt.?

TTH, TTF, CPH? is important, but Quality of Hire is where your focus should be?

You’ll likely become blinded by Time to Hire, Time to Fill and Cost Per Hire metrics. You naturally want to impress: be cost-effective, find great candidates quickly and create an internal hiring process that is effective and fit for purpose. But make sure you’ve created a Quality of Hire metric. Something that measures if expectations have been aligned between hiring managers and successful hires, culture add to the business, productivity in role, retention, ramp-up times etc. You’ll learn so much that will help validate what a good hire looks like in the future and it can become a repeatable process.

ATS yourself up ASAP?

Your applicant tracking system is the backbone of your entire operation. Don’t try to cut corners with an existing tool the business might be using (Hubspot, Salesforce, Notion) etc. Get something specific to your needs, with great UX that hiring managers who don’t live and breathe talent every day can use seamlessly. Try to automate as much as you can, without losing the key human elements of what a TA person should be doing. Make sure you use an ATS that properly tracks hiring analytics (application source and ROI, conversion rates, pipeline conversion etc) and has a great support function with fast response times.

Create a thorough new requisition process that questions hiring managers?

Your hiring managers will want to hire quickly and sometimes may miss out on some important commercial details, or fail to consider the impact hiring an external may have on your existing team. Create a process where hiring managers have to flesh out their thinking and commercial reasoning for a hire, ideally before any call to uncover what good looks like. Will this new hire actually solve the problem they’re facing? Or do underlying processes and procedures need to be reviewed before the team expands? You may find probing questions like these may highlight some gaps in their rationale which could completely change the scope of the role. An age-old cliche - slow down to speed up!?

And that tees me up nicely for my next point…

Don’t start the recruitment process until you’re 100% sure your stakeholders know what they want.?

An amazing piece of advice I received when I first made the step over was to never lose that “Agency edge” when it comes to the requisition process and to know your value as a partner. Going to market for roles that aren’t quite ready to be hired or haven’t gone through the full requisition process has a detrimental impact on your brand. Candidates see the role has been open for 3 months longer than it should have ever been and the dreaded “why haven’t you hired someone yet” question comes up during the early stages. Not a good look

Get as much info as you possibly can from stakeholders so you can impress candidates at the initial interview stages??

IMO it’s integral that as a recruitment partner you know a lot of key details about your business, the specific team, and the role itself. Often as the intro stage, TAs set the scene for what calibre of people are within a business -? nail it and you start with a bang!

E.g. You impress a VP Sales with your knowledge of annual contract values (ACVs) across different customer segmentations or your net revenue retention (NRR) rate -? it only creates further intrigue in the opportunity. I guarantee it’ll reduce your Time to Hire.?

Recruitment Agencies aren’t your enemy?

You will need them at some point. One of your main metrics as a TA is cost savings associated with hiring, so you’ll always be targeted against Cost Per Hire. But Time to Hire and Time to Fill is just as important - the intangible costs of interviewing and missed productivity for interviewers will be massive if you don’t hire the right people quickly. So that needs to be weighed against the costs of working with a rec agency. If they can half your TTH/TTF, then it’s worth it.?

Invest in a video interviewing tool to help with “high volume positions”?

Roles that typically draw 100s of applications will need this. Rightfully, you’ll want to pride yourself on offering a great candidate experience to every applicant - that means reviewing each application fairly and responding to them. But you won’t be able to do this via the typical process when you have 100+ applications to assess.?

We used an agency when we first hired a group of SDRs. It was costly and out of the 5 who joined, only 1 stayed and is now flourishing. Feedback on “candidate experience” with this agency was poor. So we tried a different angle. Video-based interviewing. The right tool can extend your capacity as a recruiter and still offer a great candidate experience, but at a fraction of the cost., Credit to the team at Willo? for this!

Train your hiring team in the art of interviewing

You can create the best end-to-end interview process out there… but if your hiring managers/interviewers don’t know how to interview - you’re f*cked! Delivering an amazing candidate experience, highlighting and removing unconscious bias, and ensuring your team understands the basic legalities of interviewing is TA 101.

If there's anything I've missed, or any alternative opinions out there, I'd love to hear from you!