Track candidates in one system and use specialist recruiters

1. The constraint and what graduates it

Recruiting means finding the people who will work for your company, and hiring them.

Item	At this stage
The constraint	Finding good people takes so long that they take jobs somewhere else. Too many roles sit open at once, and there is no single place that holds every candidate and the step each one has reached
To graduate	Install an applicant tracking system (an ATS) that holds every open role and where everyone is in the process, and pay specialized recruiting firms to keep up

What the mess looks like. A multiple-step interview process should already be in place by now. What has changed is the volume. With six roles open, or 15, one role is at the second interview, another at the third, another at screening; four candidates sit at one step, one at the second interview, one at the first. Across all of it, keeping things organized becomes a nightmare, and meanwhile the good people go to the companies that know how to run hiring. You start to notice things slip through the cracks. You ask where a candidate is and hear they had an interview on Monday, and it is Friday; or that their interview is scheduled for Monday: seven days of waiting.

2. Why a tracking system

Think of the system as the same thing a sales pipeline is for your sales team: a pipeline for talent. You already have a funnel that generates leads; now you have a funnel that generates talent, and software that makes it easier is how you formalize it.

A lot of the times, you can set up your customer relationship software to double as the tracking system; that has been tried in one practice here. It is never going to be as good as a system built for the job, out of the box.

No tracking system is perfect, and no customer relationship system is either. There are no perfect solutions in business, and that holds for literally everything, the people you hire included. You can still be better than you are right now.

3. Why specialist recruiters

At this size your team will be bad at finding people for a lot of roles. You maybe have one recruiter on the team; maybe you use a general recruiting firm. Moving into 50 to 99 people, you go from hiring a lot of generalists to hiring far more specialists, and specialists are harder to find: each role wants a specific skill set, and the people who have it are not as general as the people you hired before.

What a lot of people do at this point is hire more recruiters of their own to help. The answer offered is no. There are specialized firms that find only one kind of person: some only find financial controllers for healthcare companies; some only find sales reps who sell in one price range. They exist for very specific roles. It makes no sense to bring people onto your team to recruit for a need that will probably resolve itself in two years.

4. Choosing the system

Choosing one is like choosing a customer relationship system: get it wrong and it will damage your business. That has happened in one practice here, too many times. Look for these.

1. An easy user experience. This one is called the most important, and it is said from the founder's seat, not as someone who loves human resources and recruiting. If the system is not easy for the rest of the company to use, if it only suits recruiters or people who are good with technology, it will not get used. It is just like a customer relationship system that looks incredibly complicated: how is a 19-year-old salesperson going to use it? He is not; he will use something else, or nothing. Find one that simplifies the workflow for the recruiters, the candidates and the interviewers. Inside it you will have the people who run interviews, the hiring managers and the recruiters, and sometimes the candidates themselves.
2. Integration with what you already have. The habit described is always to look for one that connects to the payroll system, the human resource information system and any other customer relationship software in use. The more it connects to the tools you already use, the better.
3. Automation. Look for résumé parsing (a lot of systems now have AI that reads the résumés for you); interview scheduling (the system prompts you to schedule and can offer candidates open time slots); and AI-driven candidate matching, which saves you a ton of time by going through every candidate and naming the top five it thinks meet your needs. If you can find one with automation like that built in, do. With this many people on the team, more process protects you from people's mistakes. Your recruiters are probably spending a lot of time reviewing résumés, because so many roles are open, and that is not the most valuable use of their time. If you can automate it, that is ideal.
4. Analytics and reporting. You want actionable data on hiring and on how recruiting performs: how many résumés you have, how many you take to a screening call, how many people pass the screen, how many go from screening to the first interview, and how many pass it. As with a sales pipeline, you want to tune every step. The data tells you where it breaks. Does nobody pass your interviews, because the team is bad at interviewing? Or do people pass and then all get cut at the final interview, because nobody checked their skill fit, and the hiring manager finds at the end that this person cannot do the role? You keep working through that pipeline the way you would a sales pipeline, and until it is in a system, that is really hard to do.
5. Scalability and support. Pick one that grows with the business and has really good customer support and training. That saves you from hiring somebody just to manage a platform, which does not grow revenue. The stated preference is always to get as much support as possible.

Buy for the headcount ahead of you. For people systems, human resources and recruiting alike, pick one that scales with the number of people you will be hiring. Ask how many people you will have in the next 18 to 24 to 36 months; if you do not, you will have to trade up again. Sometimes people pick a tool that is really good for small businesses, or for businesses below 100 people, and outgrow it within a year. It was simply the wrong tool. Pick one you have room to grow into.

