As a startup, you are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to recruiting. You need to hire the best people as quickly as possible to grow your business. However, you don’t have an entire team to handle recruiting for you. The founder of the company is usually the one who is also trying to run the company at the same time. So while the founder is trying to interview candidates and decide who to hire, the founder is also trying to fix bugs at midnight, deal with investors, etc. It’s hard work. Large companies have huge teams to manage recruiting, and they also have a lot of internal mobility. As a founder, you do all of this yourself.
Speed is your only advantage. The product, sales organization, and engineers are some of the things that matter most to you as a founder because they can help your organization grow as quickly as possible. And, when that number starts to drop significantly for you as a founder, it’s often because you’ve started adding a lot of processes in order to find more people. All this with the aim of adding even more process just to be able to hire more people, and so on. Needless to say, at the end of the day, some parts of the hiring process are just plain slow and manual. And these things are not going to scale well for you as a founder. This is where hiring AI software for recruitment comes in.
The question is how to choose the best AI recruitment software solution for you and your growing organization?
The answer is to source candidates without hiring a recruiter and select those who are worth your time. as founder.
Sourcing that evolves without recruiters
So even if these recruiting tools don’t find 100% of all relevant candidates, they can certainly sift through large amounts of relevant information to find sourcing leads that you might have otherwise missed. In addition to finding new leads, founders can also use automation for cold outreach. Rather than sending a generic email such as “I hope you’re doing well” and then listing reasons why a candidate might be a good fit for the company, let an automated recruiting tool help you. For example, automated recruiting tools can create personalized emails based on information found on a candidate’s LinkedIn or GitHub profile (i.e., an open source contribution that the candidate worked on). These types of emails can achieve high response rates due to the personalization involved.
A projection that saves the founder time
Instead of filtering resume after resume of underqualified candidates, recruiting software will allow you to sift through resumes and rank candidates based on their fit with a job’s core skills. Additionally, it will summarize candidates’ previous work to make it easier for you to get an idea of the type of work they can do.
Pipeline visibility for distributed teams
As your startup grows and hires more people, it can become very difficult to manage recruiting as a founder. This is especially true when multiple people in the company are hiring for similar positions. In order to maintain control, it is very important to control your recruitment with a centralized pipeline. This will prevent your CTO from interviewing the same candidate for the same position that your sales manager is interviewing them for. This will also prevent you from forgetting to include a top candidate in your calendar and then ghosting them.
The criteria that really matter for startups
Recruitment software is made for large companies. Most large companies have very complex recruiting processes. They have plenty of staff to service their many locations. And they can afford to spend more time and money finding the right people for their open jobs. Large companies can even afford to bring in people for numerous rounds of interviews. In addition to this, they may also retain them for extended periods depending on the company’s deliberations.
Many startups abuse big recruiting software. Their mistake is that they look at the feature list of many recruiting software and think that the more features a software has, the better it must be for their small startup. But most recruiting software wasn’t designed for startups. In this article, we’ll look at four criteria every startup should use when looking for the right recruiting software for their business.
Return on value versus number of features
Demoing all the recruiting features of an enterprise-class recruiting tool only to realize it didn’t match your timing is not a cost-effective approach. For example, Workday is an example of a tool that could take six months to implement, in addition to costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement. This wouldn’t map well to the time-to-value if you were pressed for time. Rather, a startup recruiting tool should be able to be implemented to start adding value within hours to days of implementation. And it shouldn’t require a full-time administrator. The tool must be able to be configured to work with the startup’s existing technology stack. Typically, this includes tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and an existing applicant tracking (AT) system like Lever or Ashby.
Pricing for Startups
Be aware that per-user pricing models are typically aimed at larger businesses with more than 100 users. As an early-stage or early-stage business with a low margin, be wary of high recruiting software prices. Look for tools with transparent pricing models that scale based on your usage. This can include information such as number of logins per month, number of job postings per month, etc. Some recruiting providers even list startup-friendly pricing tiers (e.g. companies under $2 million in funding) that have significantly reduced their prices for you.
Integration with current technology stack
Startups are carried out in the startup environment. It is common that no single technology stack exists at any point in time. Additionally, recruiting tools create additional workflows for daily tasks, which creates additional friction compared to what the founders can manage. The founder should verify that the recruiting tool will work within their current tool stack.
Practical tips to get started
Run a single-role sprint
A “single role sprint” is a two-week implementation of a new recruiting tool. Specifically, its goal is to see if it increases the pipeline of qualified people for the hardest-to-fill position at a startup. A good role to start with for this type of testing is as a senior product marketing manager.
Involve your operators from the start
The founder is the person who buys the software. For this reason, the founder must involve the first team members in the evaluation phase. Specifically, founders should designate those who will use the software for sourcing to help them evaluate various tools. The founder could assign someone to setup the tool so they can run a mock test on it (e.g. 2 weeks). This assessment must be accompanied by a set of criteria to measure success on the test.
The real question is how to use it
No AI recruiting software will build your business for you. Your business is your culture. It’s also your story for candidates about why working at your startup is the best idea they’ve ever had. Work at define your culture and history. These tools will only speed up your process of finding the best candidates to help you realize your vision for your startup.
The features will exist anyway, whether or not you choose to use them. So you might as well find a way to make them as operational as the rest of the stack. If you’re currently reading a lot of Google Sheets documents, it’s time to find a tool you can integrate with the rest of your stack.
