Every start-up has challenges to On-board their first set of employees and sustain them for a tenure of 8 – 10 months. There are multiple challenges they face in this journey.
Sourcing of Talent:- Since the start-ups are lean and mean in their structure they may not want to invest on costly job portals or recruiters unless they are funded well. They may want to use their available references effectively or bring in their previous employed contacts. Normally founders and co-founders do recruitment by themselves and this takes time and bandwidth from their regular business to be attended.
Attracting Talent:- Not all individuals are eager to join a start-up unless they are having the value proposition of learning something new, niche or and other USP for them to join the start up. Today’s millennials are very aware and well informed and take the right decisions in terms of joining organisations. Hence it becomes very important for the start-up to have an employer branding to ensure talent attraction. This holds good for attracting senior talent as well.
Retaining Talent:- Once the above mentioned bridges are crossed the promoters need to think how happy or productive the employees are with the organisation. They need to spend enough time and effort to retain talent by addressing their challenges and motivating them. This phase is crucial for both the employer and the employees as both get to understand each other and the work ahead.
Growing Talent:- Nurturing talent with in and bringing talent from outside is a crucial factor for business growth. To propel more growth the most important factor is the human resource for each function of the organisation. The Start-up has to take in to consideration that the individuals need to be given a proper work life balance and at the same time high levels of productivity too.
Certain Key factors which start-ups need to have in mind on the recruitment and HR perspective are
Cost per hire:- Usually the cost per hire is low at the initial phase when referral plays a key role in start-up hiring, but over a period of time the investments on various sourcing processes prove to be costly. Not every time do you get the right hire through reference? Sometimes there is a herd mentality which is seen in start-up where the employees join together and leave the organisation together which is a risk too.
Time to hire:- Just in time hiring is crucial for Start-up as they are fighting a war against the big players who have all the muscle and resource to fill talent. Loss of manpower is equal to loss of business in Start- ups as the clients will not want to wait. It is imperative to have a proper plan in place to make sure that just in time hiring happens.
Quality of hiring:- There is a saying when you throw peanuts you get monkeys…
Well- funded start-up may allocate good salary pay outs for them to get stars from the market. For many start-ups which has limited cash flows and capital to invest the quality becomes a challenge
RPO seems to be the glue between the start-up and the candidate which bonds to create the start-up environment to be more agile and successful.
The first 50 employees in and start up is crucial to build and hold for them to deliver and prosper.
How can Recruitment process outsourcing help to build a start up ?
Well amidst may question this is an important question were the start-ups today relay on employee referral, Social media, Job Boards etc. for hiring their employees, but is the process they are adopting going to give them results which are long term and could sustain?
Related Read: Building Your Most Important Growth Strategy – Hiring
RPO offers a scientific approach to the whole recruitment process starting from offering talent advisory services which involves aligning HR strategies to the business goals of the organisation. It starts from offering the talent advisory services like salary bench marking, market scoping on availability, Defining Job roles and constructing JD’s.
RPO has a key element of employer branding which is creating sufficient collateral for the employer to reach out to the candidates to communicate the right pitch on the career counselling aspect. This is important for a start up from employer branding perspective and also from a candidate perspective on understanding the various goals and career progression in the organisation.
RPO saves a lot of time for the start-ups in order to attract talent which is the key driver since it is more of a plug and play model instead of inventing the wheel from scratch. Since RPO is all about accountable recruitments the chances of failing in SLA is limited and there is a course correction method inbuilt which will follow through on a monthly basis to inculcate the checks and balances of the process in recruitments.
RPO help Start-ups manage process and quality as it acts as a one stop shop to cater to all the recruitment process such as vendor management, referral management, Offer management, Candidate engagement and other where the process is much simpler to adopt and easier to assess.
It also helps to save on cost to a large extent as the start-ups need not have any inventory of investment on job boards and people at the initial stages of their growth.
The risk the start-ups run is that they need to choose the right RPO partner who have specific domain knowledge and hand-on experience in Recruitments and marketing.
Start-ups will have the edge of employer branding should they go with renowned brand doing RPO as the co-branding process will be useful for better candidate reach and talent attraction.
RPO provider would act more as an HR Advisory rather than being called as a recruitment vendor where they share their experience and genuinely take interest in providing solution which is flexible, long-term and sustainable.
While start-ups are more unorganised in their process they could rely on the RPO Partner to have their people supply chain as an ongoing and organised process.
Related Read: Top 10 Hiring Tips For Sourcing The Right Candidate
Automated process like POFU (Post offer follow up) would give predictive analysis and dashboards to the start-ups to know the status on engagement levels with the candidates offered and if they may join the start-up based on which they could further opt to engage with the candidate or revoke the offer given.
The churn of employee referral through technology automation would have better results for start-ups as the engagement levels with the employees to refer their contacts are improved and the same is rewarded on time as automation play the role of compliance.
Start-ups could adopt simpler forms of RPO like the ROD Model (Recruiter on Demand) to fit their budget which is on demand model offering flexibility of deploying experienced recruiters at the start-up office and have the benefit of cost savings too.
RPO provider helps the start-up to devise the recruitment strategy, organise the source mix engineer the recruitment process to define the milestones and POA directing towards the same. It would in all essence be in alignment with the goals of the promoters and vision of the organisation suiting the fitments such as Salary bands, Grades, Cultural fitment, education and experience etc.
Overall RPO is viewed as a far more evolved HR Proposition than a contingent model of hiring process where the effort is more and the results are not commiserating the effort.
RPO seems to be the best bet start-ups could take to achieve their goals as far as human capital and resource management is concerned.
Also Read: Your Complete Guide to Hiring a Remote Development Team
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by Mr. N. Shivakumar- Business Head- RPO, Recruitment Services. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the authors of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)