When the job board's tracker stops being enough. A job board such as Indeed has a tracking system built in, so if you use it now you already have one, inside that platform. At this stage it is no longer enough. You are hiring for more specialized roles, looking for people on LinkedIn and head-hunting them, and the job board's tracker only holds candidates who came through the job board. Candidates from specialized firms are not dropped into it: you have to enter them somewhere, or they get lost.

5. Picking specialist recruiters

Relationships with a lot of different recruiters are thought, in one practice here, to be the reason teams there could grow quickly. When a role comes up, there is a suite of recruiters to pick from, each known to be good at a kind of role. The business has always had its own recruiters too; for special hiring needs it is really useful to know whom to go to for great candidates.

Step 1: Find the roles you hire for most. Ask what you hire for continuously. For you it might be sales reps; it might be customer service; it might be coaches; whatever it might be, work out what you hire for most, and whether a specialized firm makes sense for it.

The caveat: a role that is incredibly specific to your business, one other businesses do not demand, is not one a recruiter can fill. Say you are a fitness and nutrition coach looking for nutrition coaches who know keto: no recruiter will find those for you, and you will have to find them yourself. Sales reps, customer service reps and technology people are roles recruiters can help with. When a role is specific to the company rather than to the job, you might have to take the search in-house and work it out yourselves.

Step 2: Start the search for a recruiter. Before you can work with one you have to find one, and if you are not good at finding people, you might struggle to find recruiters. Search, and ask for referrals to recruiters who work in the job market you are hiring in. The best way found in one practice here is to ask friends: which recruiters and firms do you use, do you have any specialists, has anyone helped you with event roles, customer service roles, sales roles? Your network is the best place to start.

LinkedIn is the second-best place to start, and is called the best place to find recruiters. Post or look there for recruiters and they will find you; you do not need a following. The reason offered: most of the time, when a company stops growing, recruiters are the first people let go. So contract recruiters are a dime a dozen: tired of being fired all the time, they end up working for themselves, for hire.

Step 3: Check their track record and results. Ask for their placement success rate: when they receive a request to fill a job, how often they fill it. If you ask for nothing else, ask for this one number, and look for someone whose rate is high. The best have a rate of 100, and that is absolutely possible: they turn down jobs they know they cannot fill, because they know what they are good at.

Ask, too, for ratings and client testimonials. A lot of times, before working with a recruiter, the practice described is to ask to speak with someone who has worked with them: how are the people they recruited for you working out, and what was working with them like? You want someone who can find the right candidate and who will also communicate along the way. Recruiting is not handing over what you need and getting it back; it is a constant conversation to stay on the same page about the candidate you need, just as you would with an internal team.

Step 4: Ask about their process and expectations. Above all, you want them fast: the best candidates are gone in something like nine days. Most of the time, in one practice here, recruiters are picked by how quickly they respond. If they are not fast in how they communicate with you, there is no way they will be fast with candidates, and the best candidates will be gone.

The same goes for how they treat you. To them, you are a lead. How they work you as a lead, how they talk with you and organize your calls, is exactly how they will work the candidate they are selling you later. It is an easy litmus test: what they do with you is how they will act for you.

Then try before you buy. The last thing you can do, and one much favored in one practice here, is a trial. Before you commit to a contract or sign anything, give them one role to find. Make it a minor role, not one that is very important and that the business needs to survive, so you can test them out.

6. The function in one line

It took too long to hire good people, so they were hired elsewhere; there were too many open roles and no way to track the candidates. So you install a tracking system, and you bring in specialized recruiters to speed things up.

7. Where this sits

• The multi-step interview this system tracks: the screen and interview at five to nine people are on SOP 149, section 9, and splitting the fits across interviewers for higher roles is on SOP 163 — Head-hunt and interview for higher-level roles.
• Messaging higher-level people on LinkedIn yourself, with its paid tools: SOP 163, section 4.
• Paying your own team for referrals, measured against what an agency charges: SOP 152, section 8.
• Buying skills from outside against training your own people: SOP 44 — Buy or build talent.
• Choosing the human resource information system this one connects to: SOP 173 — Choose a human-resource information system.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• The price range of what the sales reps sell, in section 3's example. The figures given read "$5 and $110,000". Not established on this page.
• Which tracking system to buy. Beyond the job board's built-in tracker, no system is named. Not established on this page.
• What a recruiter charges, and on what contract. This page gives no figure for a recruiter's fee.

9. What this page does not cover

Employment law is not covered on this page.