How to hire top talent before your competitors even know they exist

As an entrepreneur, you know how important it is to develop your sales pipelines. The question, however, is how much effort have you put into building your talent pool?

Brendan McGurgan says sustainable business success depends on creative engagement with talent who is about to enter the job market or working elsewhere. McGurgan is the director and founder of Simple Scaling, former CEO of the CDE Group, and author of Simple Scaling. As part of the CDE Group, McGurgan has helped the company generate nearly $750 million in cumulative revenue and $75 million in cumulative profit in over 90 countries.

When McGurgan first looked into the CDE Group's recruitment approach, he discovered a reactive process run by an already overstretched team, which is common to many fast-growing companies. He is committed to changing the way CDE Group has recruited and shares the approach he has used during his 12 years in this role to transform the company into a major export company employing almost 700 people and achieving 25x revenue growth.

Recruitment is not an HR function

When McGurgan was hired in 2007, the CDE Group was a growing engineering company with a big problem: attracting great talent. Line managers could not keep up with the growth of the CDE group, as they lacked the capacity to handle an ever-increasing workload.

McGurgan wanted to find the root of the problem: "If you can't attract great talent, it's almost always due to one of three things," McGurgan explained. "Your culture is bad, your recruiting processes aren't working, or your employer value proposition (EVP) isn't having an impact."

McGurgan knew it wasn't the culture, because that's what drew him to the company in the first place. When he started exploring their recruiting processes, McGurgan saw a poor division of responsibilities that is common in small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

“Typically recruiting is the purview of HR, who try to integrate it as a sort of side function,” McGurgan said. "That's a big mistake, but has a simple fix."

Consider a full-time recruiter

Recruiting is one of the most important functions in a growing business, says McGurgan, so you have to get it right. The greatest gift you can give an overstretched HR team is a dedicated full-time recruiter. If you can't afford this role right now, there's another option.

"You can engage with a local recruiter in what's called an RPO, or recruiting process outsourcing agreement," McGurgan said. “The agency employs the resource, but it is based in your company. This is a service that most major recruitment agencies offer."

Once you have your recruiter, you can start creating a resource plan for the future. There is no magic formula for determining how many people you should hire. The important thing is to be realistic about the time it will take to both find the right person and make them a valuable contributor. Also, remember that the repercussions of hiring too many people or hiring the wrong people can be detrimental to everyone involved.

"When trying to look ahead to establish your needs, consider things like upcoming projects," McGurgan advised. "You can also view your plans for expansion into new sectors and regions, as well as planned changes in these sectors."

Another piece of advice offered by McGurgan is that if you are starting to achieve high growth and profitability, consider a revenue per employee or profit per employee goal. There will be a sweet spot for this metric. Too crowded and it gets too low. Too little and you risk burnout.

How to recruit top talent before your competitors even know they exist

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