You’ve just closed a funding round and the promises you’ve made your investors are still ringing in your ears. Now it’s time to deliver. You need dozens of great people and you need them all yesterday!
But where to start? How do you find the people you want? How do you inspire them to join your company? How do you make sure you don’t hire a dud? How do you ensure you’re paying people the market rate? And how do you get them onboard and up to speed as soon as possible?
It’s easy to see why hiring quickly becomes the number one challenge for any scale-up. If you know your market and you have a disruptive product then the biggest barrier to your growth is almost certainly whether you can attract, engage and retain the talent you need to execute on the opportunity.
If you can’t hire the people you need or worse, if you hire the wrong people, then it will kill the growth of your company.
And to get this right in a matter of weeks, often from a standing start, is a big ask.
Faced with this challenge, most scale-ups throw money and resources at it. But that’s not a smart approach and it doesn’t guarantee results. If you don’t have a clear strategy and if you don’t have a method for improving your recruitment engine over time, then hiring will always feel like a burden that’s dragging you away from actually building your business.