If you feel like making hires is always done in fire drill fashion, you are not alone. It’s especially hard to recruit well when you are small or you are not a hyper-growth startup. If you think about it, the reason recruiting feels like an emergency is simple:

 

 

 

 

Since we don’t hire every day, we don’t give it every-day priority.

Rule 1: Always be recruiting.

Rule 2: See rule #1.

The single biggest recruiting mistake is stopping. Why is it a mistake to stop recruiting?

• It takes lead time to restart the recruiting engine.  It takes time to push buttons, refresh content, and post jobs.

• It costs money to restart the engine. You’ll have to sponsor jobs to get candidates quickly.

• You will not build a talent community,which further increases future recruiting costs.

• Managers will retain poor performers because they don’t have confidence there will be a new person quickly.

• You’ll fail to exploit opportunity if you can’t staff up quickly.

You don’t have to have every job in the company posted all the time. There are reasonable limits. But you should always be recruiting for positions like:

Sales, Engineering, Production (people who make the product, provide service or bill hours), and Administrative Support

So, what do you do if someone applies and you just can’t hire them? It’s easy:

“That position is filled. Would it be OK if I reached out to you if the job opens in the future?”

Most candidates will happily say, “Yes,” and when you do go to make a hire, you’ll have people you can reach out to start the process immediately.

 

Mike Seidle
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