🛠️ Issue #98: How To Build A Recruiting Engine in 2023
Claremont serial entrepreneur Arjun Lall shares everything hiring managers need to know about the key tactics to drive candidates into open roles and a framework to build your own recruiting engine
💬 Welcome to issue #98 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. Recruiting seasoned talent has always been challenging, but 2023 is shaping up to be especially tough for talent acquisition. The workforce is more discerning, and employee loyalty is at a breaking point. The hiring landscape now favors candidates, intensifying the competition for top talent.
This week, Claremont serial entrepreneur and recruitment expert Arjun Lall offers insights into the hiring struggles of startup companies. He also discusses the three key tactics to attract high-quality candidates and a framework to build your own recruiting engine. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
📢 👥 Community Voices: How To Build A Recruiting Engine in 2023
Author: Arjun Lall
Claremont grad Arjun Lall (CMC ‘07) is the CEO & co-founder of Hireflow and its parent company, Rocket. Both companies build AI and automation to help high-growth companies make better hires faster. Since his time at Claremont, he has founded four companies with two successful exits under his belt. His gaming startup, JamLegend, was acquired by Zynga in 2011. He then founded Renzu in 2014 – a competitive mobile intelligence product that was acquired and eventually became SurveyMonkey.
Over the last six years, my team and I have worked with hundreds of startups to help them hire everything from founding engineers to scaling their sales teams. When it comes to recruiting, I’d like to say I’ve seen it all, but the market continues to surprise me.
One consistent source of frustration for startups of all sizes is getting enough high-quality candidates into the top of the funnel. Anemic candidate pipelines create a range of downstream problems that time-constrained startups can’t afford. And while there's no magic bullet, I’ll walk through key infrastructure you can set up to avoid these pitfalls. By the end of this post, you’ll know the three key tactics to drive candidates into your open roles and have a framework to build your own recruiting engine.
The Hiring Market in 2023
Despite having over 1,900 layoffs in tech spanning 400,000+ employees over the last two years, you might have noticed that recruiting is still not any easier.¹ Our old friend, the talent shortage, has shape-shifted into something quite bizarre.
Top talent? Still competitive, just as it's always been. Layoffs have scattered gems here and there, but let's be clear - there are more needles, but also many more haystacks. We have the mirage of a talent pool teeming with potential, but it’s still just as much work to make a hire.
Throw in a rather grumpy macroeconomic situation that has everyone hugging their cash reserves, yet still opportunistically on the lookout for “top talent”, and you’ve got quite a conundrum. The reality is, the lights are still on in the tech world, startups are still sprouting up, and making your mark is just as tough as before.
So, what can you do to hit your hiring goals this year?
In an age where organizations are vying for the best talent amidst a dynamic job market, recruitment strategies are evolving to meet the demand and are more important than ever. They're becoming more refined, more targeted, and more data-driven. Let’s jump into the first of 3 channels to build a winning recruitment strategy.
Inbound Recruiting: All About the Attraction
Inbound is the idea of 'If you build it, they will come'. You're putting your company out there, creating buzz, and hoping the right candidates notice and want to join the mission. In brief, this involves posting to job boards and promoting them if you don’t get enough interest. But there is a lot of complexity to doing it well. Building a strong employer brand can make a meaningful difference, but it’s not a linear path.
Outbound Recruiting: On the Prowl
No waiting around here. You're on the hunt, tracking down candidates like a detective on a hot lead. This comes down to two parts, sourcing and engagement.
Referral Recruiting: Inside Scoop
Nothing quite like using your community as a talent-finding tool, right? Referrals can come from your team, investors, advisors, and your own network. Look for common connections on LinkedIn or use tools to aggregate your team’s contacts into a searchable database.
How should I structure these channels?
If you are a Seed/Series A with no dedicated recruiter:
Referral: 40% of hires - This is a great way to hire early on before the potential pool gets exhausted
Outbound: 50% of hires - This is where you can really move the needle, especially if the initial work with referrals is not panning out. Using a product like Hireflow can put this process mostly on autopilot
Inbound: 10% of hires - Might as well post your jobs, but unless you are paying to promote or have access to exclusive job boards like YC’s Work at a Startup, this will not get you enough quality applicants to make it worth more than a basic investment of time.
