Grow Fast But Smart: How To Hire For A High-Growth Organization

Effective strategies to thrive in high-growth mode while hiring top talent

By Hari Kolam, Findem

The pressures of successful hiring are intense enough, but everything becomes exceedingly more complicated and the stakes are higher when you are hiring for a business in high-growth mode.

When companies start scaling rapidly, more is on the line for talent acquisition and your hiring strategy has to scale accordingly.

Technology moves from a valuable tool to an utter necessity to keep pace and ensure you are not sacrificing quality as you face high-demand conditions. It’s also imperative to outline a plan and set some hiring patterns from the start, which can be adapted, as needed, as you start growing and scaling your hiring process.

Not all talent professionals have experienced the variables and disruption that come with hiring at rapid speed, but chances are they will at some point due to new funding, an M&A, a market surge or a staffing deficit.

There are a multitude of strategies that can be put into play to hire fast yet smart. These are three that can be put into practice quickly when preparing for that surge.

Build a Modern Talent Acquisition Ecosystem

Talent acquisition ecosystems are multi-channel, go-to-market strategies that enable organizations to identify, develop, nurture and retain top talent at scale. When executed well, they power the top of the talent funnel, making it possible to deliver continuous, well-balanced pipelines.

According to talent leader Brett Coin, former vice president of talent acquisition at Okta, talent acquisition ecosystems can be successful in shifting conventional recruiting practices from an individual process to a more holistic one. Back in the day, it used to be that recruiters would get a req, ferret out candidates, fill the position and get paid for that win, essentially being rewarded for “winning alone.” This approach is both highly inefficient and leaves little room for scale. The best recruiters end up keeping candidates to themselves and that ends up being a losing proposition for the hiring managers, the company and the candidates.

The talent acquisition ecosystem flourishes in a culture of recruiting that goes beyond the recruiting team. By involving and enabling partners, employees and even candidates to recruit, talent acquisition efforts scale beyond the results of a single person or even a talent team and support the company’s fast-growth mode.

In a modern talent acquisition ecosystem, a variety of stakeholders, technologies and strategies work in cohesion to build at-the-ready talent pools that allow them to scale during boom times. Talent pools become extremely important to remain connected to qualified, diverse talent for times of high growth. Think of them as a parking lot for highly qualified talent that you would hire today, but for some reason, the timing doesn’t work.

The key to developing a talent acquisition ecosystem that enables you to quickly scale when in high-growth mode is to have a winning-as-a team culture where everyone works toward the common goal of making the best hires and bringing the highest value to the company. For example, according to Coin, the talent team starts by identifying roles that they’ve hired for over and over, which is approximately 70%. Recruiting teams agree to enter their qualified, ready-later candidates into a shared space to be nurtured for future needs.

Always recruiting and candidate nurturing are the keys to building a successful talent ecosystem. The most successful nurturing involves forming an emotional connection between the candidate and the company, so it needs to go beyond an email or two. Involving hiring managers, leaders and employees in the nurturing process can be a powerful way to foster talent pool engagement. When you have a warm bench of highly qualified and highly diverse talent at the ready, hiring for high growth becomes drastically easier.

Tap into Tech to Diversify Your Funnel

For companies building back after a hiring slowdown or experiencing skyrocketing growth, now is a good time to put processes and strategies in place to move the needle on diversity. When you’re hiring for just a handful of roles, it’s difficult to make a significant impact on diversity, but the opportunity grows when you’re hiring hundreds of new employees.

Reaching diversity goals starts with being intentional about ensuring you have high-quality, diverse candidates in your funnel to broaden the type of talent you are ultimately introducing into the company. Your entire funnel must be diverse, not just the individuals in it, to pre-empt any bias from creeping in.

From top to bottom, technology and data are powerful tools to help further diversify the funnel and avoid bias that gets introduced when diversity becomes a recruiter-by-recruiter decision. Without taking a data-driven approach to ensure your pipeline is well represented, there is a strong likelihood that bias will occur due to manual processes.

The best practice here is to use analytics to benchmark and assess diversity ratios (gender, ethnicity, veterans, etc.) for each stage of the hiring funnel, then continuously monitor the funnel to see where diversity decreases as candidates move through the pipeline. Analytics can clearly tell you at which stages in the hiring process you are losing diverse candidates so you can take meaningful steps to resolve the issues at hand. Your data may show that your pipeline diversity is dropping off after pre-screening or when an offer is made, and each of these scenarios will require a different type of remediation.

Also, don’t be resistant to piloting newer sourcing and recruiting technologies to see if they can help bring more people into the funnel. See what each recruiter can accomplish with different tech tools that are relevant to their positions and measure their impact. In working toward diversifying your workforce whether in growth mode or not, data should always be a guiding light.

Nail the Candidate Experience

Candidate engagement process is always super critical, but it becomes high stakes when you have the tall task of hiring at scale. There’s little more defeating than to see highly qualified candidates falling out of the funnel before reaching the interview phase. Industry data shows 60% of job seekers have had a bad candidate experience and 72% of those candidates shared it with others, so not only does delivering a poor experience put you in jeopardy of losing a good candidate, but it also could cost you in future hires.

One of the most effective ways to engage candidates is to design a personalized candidate outreach campaign and hit it with the right cadence. When hiring en masse, it’s entirely too labor intensive to do this all manually, but there are a number of tools that will automate a majority of the process and generative AI integrations that can help with the personalization. A successful approach typically involves a combination of automation, AI and customized reach-outs. Because it’s such a critical juncture in the hiring process, you don’t want to completely remove the human touch.

Using a combination of personal emails, texts and automated campaigns allows you to keep in frequent touch with candidates with personalized messages, and automated engagement tools will show you the response rates so you can hone those messages. Messages can be automatically sent at a certain cadence, with three typically being the magic number.

It’s still very important to have a personal touch, though, especially because you want candidates to have a quality experience, feel as if they’ve been set up for success and be ambassadors. Even if they’re not ultimately hired, they can be added to your ready-later pool and re-engaged when the right job-candidate fit comes up.