Speed Matters in Recruiting
In recruiting, speed matters a lot.
An extra couple days at each step results in losing great candidates.
Some companies don’t even look at applications for weeks. We aim for a response to everyone within a couple days.
Our process has a number of steps and is pretty involved to make sure we are extra careful when hiring, but we try hard to make sure any delay (caused by us) between each step is rather short.
Scheduling multiple interview steps in parallel can help.
What’s especially important is when people have other upcoming or pending offers. Gotta move fast.
I especially try hard to get offers in on Fridays before a weekend, since nearly everybody wants to “sleep on it”. Then we usually come in Monday with a Yes.
The longer a candidate waits for an offer, the more of a chance you lose them.
Moving fast can be tough, especially for final decision makers. TBH I’ve had to do final interviews or make offers on holidays, on vacation, during parental leave, etc.
More commonly, I’ve been prioritizing late stage recruiting calls at the expense of already scheduled 1:1s and other in-team syncs, even though that’s not ideal either.
But I think it makes a big difference in closing great talent.
And it’s all worth it when key hires join and start making a difference.
See here for more hiring tips:
This is the blog post version of a talk I gave at True University in Berkeley, CA in June 2018 to help early stage startups scale their engineering teams from 2 to 20. Hiring is…
Phil Freo · June 30, 2018Related
Yep. Recruiting is sales. A big part of a sales person’s job is creating urgency toward a decision. We always put expirations on offers, though usually it’s “sure, you can have the weekend to think about it” vs. hours. Also, best to not make an offer at all until they’re pre-closed and likely to quickly accept.
Exploding offers are great when you are trying to make something happen. Can’t give people weeks to accept an offer if you have a limited number of spots and you’re trying to put a team together. Someone either wants to join or they don’t. Don’t have to think about it
1/ In hiring, you think you've made a hire once they sign your offer acceptance paperwork. ⚠️That couldn't be more wrong. I wrote this post 3 years ago and still can't believe how true it is. A not-so-fun example of this recently... (thread)
This was originally posted on X in September 2023.