If you are a Series A/B company with 1-2 recruiters:
Referral: 20% of hires - As you scale, it’s important not to over-rely on referral recruiting to avoid a homogeneous team
Outbound: 50% of hires - This remains the most powerful strategy as long as it’s done in a time-efficient manner. Starting with a pool of sourced candidates that meet the job’s bar makes everything after the sourcing much smoother. The best candidates are passive and need to be sourced.
Inbound: 30% of hires - At this point, the brand may be able to draw more meaningful organic inbound or there may be more budget to promote postings. However, be prepared to invest the time to comb through these applicants. Generally, the recruiting team will filter through these, but the work can be split with hiring managers to help scale up.
5C Experience: “I needed to make great engineering and design hires fast and didn’t have time for the traditional inbound application process. By partnering with Hireflow and their top-notch team, I got to see tons of high-quality candidates, which led to hiring someone with the right skillset, experience, and cultural fit.” - Julian Feeley (CMC ‘16), VP of Product at Recuro Health (Series B)
If you are a Series C+ company with a robust talent team:
Referral: 10% of hires - At later stages, it’s less likely to have your team investing the time to find and engage referrals. At early stages, the hires can be so “make or break” that everyone is motivated to pitch in, but with scale, this evolves.
Outbound: 45% of hires - Outbound may switch from a must for every job req, to a more focused beam you point at reqs that need high hiring velocity or more specialized roles. However, some teams may prefer to put more energy into outbound so they don’t need to deal with the signal-to-noise problem inherent in inbound.
Inbound: 45% of hires - Inbound should be a viable strategy for volume hires and evergreen roles. Starting and stopping inbound gets jerky but if you know you will be hiring 10-20 software engineers for the year then it’s easy to just leave the postings up continuously.
Of course, every company will look different depending on their needs and circumstances. These breakdowns serve as a framework, particularly for early-stage founders looking to grow their teams in both a time and cost-conscious way.
So what’s the bottom line? Even with an influx of supply, the talent market is incredibly challenging to navigate for startups vying for great new teammates. By working with hundreds of startups over the last few years and building my own since graduating from CMC, it’s clear that creating a winning recruiting engine isn’t about picking one strategy over another. Use inbound to attract a broad range of candidates, outbound to pinpoint the skills you need, and referrals to leverage the networks you already have. With this three-pronged strategy, you can set your team up for success, regardless of the market conditions.
Check out the full article for Arjun’s in-depth recommendations on attracting top-tier candidates and being competitive in the current hiring market.👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Xiaoyin Qu & Run The World
Claremont grad Xiaoyin Qu (PO) is the founder and CEO of Run The World – a digital event and networking platform for organizations and communities, powering over 50K events worldwide. Before starting her multi-million dollar startup, Xiaoyin spent time at Facebook as a Senior Product Manager leading a 40-people cross-functional team that helped celebrities put content on Facebook and Instagram.
Shortly after, she founded RunThe World, which was very timely since live events shut down worldwide due to the pandemic a month after the company was started. Xiaoyin was able to raise $15M from a16z, Founders Fund, GGV, and Pear VC. She’s also received several awards, including Inc Magazine’s Female Founder 100, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in Virtual Events.
Run The World was recently acquired by industry-leading event management software provider EventMobi. Congratulations to Xioayin on the successful exit!
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Speakeasy & Living Carbon
Sagar Batchu (HMC ‘15) is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy – an API DevEx platform that instantly creates SDKs that make API integration easy for your users. Their platform takes the heavy lifting out of providing a great API experience by integrating directly into your GitOps and propagating changes. Speakeasy recently emerged from stealth, backed by Google Ventures and Quiet Capital, and they’re looking for a Founding Engineer to join their team.
Living Carbon, co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO Maddie Hall (CMC ‘14), is a public benefit corporation with a mission to responsibly rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle using the inherent power of plants. The biotech startup recently raised its Series A and is targeting to have over four million of its hybrid poplar seedlings planted by the spring of 2024 to reduce the carbon footprint of companies and communities across the US and turn land assets into carbon sinks. They’re hiring an Ops Coordinator for their lab in Hayward, CA.
