How to recruit successfully?

Recruiting in the IT industry, especially for companies with a need for dynamic growth, is often a key challenge for organizations. It's never been easy, but in recent years it's become even more difficult. The pandemic has made the "remote first" approach a standard, opening up the possibility for candidates to browse through attractive offers from all over the world. No longer are we competing for talent with local companies, but with everyone from everywhere. How to recruit effectively and attract the right people to the organization?? These are very important questions, especially for smaller companies and start-ups, where a team often needs to be built quickly, but there is no recognizable employer brand or dedicated recruiters.

What should you do if you find yourself in such a situation? Take a deep breath and... build a process. Its elements will be very similar to the sales process — if you take a partnership approach to sales in your company and want to deliver real value to your customers, you will see many analogies here :). Books can be written about each of the stages of this process, so here I will describe them in a heavily abbreviated manner and try to distill the most important information.

Where to start?

In my opinion, there is one correct, but not always obvious answer to this question — from the organizational culture. There are many definitions of organizational culture. One of them, presented by L. Rue and P. Holland says that it is a set of beliefs and convictions propagated in a company regarding how to conduct business, how employees should behave and how they should be treated. According to A. Ko?miński, it can be described as the DNA of an organization, written in the consciousness of its members, resulting in a repetition of both individual and collective behaviors, perceptions, emotions, and attitudes.??

How does it relate to team building? In the context of recruitment, organizational culture acts as a guidepost for what kind of candidates we are looking for, and based on what criteria we will assess whether we have the right person in front of us — I'm not talking about skills, but being a true match for the team. This is crucial, especially for small companies, where the impact of an individual on the entire group is large and felt almost immediately. Fitting in at the value level increases the chance that a person will find their way into the organization, commit to it for the long term, and be involved in achieving a common goal in a way that is consistent with the company's standards. On the other hand, a strong and properly communicated organizational culture is a company differentiator that attracts suitable candidates like a magnet and can be a deciding argument when choosing an employer.

If you were just thinking “But we don't have an organizational culture yet”, I have good news, you do. You just need to discover it and then consciously continue to build and nurture it. Working on the culture is an ongoing process, but to start it you need to define the mission and vision, and together with your team find the values that you share and that support the fulfillment of the business goals. Then, so that they are not empty slogans on the wall, describe what behaviors should be behind specific values and which are inconsistent with them. And communicate this at every possible opportunity – both inside and outside the organization.

Candidate Profile

I will skip the basics that say you need to define the challenges, the scope of the tasks, the core competencies and the qualities needed to fulfill them or the salary range. Instead, I would like to focus on two important things that are often forgotten. The first is to confront the description we have developed with market realities. Start-ups mostly need people with a wide range of skills who will be able to perform various tasks depending on the current needs. Sometimes this causes us to have an idealized or even unrealistic candidate profile and look for people who don't exist or are far beyond the budget we have. If our clash with market realities turns out to be painful, it's worth considering which skills are critical and what the candidate can already learn on the job. We don't always need the skills in question, many times the potential to acquire them is enough. The second significant point is to take into account the current position of the company and where do you want to be in some time. The person we are looking for should be able to find his or her way in the current realities (in start-ups this often involves a lot of independence, enterprising mindset, high dynamics of change, a wide range of responsibilities), but also grow and develop with the organization on the way to the next level.

Candidate Persona.

The next step is to think about who our candidate is in a daily life. What motivates them, what do they fear, what frustrates them? What is their family status? What do they expect from the employer? How do they spend their free time, what interests them? Where do they frequent? How do they make decisions? What are their goals and priorities?

It's a good idea to involve the team in the search for answers to these questions, especially people who could be the model candidates (or who we would like to clone, if we could :). Information about what drove them to accept this particular offer, what is important to them, what do they like, what was their decision process, what offers in the market they considered competitive is a very valuable knowledge that can and should be used.

Value proposition.

Knowing what needs and motivations our potential candidates have, we can move on to the value proposition. This is the promise of benefits (tangible and intangible) that employees will receive from the organization in return for their work. The starting point should be to find out what the current employees see as value, how they rate the various aspects of working for the organization. This is how we will identify our strengths (and know what to improve) and ensure that the promise we make to potential candidates is credible.

