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The biggest mistake founders make when scaling up recruiting
My company Dover is building a recruiting platform to help companies find and hire the best talent. Over the past four years, we’ve helped 1200+ companies understand how to run a data-driven recruiting process and get the results they want.
This post is about the single most common mistake I’ve seen founders make when scaling up recruiting: misunderstanding how the shape of the candidate funnel will differ across candidate sources.
Comparing candidate sources purely on time-to-hire or cost-per-hire is easy, but it’s often an oversimplification that can lead to inefficiencies in your interview process and misguided expectations about your candidate pipeline.
What is a candidate source?
A candidate source is any pool of candidates that you can get into your interview process.
Some examples of candidate sources:
- a job posting on Indeed
- an employee’s network
- Wellfound
- candidates introduced to you by a contingency recruiter
- …and so on
Candidate sources generally fall into one of three channels:
- referrals (network-based)
- inbound (candidates find you)
- outbound (you find the candidates)
When making the first one or two hires at your company, founders should focus on a single candidate source: the founders’ personal network. Early on, the main thing your company has is the founding team itself––your network will have the candidates that know you best, and therefore trust you most.
Once you start to scale and have some more resources to devote to hiring, you will need to start expanding to more candidate sources.
The candidate pool from each candidate source will be slightly different. Some candidate sources contain primarily active candidates (job applicants) while some are mostly passive (LinkedIn). Some are prequalified with a phone screen (contingency recruiters) while others are not.
