Early recruitment strategies: in-house or outsourced

Recruitment remains a crucial decision for all startups at different stages: inception, maturity and evolution.

Regardless of company size and budget for new hires, some fundamentals remain constant.

Companies always want to hire the right people with the right skills, who align with cultural values ​​and stay long enough to make a meaningful contribution during their tenure.

So how should recruitment strategies evolve over time to meet these criteria? Any recruitment process should also consider hiring for different roles, such as technical and non-technical positions.

This article will guide you on the pros and cons of in-house or outsourcing recruitment strategies for early-stage startups.

Importance of Effective Recruitment for Startups

A startup's first employees can make or break its chances of success. The rapid pace of experimentation and execution in startups makes recruiting the right people at the right time crucial.

Lean startup teams can't afford to spend a lot of time or resources on recruiting.

In the early stages, founders should be closely involved in recruiting, whether they build their team in-house or outsource it. Likewise, subsequent handover to the talent acquisition team should always maintain the integrity of the process.

The importance of effective recruiting for startups is evident when Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, said:

"When it comes to hiring, maybe that's why the first ten people you hire, the decisions are so important that not only are you hiring those first ten people, you're actually hiring a hundred people because you think each of those people is going to bring ten other people with them. »

Leverage internal resources

In-house recruitment teams work full-time for a given employer. Therefore, they hire talent to retain them for the long term for the company and in doing so also improve the employer brand image and put in place processes to strengthen the employer brand image . house recruitment for the future.

What is Internal Recruitment?

In simple terms, in-house recruiting is an employee of the company who manages the end-to-end process of finding, selecting, evaluating, interviewing and providing the offer letter to candidates . Internal recruitment usually involves hiring full-time employees.

Benefits of recruiting internally

The first employees of a startup need skills beyond their primary domain-specific role.

They must adapt to the dynamic nature of the changing needs of the team with characteristics such as problem-solving skills, a penchant for action and execution, and much more. The insight that a founding team brings in terms of the vision for the business and its long-term impact proves invaluable in facilitating these conversations.

The founding team is in the best position to know the extent to which different team members can contribute to shared responsibilities and set the right expectations when recruiting internally.

For example, suppose a developer hired by an agency at a fledgling startup builds features in isolation, without talking to users of the product. In this case, it will cause downstream problems for the company.

Internal recruiting provides the flexibility to adjust the recruiting process based on the role. For example, the entry-level hiring process will be different from the lateral hiring process. However, some parts of the preliminary selection can work either way. Hiring from within lets you decide that and make quick changes if needed.

When your team knows a candidate would be a great addition to your team, they can allay any fears of joining a start-up company and share their specific experiences and benefits that have served them well as individuals, professionally and personally. An agency would not have an insider's perspective on this.

The challenges of internal recruitment

Setting up internal processes requires the right tools and dedicated people to manage them. This involves considerable time and cost to company resources. When setting up these tools, make sure they scale with the pace and frequency of your hiring.

Ideally, avoid tools that charge a monthly subscription fee even when you pause recruiting and increase your expenses prohibitively when you increase recruiting.