I recently learnt of a hiring technique that is working very well for one of The Morpheus’ portfolio company (and while interviewing for them I wrote the previous article). They have been able to build a very impressive pipeline of potential candidates for various roles and all this without paying expensive fees to consultants.
Preparation
- Create a hiring team that would exclusively focus on hiring & do nothing else for minimum 1 month
- Have an HR person who would undertake search / make the initial contacts / handle scheduling & other logistics
- Have founders dedicate their time to share the company’s vision & check the skills of candidates
- Have domain experts to check for required skills
- Have some experienced advisers / entrepreneurs / investors / mentors to check if the guy would fit in a startup (people who understand culture of ur startup)
- Be prepared to put dedicated / high quality / honest effort
- Ensure the pre-sales material is in place :
- Impressive corporate website
- Well written job profiles
- Well thought of pitches to get candidates interested
- Crisp powerpoints abt the company
- Understand that the best talent is most likely not looking for new positions & hence ur initial pitch / pre-sales needs to be really good
Execution
- Buy a limited time access to naukari.com database
- Buy premium LinkedIn package for your HR person
- Make a list of companies / places you would like to hire from
- Find relavent people in those companies via linkedin & other sources
- Research them online / on social media
- Connect with them on social networks or use naukari.com database to find a old / new copy of resume of this guy
- Basically get hold of their cell number / personal email
- Have a person with good people skills (preferabally a girl) cold call this person
- This first contact should only focus on few things
- We are a exciting company
- We have hand picked ur profile from 100s of profiles
- Our founder would like to meet you for coffee
- Line up lots of focused interviews
- Ensure a high quality interview process that would look impressive to potential candidates
- Take real good care of candidates during the interview process
- meet them on agreed time
- keep them informed
- keep ur promises
- [Important] do get back to people who are rejected & inform them accordingly
- For candidates who look good, line up the followup interviews fast & complete the whole process swiftly
Hope fully this would allow you to build a good hiring pipeline & close some positions. Do share ur experiences & tips in comments.
Note: Thanks to Ankita & Annkur for sparking the idea for the post.