How do you recruit before you have in-house recruiters?

What percentage of companies now have a Talent Acquisition person in-house?

At what point does a company hire someone to be their first Internal Recruiter?

If you look at the growth of a company, different functions get hired at different stages of growth, depending on the skills and experience of the founding directors!

First up would be perhaps marketing or sales (or a combination of both!)

Perhaps then a finance specialist?

What next – IT Support? Human Resources?

It’s certainly not a Talent Acquisition person until a company has reached a significant size – perhaps 50, 60, even 70 people?

…

So what happens with the recruitment function before then? It’s almost certainly handled by either the directors, HR or perhaps even Finance!

And that is where the smaller companies then struggle to recruit the best people for their key roles! As they don’t have someone with the right set of skills, experience and full accountability for the recruitment function, they are operating at a lower impact level than their bigger competitors, who do have Talent Acquisition specialists.

Think about it – you wouldn’t expect a finance person to be an expert at marketing! Or your HR Business Partner to handle your bookkeeping! They will never be able to perform as well as an expert in that function!

So if you are at a smaller company without in-house recruitment, then what can you do about it that won’t take up all your time or be impossible to implement or overly reliant on recruitment agents!

Here are some simple and immediate actions you can take:

1. Understand who really holds accountability in your company for the recruitment function. Don’t have Finance controlling the budget, marketing putting out the adverts, directors doing the interviewing, yet none joining the dots. One person should have the key task of ALL elements of your company’s recruiting and onboarding!
2. Maximise your own staff’s network. Your staff know people who know people who know people – effectively utilising your own people’s networks is an easy way to improve your recruitment and not that hard to implement.
3. Are you proactive or reactive with recruiting key roles? Do you wait to start looking for someone when you have a vacancy? If yes, there are simple actions you can take to build yourself a cost-effective pipeline of engaged candidates. Be your company’s own head-hunter!

I will be expanding on each of these three points in future posts with some easy practical actions you can take.

I will also be providing more actions you can do which will make your ability to recruit better, faster, cheaper!