Fred Wilson has a great post today titled MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices. In it he highlights a number of quality strategies and tactics to build out the most crucial part of a startup: the team members. A couple years ago I was visiting the CEO of Appcelerator at his office in California and he told me how difficult it was to recruit great team members out there, so much so that they had brought on a full-time in-house recruiter, even though they were much smaller then.
When we started to grow faster than we could hire, we took the next step of bringing on an in-house recruiter. Here are some of the benefits we’ve found having an in-house recruiter:
- Focus, focus, focus — it’s awesome what one person can do when they have a single focus
- Reach — a dedicated recruiter has the time to cast a wider net to work with more outside, contingency-based recruiters, college career centers, potential candidates on LinkedIn, and more
- Process — many startups are averse to much structure, but hiring is the one area that you can’t cut corners, making a strong hiring process that much more important
When company growth outpaces the capacity to bring on new team members, in-house recruiters can really help close the gap and ramp up the hiring process, while maintaining quality.
What else? What are your thoughts on in-house recruiters for startup growth?
David Cummings on Startups 