Treat your recruiting process like a startup

From ABC’s Shark Tank to HBO’s Silicon Valley to bestselling books like Steve Jobs, the narrative of startups is embedded in our culture. It’s the story of a founder with an idea who executes on it and changes the world. And it always happens in the garage.

While the startup mythos has become a mixture of truth, truth-adjacent, and hyperbole, small and large companies alike have adopted the lessons learned from startup culture. If you’re thinking about overhauling your recruiting process to entice candidates in new ways, these early steps that startups follow would be a great one to copy.

Ideation

This initial phase is where the entrepreneur comes up with an idea for a product or service and begins to flesh it out to determine if it has value for a target market. For recruiters, this would mean an honest evaluation of your recruiting practices and reimagining them so that they are a fit for today’s candidates. How are candidates finding out about your open positions? Are you still doing phone screens when most millennials use their phones primarily for texting and emailing? How effective are your candidate engagement and follow-up efforts?

Concepting

In this stage, the mission, vision, and strategy of new businesses are defined and refined, including setting key milestones for the next several years. This stage is also where co-founders are identified and brought on board. Though HR and the hiring manager typically run the show, this would be a great time to invite other departments to the team. A fresh perspective can be invigorating and team members who are not directly impacted by the hire can be more objective when reviewing candidates.

Commitment

Now it’s time for rollout. Many startups follow the lean methodology which encourages companies to launch a minimum viable product – one that has just enough features to allow the team to start collecting information about what users want and what they don’t want. In this recruiting scenario, your two sets of users are the hiring team and the candidate pool. Get feedback from both groups to determine how well your updated hiring process is delivering the results they’re looking for.

Validation

Once your new hiring process is in place, continue to learn from your users and revise the process as needed. This phase is all about validating your hiring solution, identifying key performance indicators (KPIs), and responding to user feedback with new features or process changes.

Great startups are nimble, forward thinking, and are constantly adapting their products based on what their customers want. Whether you’re hiring process needs a tune-up or a complete overhaul, using the startup blueprint will reinvigorate your thinking and keep you focused on what works best for your hiring team and your candidates. 

Reimagine your talent acquisition process with Hoops. Call us at (877) 262-7358  and we’ll show you how!

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