Building a business from the ground up comes with a wide range of opportunities and challenges. It can take a lot of time, resources, and hard work to turn an idea into a sustainable venture. However, one of the most significant challenges businesses face as they begin to scale is ensuring they maintain a great team along the way.
Since many startup businesses are often focused on uncovering funding opportunities or prioritizing product development, it can be easy to minimize the importance of creating scalable recruitment strategies. However, the more an organization grows, the more critical this process becomes.
Below are some practical strategies you can use to ensure your hiring practices stay in alignment with your ongoing growth plans.
Focus on Your Company Culture
Whenever a business goes through a period of fast growth, both advantages and disadvantages can come along with it. One of these disadvantages is that the company culture can sometimes fail to evolve along with the business.
However, since a great company culture is a crucial element for increasing staff retention, maintaining a focus on your business’s core principles and values as you scale is essential. Taking this step ensures you’re always hiring individuals who align well with the current culture you have and will contribute to improving it over time.
Consider Batch Hiring
One way to scale your team more quickly is to invest in batch hiring. In these scenarios, your focus is on hiring for more than one position all at once in similar categories. You can then simplify the recruitment process by combining your training and onboarding processes into a span of a few weeks.
Another aspect of batch hiring is to schedule candidate interviews all within the same day or week. This allows your HR teams to focus strictly on recruitment activities while being able to make multiple hiring decisions around the same timeframe.
Develop Personas for Candidates
A good strategy to use when starting your hiring process is to create candidate personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal applicants when posting a new job. This is very similar to the process that marketing professionals follow when they try to define the audiences they’re targeting.
Having candidate persona profiles pre-established allows you to stipulate any required industry experience, credentials, or skill sets your hiring managers should be looking for. You can also incorporate certain personality traits necessary based on your company culture or your overall level of flexibility.
These personas can make your hiring processes much more efficient and unbiased, helping you to scale your staffing capabilities throughout the year.
Leverage an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
As your business scales its hiring processes, investing in an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) can help you stay more efficient. These tools centralize all hiring activities into an easy-to-use platform that makes it easy to organize, engage with, and track job candidates.
These tools can be invaluable when trying to create an efficient talent pipeline while also helping your business to reduce the amount of time and resources spent on hiring new staff members. The great thing about these solutions is that they also blend seamlessly into current technology stacks and can help HR teams stay on task.
Use Pre-Employment Skill Tests
An important aspect of scaling your recruitment processes is to limit the number of times you need to go back to the hiring well. Hiring a candidate only to find out they really aren’t the great fit for the organization after all can be a time-consuming and expensive realization.
To minimize this from happening, identifying the best candidates from the very beginning is important. Pre-employment skill tests are a great way to ensure this by allowing you to evaluate the skills and abilities of applicants before signing any agreements. No different than hiring a home renovation company, by thoroughly vetting the individuals you decide to work with, you’ll make sure both parties are satisfied moving forward.
Depending on your business and the roles you’re hiring for, these tests can be simple language or cognitive tests as well as technical exams. While these tests should be built with a candidate’s personal time in mind, they can be an effective way to filter out individuals who may not be able to meet certain qualifications you’re looking for.
Shortlist Your Best Candidates
It can sometimes be overwhelming when you’re trying to hire for new positions and you’ve received an excessive amount of resumes. While this may seem like a “good” problem to have, the reality is, your business is on the clock to source the right candidates and interview them fast before they move on to other opportunities.
To do this effectively, you can apply a number of strategies to shortlist your best candidates and minimize the amount of time before you get back to applicants. There are now many AI-enabled software tools available that you can leverage to help quickly comb through each resume you’ve received to look for ideal matches based on your established criteria.
This can be a highly effective way to expedite your interview processes and help you hire and train new employees faster.
Scale Your Hiring Processes as Your Business Grows
As your business grows, scaling your employees effectively is absolutely critical for long-term success. Knowing the right strategies to scale your hiring process not only saves resources but also ensures you’re building a team that will actively help drive your company’s growth moving forward.
Author Information
Author Name: Dalip Jaggi
Author Bio:
Entrepreneur, technologist, and passionate business leader sum up the core of Dalip Jaggi, co-founder of Revive Real Estate, a PropTech company with a goal to democratize house flipping. Since its 2020 inception, Revive has become the smartest solution for homeowners across the nation to maximize their home’s value.
