In our previous post in this series, How Pave Hired Our First 100 Employees, several team members shared insights around quality versus quantity and using prolific communication to earn trust.
And since so many of our clients are tech companies that are also growing quickly, next we wanted to offer a list of do's and don’ts for rapid scaling.
In this culture deep dive, we tap into the wisdom of the Pave’s squad for tactics around documentation and coordination. These strategies and tactics are critical for compensation planning and communicating, but also for operational success in general.
If your tech company is growing fast, keep these ideas in mind.
Build Infrastructure To Help Your Team Scale
Process is how growing companies generate alignment when it doesn't naturally happen. A good process can be superimposed over the operations of virtually any company, whether it’s twenty employees or two hundred.
But the key to building your process is not to overdo it. Staying agile enough to iterate and pivot when necessary makes all the difference in growth. I sat down with my colleague Olivia Bentley, Building Teams at Pave, who offered insight on building recruiting infrastructure to help our team scale:
"Pave grew quickly and effectively because we’re not afraid to play around with our process. We’re willing to do what we need to do to get the talent we want. From a recruiting perspective, we do follow a process, but at the same time, if we find a great candidate, it goes out the window to get them in. We hire people who are very passionate about this space, so everyone can sell it in their sleep. It’s almost impossible to leave a call with a Paver without being hyped up about the company. That’s special."
Pave’s early days involved some documentation, but now we have such a rich database and really strong internal champions. We’ve spent a lot of time codifying our systems because we want to do it right. In our experience, you can still grow fast while also spending time up front to document and get the operational tooling in place.
DON’T try to go back and rewrite documents later. Reinventing the recruiting wheel is expensive and labor intensive.
DO start earlier than you think you need to when documenting work in regards to recruiting and hiring. If you don’t write it down, it never happened. And if you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.
Dunbar's number explains this phenomenon. He's the anthropologist who first suggested the idea of a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. As the theory goes, this limit is a direct function of human brain size. After your tribe or company or village gets to about a hundred and fifty people, the neocortex's processing capacity can no longer cope.
Where does your organization sit among that magic number?
DON’T allow learning to be left to chance if you’re smack dab in the middle of a growth surge. Lack of intentionality leads to low profitability.
DO iterate, refine and experiment with processes until you find the right ones. As we like to say around Pave, if you ever find yourself answering the same question twice, you should make a document.
Anastasia Dencic, Technical Recruiting Lead at Pave, summarized this principle:
"The key to expanding our team to where it is today was building a great infrastructure to help us scale. Our focus is always on growing, but being extremely thoughtful around how we do it is critical to executing on that vision. Bringing in team members with the necessary, diverse skill sets for your first hundred is invaluable to success down the road."
Process, then, is a form of responsive learning. It’s about flexibility and adaptability, which is another way of saying humility and letting go. If you start mitigating information overload from the beginning, your employees will view it as an expression of generosity and caring.
If you’re going to have a lot of stuff thrown at you at once, you can rest easy knowing that it’s all documented and easy to reference in one place, forever.
Use Force Multipliers To Give Recruiters Leverage
We feel privileged to have clients who have scaled their companies significantly. And one pattern we’ve noticed when we onboard people ops teams, leverage is everything.
In the early days of company growth, you can’t do it all by yourself. Your company may need to lean on recruiting agencies, freelance headhunters and other third party consultants to fill gaps where your referral networks can’t get you. But that gets costly.
Eventually, however, you will need to pivot to hiring an in-house talent acquisition team. There’s an easy business case to be made for this transition. Agencies typically charge 20-30% of a candidate’s salary, an in-house recruiter essentially pays for their salary with only a few hires. What’s more, recruiters in house are more likely to protect the company’s brand reputation, to get responses from candidates in their outreach, and to keep the process moving quickly.
Mike Devine, Recruiting at Pave, understands how scaling companies can use force multipliers to give recruiters leverage. External support can be one of them, but the real magic happens within your company walls:
"It’s important to transition to in-house recruiters sooner rather than later. In-house recruiters typically know the company’s brand story, culture, and preferences better than any external agency can. They can better articulate why the company is worth joining. They have more touch points with hiring managers, and can move interview processes faster. As momentum builds, the company should transition from using agencies, to using in-house talent acquisition, to establishing enough of an employer brand that the inbound pipeline begins to pick up. Momentum feeds upon itself with referrals and inbound interest."
For Pave, the coordinator role turned out to be the force multiplier of our growth. Now, recruiting coordination may not seem like a lot of scheduling, but do the math. If you have a team of eight recruiters, managing calendars is a huge task with their candidate pipeline. Growing companies are scheduling fifty to seventy candidates a week.
Can you imagine your recruiters having to take on that workload themselves? Relieving them of that key process makes more room for efficiency. Now they can focus on what they need to do, which is sell people on working there.
Meet Lindsay Curlett, Recruiting Coordinator at Pave. Pave had sixty to seventy employees when she started, and only a team of four recruiters. But recruiting was gradual at that time. We had fewer candidates in the pipeline. Prior to her tenure as recruiting coordinator, recruiters scheduled for themselves.
Here’s what Lindsay had to say about her first few months:
"Our recruiters were (and are) so appreciative of having a recruiting coordinator role, and that’s one of the many reasons why I cherish it so much. I enjoy being the connective tissue of the candidate experience, while not actually being a recruiter. Selling is not my strong suit. I’m an extremely passionate person, but that function isn’t necessarily for me. Recruiters are, for all intents and purposes, part of a collective sales team, so their support structure is rewarding for me and the perfect use of my talents."
DON’T let your recruiters get trapped in the vortex of scheduling on top of reporting, communication, hiring manager outreach, and the rest of their duties.
DO create leverage for your team. Find an amazing coordinator. Hire for positive attitude, detail orientation and process organization.
That foundation can equip your recruiting team to deliver a candidate experience that has world class white glove service. This is crucial to the backbone of any recruiting effort.
Ultimately, rapid scaling can be stressful and intimidating. If your company is growing at a high rate, quickly, keep in mind these do's and don’ts. Documentation and coordination make a world of difference in compensation planning, but also in operational success.
Stay tuned for our final edition of this series, when Pave team members share stories and lessons learned on how to make recruiting everyone’s job, elevating candidate experience, and staying grounded as headcount lifts off.
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