Advisory

We’ve all noticed it. It feels as though every company who grew like wildfire over the last 5-10 years has reduced their talent function in recent months. This downsizing has left recruiting teams struggling to keep up - from systemic issues impacting their ATS and recruiting workflows to their capacity to source on top of handling all of the new headcount and backfills. Even the recruiting teams at companies who are lucky enough to be going through hyper growth are feeling stretched thin and seeking additional, flexible support. 

As we mentioned last month, one of the natural evolutions of maturing recruiting teams is to build out an internal leadership/exec recruiting function. In fact, as we have noted before, it has been a growing trend for companies to invest in this function on a continually earlier basis. At Growth by Design Talent, we have the POV that building this internal muscle is a key differentiating factor in the success of growing companies. As a trusted advisor, you can position yourself to be anticipating these needs by being close to the business and talent strategy. 

If you received an email today announcing that your company has filed its S-1, would your recruiting team know what to do? Do you know what an S-1 is? From our experience, that email has been followed by, “YAY, we’re finally going public!”, immediately followed by panic inducing questions like, “what are we allowed to say to candidates?” or “how do we pitch a job opportunity if you can’t talk about the value of an offer?”

“How do I make this process repeatable, and less time consuming for me?” This is the question recently asked by a leader at one of the early stage companies we’re working with. Through our Fractional Talent Partner offering, we partner with a VC firm to give extra support to their portfolio companies and that’s how we met this leader. 

Over the last month, we’ve spent a lot of time with recruiting leaders at events like RecFest, with our client companies, and in 1:1 conversations. Here is what we are hearing as top of mind going into Q4 and planning for next year.

With a general slowing of hiring across the industry, recruiting leaders and teams are re-evaluating their hiring processes from top to bottom. One area we see getting a lot of attention is the consistency of hiring decisions. Bar raisers, hiring committees and similar types of programs have been around seemingly since the early days of Silicon Valley. With the emergence of more tools and systems to better collect candidate assessment and performance data, the opportunity is there to modernize these programs.