If You Think Good Recruiting Is Expensive, You Should See the Cost of Bad Recruiting

"If you think good design is expensive, you should see the cost of bad design." - Ralf Speth, former CEO of Jaguar Land Rover

I recently saw this tweet about recruiting.

Hiring is an undeniably important component of startups' rapid growth. However, startups often underestimate the challenges and dangers associated with hiring, which leads to the snowball effect affecting every other facet of the business' goals and vision.

In short, recruiting and hiring are tools for growth, but they can become a burden and a liability that complicates the work of startups. In 2019, Peter Capelli wrote a still-relevant article about how hiring has changed and what companies are doing wrong in their hiring processes. 

Disclosure of vested interest: The author, Sasha Bondar, is the founder of Reintech, a platform that helps startups and mature companies with their recruting and hiring needs. This article serves to educate, not advertise, but a link to Reintech's website will be provided at the end of this article for any interested readers.

The Risk of Hiring

For founders, hiring is intimidating – recruiting takes a huge amount of effort and resources for the company, and those efforts still carry a risk of failure. Failure to hire the right people at an early stage of a startup's development can seriously impair growth and progress; when a company consists of a select few individuals, each individual's contributions is all the more important and visible. If you're lucky, then everything will turn out well. But if your hiring practices lead to any subpar hires, the business will suffer. 

Finding the right talent to scale a startup is a critical business challenge that can keep founders up at night.

Hiring Done Right

Recruiting is challenging in part because it involves working with people who are outside the sphere of the company's culture and norms. One of the tasks of quality recruitment is to bring different candidates together under the same conditions. 

Take for example one of the massive tech companies, such as Meta or Google. Most if not all of the candidates for jobs at these companies have familiarized themselves with the selection process and the difficulties that await them. That candidates are able to prepare so thoroughly is evidence that their recruitment and hiring processes are systematic, streamlined, and have yielded good results for them in the past. 

In most other companies, the recruitment and hiring processes are not as systematic. Each company builds its own culture, rules, customs, and relationships in a way that they hope will be successful at attracting talent in a crowded and noisy job market. The unique aspects of each company (culture, etc.) are hugely important in establishing an identity. 

Google does this well because they implement their system at an early stage when candidates are preparing to interview. Google is, of course, a mature and massive company with immense resources to put towards systematizing these processes. For most companies, this can be a daunting task that gets de-prioritized or deemed too resource-intensive.

Getting Ahead

The way to navigate this chaos is to build a systematic approach to hiring. For many companies, this involves the hiring and use of recruitment platforms. It's simpler and more cost-effective than trying to re-invent the wheel and will lead to better results. 

Recruitment platforms like Reintech aim to reduce the friction between the relative order of your company and the relative chaos of the job market. The choice of a recuitment platform is based on several factors, such as technological needs, geography, level of candidates, and more. Using a service like this can allow you to specify your unique needs without having to utilize your limited resources trying to build and maintain an effective talent pipeline for your company. 

If you've tried all the traditional methods of hiring and you aren't getting the results you need, Reintech can help you – we aren't a traditional hiring method. If you've invested money into a hiring system that just isn't working out, it's not too late for Reintech to help you. If you have an urgent need to hire software developers, and you needed them yesterday, come to Reintech. Just as Saul Goodman (of Better Call Saul) was the last resort for many people in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Reintech is the last resort for companies in desparate need of software developers. Better Call Reintech!