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Claremont entrepreneurs Nicole Alonso (CMC) and Liam Brennan-Burke (CMC) are the co-founders of Syro – a powerful secret management platform designed to streamline your team's workflows and keep your sensitive information secure. They recently wrote an article about how companies can prevent costly data breaches and the best practices for securing API keys, passwords, and tokens.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to former Google executive and Claremont entrepreneur Laszlo Bock (PO) and Humu on their successful exit. Humu is the developer of the “nudge engine” software that leverages machine learning and data analytics to prompt smarter employee behavior and help anyone grow into a better manager. Laszlo is also the co-founder of Gretel.ai – a data platform that automatically fine-tunes AI models to generate accurate and safe synthetic data on demand.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Being a non-technical founder, Claremont grad Maddie Hall (CMC ‘14) talked about her experience recruiting a technical co-founder and her tips for hiring an all-star technical team to execute her vision of fighting climate change. Maddie is the co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon – a public benefit company combating climate change by genetically enhancing CO2 capture and storage in trees.
Claremont grad Emre Ozgur (CMC ‘03) joined Halo Talks host Pete Moore at the March 2023 IHRSA Trade Show to share his insights on building a successful and profitable fitness franchise. Emre is the co-Founder of Safe Sweat, a revolutionary fitness concept born out of the pandemic after recognizing the challenges faced by individuals intimidated by traditional gyms. Emre also discussed updates on Safe Sweat and their plans for the future.
Everything else you need to know💡
Claremont entrepreneur and CEO Edith Harbaugh (HMC) was recently featured in Fortune magazine, where she shares the most significant challenges she’s faced as a founder and some interesting facts that people may not know about her. Edith is the co-founder of the feature management platform LaunchDarkly. She’s also been celebrated as one of Entrepreneur’s most influential women for leading LaunchDarkly to a $3B valuation.
Can’t get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🌱 Raising Funds For Farmers….. Kenyan agtech startup Farmworks recently raised a $4M pre-Series A round led by Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund to strengthen their data analytics capabilities and enhance production with AI. The agtech company aims to unlock Africa's agricultural potential by building clusters of mid-sized farms while working with thousands of small-holder farmers and establishing direct linkage to local and global markets. Claremont grad Yi Li (PO ‘16) is the co-founder and CEO of the company.
🚚 Building Electric Trucks In A $450B Market….. Pulse 2.0 recently interviewed Claremont grad Jim Castelaz (HMC ‘06) to discuss the founding story and inspiration behind his all-electric vehicle company Motiv Power Systems. He also talks about the evolution of the company’s technology, its significant milestones, and his future goals for the business. Jim is the founder and current CTO of Motiv – a company that makes all-electric medium-duty box trucks, step vans, shuttles, and school buses.
💸 Woodridge Software’s Successful Exit….. RCG Global Services, a global digital services provider, announced their acquisition of Woodridge Software – a FinTech-focused software development firm owned and managed by Claremont grads Jen McAdams (CMC ‘94) and Matt McAdams (HMC ‘92). Woodridge has successfully delivered projects to banks and credit unions across the US, Canada, and Europe for over two decades. They also have extensive partnerships with leading financial technology companies, including Temenos, Alloy, Personetics, and MaxMyInterest.
💲 Scaling Into New Markets….. Claremont-founded company, Trash Butler, shared its plans to scale into new markets with its recent $13M investment from New York-based growth equity firm TZP Group. Trash Butler is a trash valet service spun out from College Hunks Hauling Junk – the first tech-enabled moving and junk removal franchise also started by co-founder and Claremont grad Nick Friedman (PO ‘04) in 2005.
😵💫 What Is Real And What Is Fake….. Deep fake detection platform Reality Defender is leading the fight against AI-generated disinformation. The startup recently completed the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Generative AI Accelerator and is piloting its technology with NBCUniversal to explore solutions for securing its outbound content in the public space. Claremont entrepreneur Ben Colman (CMC) is the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender.
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