Scaling Your Startup Fast With Less Hassle - Your Options

Author: Brianna Rooney

Startups face a daunting task: how do you grow your company, develop a cutting-edge product, win over customers, AND scale up all at the same time? It's a challenge that keeps even the most seasoned entrepreneurs up at night. But if you're serious about success, there's one area you can't afford to neglect: hiring.

Hiring can be daunting and expensive, but hiring the wrong people can be even more costly. "A single bad hire costs companies an average of $14,900 and for some companies, the cost of a bad hire can be as high as $240,000" (Zippia). "While a bad hire carries with it considerable financial waste, the impact on a team’s morale is arguably more damaging, as productivity suffers across the board with the position left unfilled or filled by someone who’s a poor fit" (Zippia). These statistics illustrate just how crucial hiring is to your startup.

"A single bad hire costs companies an average of $14,900 and for some companies, the cost of a bad hire can be as high as $240,000" (Zippia).

Hiring Options?

As a Leader of a successful startup company, you are an expert in the service or product that your company is offering. This does not necessarily mean that you are an expert in hiring. Since hiring is critical, but you are not an expert, what do you do?

There are four options to address hiring within your company:?

• Do your own ad-hoc hiring through referrals and network connections
• Hire an internal recruiter
• Utilize recruiting agencies and pay associated fees for each placement
• Engage an RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) company

The first two options are self-explanatory, so this article will focus on the available external options, contingency, and RPO. There are pros and cons to each option, and both will allow you to bring strong talent to your company quickly. Below we’ll take a closer look at those two options and illustrate how, if you wish to build and scale your talent department quickly and with less hassle on your side, the most recommended option would be RPO.

Contingency

There is no way to replace experience and the specialized knowledge related to talent acquisition without using a recruiter. While agency recruiters are able to find strong talent, they are just filling roles and typically not helping with the hiring process as a whole. Agency recruiters' commitment is to fill the role. They typically don’t prioritize cultural fit and alignment as an internal or embedded recruiter will.?

Pros?

• Speed: Utilizing a contingency agency can provide a quicker hiring process compared to a full-time recruiter, as they are specialized in finding candidates quickly.
• Niche network: A contingency agency has a specialized network that can provide access to a broader pool of potential candidates, especially those who may not be actively looking for work.
• Cost-effectiveness: Hiring a full-time recruiter can be expensive with all the added perks and benefits given, whereas contingency agencies are only paid when they successfully place a candidate, making it a more cost-effective option for companies with less hiring demand.
• Flexibility: Contingency agencies allow for flexibility in hiring needs. Companies can use them as needed, without committing to a long-term agreement or salary for a full-time recruiter.
• Strong closing skills: Great contingency recruiters can provide a candidate that have been pre-screened and motivators identified, which saves time and resources for companies during the hiring process and can strengthen the offer to close ratio.?

Cons

• Disjointed processes: You must handle some of the hiring process. Some agencies will help you schedule the candidate and present offers to the candidates and close deals, while others will not. If the agency handles parts of the process and internal resources handle parts, this can disrupt the candidate experience.?
• Vetting process: It is recommended to be selective about which agency you bring on, so you will need to vet each potential partner.
• Overwhelmed pipeline: Just because you don’t pay them until they make a placement, doesn’t mean you bring on as many as possible. Too many agency partners could mean still being inundated with candidates, making it difficult to review them all.?
• Agency management frustrations: Managing contingency partners can be rather time-consuming if you don’t have the right ones.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing

RPO companies are a plug-and-play solution that allows your company’s hiring to ramp up very quickly. The primary benefit of using RPO over a traditional contingency agency is that you will now have hiring experts as part of your team. Utilizing an RPO is similar to hiring an internal recruiter because they become one of you by embracing your company culture, cultivating relationships with hiring managers, and creating and implementing hiring processes for future use.?

Pros

• Invested Recruiter: Embedded recruiters from RPOs become invested in your company, ensuring they are hiring the best fit for your organization and teams.
• Money Savings: They help save money because they do not charge per hire.
• Data and Analytics: RPOs use data and analytics to create reports for each stage of the hiring process, including KPIs such as the number of applicants, stages of the interview process, time to fill, and hires made.
• Customizable: Offer customized recruitment solutions that can effectively adapt to the ever-changing needs of an organization.
• Flexible to Business Needs: Can pivot with your needs, increasing or decreasing team size based on the hiring needs of the organization, without the need to lay off team members. RPOs are great at adapting to their client's needs and economic trends.

Cons

• Ramp-up Period: There will be a ramp-up period, but not as much as onboarding a new employee. RPO recruiters will need time to familiarize themselves with the specific culture and values of the organization.?
• Access to internal tools: The RPO members working with your company will need to be given access to your internal systems and have an internal email address created.?
• Knowledge gathering phase: Initially, an RPO recruiter may not have the same level of understanding and knowledge of the organization's business objectives as internal recruiters.
• Loss of Control: You will need to develop a level of trust and rapport with the recruiter, as you will be giving up some control over the hiring process to the RPO as they take over the hiring responsibilities.
• Hand-off Challenges: At the end of the engagement, the knowledge of your recruitment processes will leave with the recruiter. Make sure the company you choose has a handoff plan.?

Why TalentPerch?

If you decide to enlist an agency or an RPO company, you want to work with the best of the best. TalentPerch is an on-demand recruiting solution for all your hiring needs with over 35 years of collective experience. We can provide sourcing support, work on a contingency basis, or, if you wish to scale your team quickly, we can provide a team of recruiters to build and support your talent acquisition functions. From a full-scale build-out of Talent Acquisition processes, and an applicant tracking system (ATS) implementation to writing job descriptions, partnering with and training your hiring managers, to sourcing top-tier candidates, this will be an instant add for your company.?

If you’re ready to build world-class hiring processes and hire top talent, to help scale your company, learn more about the services we offer, and why you should choose TalentPerch, reach out to [email protected].

#rpo #rposervices #recruitmentprocessoutsourcing #contingency #recruiting #recruitingservices #startupcompany #scalingup #grow