Recruiting top talent in a competitive jobs market can be a costly and time-consuming process for tech startups and scaleups.  You’re at a pivotal stage in your growth and you’re probably already thinking about the importance of your next 10 (or even 100) hires. For founders that need specialist support with their hiring strategies, using a recruitment agency that can identify and attract talent, as well as negotiate terms on your behalf, can relieve a huge amount of pressure.  

Being a startup founder is anything but easy. But this is where a recruiter can support you. Acting as talent partner, a great recruiter can be an invaluable resource and collaborator for founders and hiring managers – and particularly so in a fledging startup where having a full-blown in-house recruitment team may be overkill.  

So, are you thinking about instructing a recruitment agency? In this blog, we demystify some of the more common recruitment myths and tell you why we believe that a talent partnership offers greater long-term benefits to your tech business than transactional recruiting. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Commit the time 

For the founder-recruiter relationship to be successful, it needs to be two-way. Don’t expect to send over a bullet-pointed job spec and get high-quality candidates. In fact, a great recruitment ‘brief’ should be anything but brief! It’s all about the detail. The more information you can provide about the role, your business, your culture and your values, the better. What’s your hook? Why should a candidate choose you? A good recruiter will use this information to intrigue and excite potential candidates, so be crystal clear about what you’re building and where you’re heading.  

2. Too many recruiters spoil the broth 

Contrary to what you might think, many hands don’t make light work. Giving your job to three different recruitment agencies might mean that you’ll cover more of the market quicker, but there are major drawbacks. Instead, you’ll get a rush to the market, spammed candidates, and poorly qualified CVs as each agency surges to beat the other. CVs submitted by multiple agencies can quickly become unmanageable and it could even dilute your brand in the job market, something you’ll want to avoid as a startup. We prioritise the effort we put into roles based on a few factors – exclusivity is weighted highly and a way to guarantee our commitment. 

3. Who wins the no-win, no-fee lottery? 

Traditionally, recruiters only earn commission if you appoint their candidate. Whilst this feels like it’s good for the hiring manager that might not be the case. The lack of certainty will affect the mindset of the recruiter. They’re pitted against several similar agencies in their field and, as such, they only expect to be paid for a percentage of the jobs they work on. So, what does this mean for you? Pssst… it means you’re not always their top priority. They’ll be working on multiple roles and sharing your potential candidates with other employers because they need to maximise their chances of placing a role.  

4. Recruiters… or talent partners? 

It’s important to understand what you want – and what you’re getting – from your founder-recruiter relationship.  

Recruiter. Talent Partner. Branding or semantics, you decide. 

But it’s important that you recognise the difference between transactional recruitment and relationship recruitment – and choose the option that meets the needs of your startup.  

If you’re a corporate with procurement governing who you work with, you might work with a transactional service partner. Someone with high CV volume and mass marketing who can fill roles quickly from an active candidate market. 

But if you’re a time-stretched founder with little or no knowledge of in-house recruitment, consider looking for a trusted advisor and partner. Someone to partner with in the longer-term, who has experience of tech startup recruitment, can work collaboratively with you to write job specs, map the market, review your employer brand and help with retention. For example, appointing a recruiter such as ISL Talent as your talent partner is a great alternative to an internal recruiter. We’re able to scale quickly, whilst continuing to offer trusted advice and a longer-term relationship focus that more traditional recruiters will fail to match. We fill roles 3 x more effectively with our talent partnerships. 

5. Recruiting takes time 

Let’s break it down. One to four weeks to define your exact requirements. Three to 12 weeks to run the hiring process. One to three months to get someone onboarded and started. Finding the optimum candidate for your startup or scaleup involves a process – and that can take time. A good recruiter can’t save you all this time; but they can work with you to shorten a hiring process and reduce the time you’re spending on engaging with candidates who simply aren’t right. 

For example, with plenty of screening, filtering, engaging and communication, a good recruiter could engage with 100+ potential candidates and get you five qualified CVs to review. The expectation is that you’ll need to interview three to get one to offer stage. Develop the right relationship and you can free up a lot of your valuable time to impact the business elsewhere. 

6. Your brand matters 

As recruiters, we leverage our network to expand the talent pool, meaning that we can reach passive candidates who aren’t openly looking for roles. But when speaking to candidates, there’s a big difference between our approach when discussing an amazing/growing/unique SaaS business we’re working with, and one that openly tells the candidate who you are. Typically, most job ads won’t divulge the name of the business, but increasingly our approach is  to co-brand, rather than use faceless (and nameless) ads. Why? It’s easy to find candidates; but for us as recruiters, the challenge lies in engaging and exciting them. That’s why we tell candidates who we’re working with and why you’re recruiting. We showcase the founders, profile the team and tell a story that isn’t diluted simply because we’re worried about candidates and competitors finding out who our client is.  

Our own data and data from job boards supports this approach, with typically two to five times more engagement when we’re transparent about who the employer is. Last month we had two candidates say they were ignoring all the other recruiter messages but responded to ours because they could see who the client was. Both ended up being hired by those scaleups. 

So, depending on which route you want to take, learn to recognise the difference between a recruiter that will co-brand and one that uses anonymous, faceless ads. 

7. Fixed fee security 

Salaries are on the rise and with recruiter fees typically moving up in tandem, and it can be frustrating when you’re being asked to increase or improve your candidate offer. A higher salary generally equates to a higher fee, so it’s easy to be cynical about who is driving that increase – particularly when the recruitment industry hasn’t historically been one of honesty and integrity.  

But our experience tells us that salary expectations can (and do) change, and in a competitive market, it isn’t unusual for candidates to get offers from elsewhere that make them re-evaluate their market rate.  To balance this, with several of our talent partnerships, we agree a fixed fee, either monthly or on a role-by-role basis. This avoids any misaligned incentives and can avoid having uncertainty around recruitment costs in a buoyant market. 

Recently we were hiring for a cyber security scaleup. They offered a candidate £25k over their original budget because they could see the value in spending the extra cash. Although that wasn’t an easy decision, it helped that we’d agreed a fixed fee model under our Base_down product so they didn’t suffer the pain of an extra £5k on the recruitment fee. You should always be aware of the need to find extra funds if you want to secure the very top talent in the market, but you can find recruiters that will guide you what’s required without needing something to be in it for them. 

Our hope is that whatever recruitment model you choose to scale your team, we’ve helped you understand more about what’s on offer. 

If you’d like to talk more about how our talent partnerships could build you great teams for your your startup or scaleup, get in touch with our co-founder and CEO, Alan Furley, at alan@isltalent.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.