When creating a value proposition, it's worth looking at the offers from the companies we compete with for talent —? not to copy them, but to have a reference to the market and look for what makes us different and is our advantage. I will suggest that such a differentiator will definitely be the organizational culture :). What else? Perhaps an interesting product, an experienced team, working with the latest technologies, flexible working hours and... this list can be endless. Don't forget to transparently communicate the salary — even if you don't have a high budget, you don't want to waste your and the candidate’s time, for whom it is far too low. In addition, in the IT industry, providing a salary range is standard, without it most candidates will ignore the offer.

Sources of candidates.

We can categorize candidates as passive (they don't browse ads, don't send out CVs) and active (they are on the lookout, they send out their CVs and respond to ads). If we are looking for an experienced person, usually our target is the first group. The best sources of passive candidates will be recommendations from current employees, as well as directly reaching out to people who meet the requirements and encouraging them to participate in the recruitment (known as direct search). If you don't have someone on your team who can source talent like this, then there are two solution — hiring an experienced recruiter or using external support (agencies specializing in IT recruiting or freelancers). In such case, is it worth to publish ads? Yes, it is. There is always a chance that among active candidates, there is someone who meets our expectations and will apply for the offer. In addition, online ads help build employer brand awareness. However, it cannot be our only source of candidates.

Preparing the offer.

Now we know who we are looking for, where we will look and what we can offer. The next step is to write the offers we will publish. It won't be a single message, because a different form has an ad on the portal, another one is on the career tab, and we will communicate differently with a passive candidate we found on LinkedIn. A good offer should contain all the most important information about the company, company culture and position, as well as a clear value proposition tailored to the needs of our prospect. It is essential that the offer conveys the company's unique vibe and the communication style is similar to that of the company's day-to-day (if we are on the first name basis, don't write “Dear Sir” in the offer) and simply encourages the right people to talk to us.

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Verification of candidates.

Now we should plan what and how many recruitment stages we need, who from the team will be involved in each stage, and who is responsible for the final hiring decision and on what basis it is made. It is important that the questions asked during the recruitment process are standardized (everyone gets the same set) — then we can compare candidates with each other. It is worth to make sure that one person from the company coordinates the entire process — arranging meetings, providing feedback. This will help avoid chaos and have a positive impact on the candidate experience. On why the candidate experience is so important and how to make it positive, Maja Gojtowska writes in her excellent book “Candidate Experience. Still a Candidate or Already a Customer”. I recommend reading this to anyone who has any contact with recruitment.?

Collecting data and drawing conclusions.

The easiest place to start is by choosing an ATS system that generates good reports. What is worth measuring? Certainly the average time it takes from the start of the recruitment process to hiring a candidate. This allows you to better plan recruitment and start it well in advance. It is also vital to check how long we “keep” candidates in the recruitment funnel and ensure that we reduce this time as much as possible. Conversion between successive stages of the funnel is also important — then we know how many people need to apply for us to be successful, and we can predict how much of our team's time will be spent on a given recruitment process and its various stages. It's also a good idea to check the effectiveness of candidate sources and invest in those that are most effective. I also encourage you to measure NPS among candidates after recruitment. All you need is a survey with three short questions: how likely (0-10 scale) a candidate would recommend participating in our company's recruitment process to a friend, what we are doing well, and what we can change/improve. This allows us to improve the process on an ongoing basis and therefore hire people more effectively.

Now you have a sense of what are the following steps in the recruitment process. In reality, they are more complicated than in this article. Each of them is a broad topic that demands in-depth study. If you intend to scale the team dynamically, probably the wisest option is to hire a dedicated person or use external support. In the case of slow growth, you can manage on your own with the help of your current team, but this will require the time commitment of different people. Regardless of the path chosen, it is important for the founder to consciously build the organizational culture. A strong culture will not only attract the right people, but will also help create a team where people want to work and stay for the long term to achieve goals together — and this is much more challenging than recruitment :).