How to kickstart hiring with a talent strategy
Learn how to differentiate your company and your team.
Welcome to the first post of the Fractional COO!
I’m Jen Dennard. I’ve spent the last 10 years working in operations in early stage startups. I’ve seen it all—high growth, no growth, and everything in between. Right now, I lead operations and customer experience at Pulley—we make it easier for anyone (truly anyone!) to start a company. I’m also the cofounder and COO of Range, which builds communication software for teams. In other roles, I’ve led operations and strategy at Productable, built out people operations at Medium, consulted on DEIB, and even published papers in game theory and political science.
Recently, I’ve been getting several questions about hiring and retention, so that’s where we’re going to start for our first post! If you’ve got another topic you’d like me to cover, please comment or message me. I’d love to hear from you.
We all know that hiring (and retaining) a team is one of the key factors in building a successful company—it’s just not possible to do everything yourself. And yet, it’s often an area where we underinvest. As founders, we squeeze in sourcing and outreach after finishing our other work and often wing it when it comes to conversations with candidates.
To start, I’m going to apply a tactic that you’ll see me use again and again: start a doc. It sounds overly simple, but having a single doc for all things hiring will help both organize your recruiting and improve learnings over time.
Today, we’re going to focus on the first step of that doc, which I see as the key to unlocking hiring in the early stages: identifying your talent strategy.
Why do we need a talent strategy? (And what is it?)
As startups, we’re at a disadvantage. Large tech companies like Google or Meta can pay extremely high salaries to close candidates. They also have very strong brands, so applicants come to them. Startups don’t have that luxury. We’re often cash-constrained, and our brand awareness may be strong for a startup, but that’s still weak in the overall market. (This is why the canonical investor advice is to hire from your network aka folks who already know you.)
As a result, we need to find other ways to attract and close potential teammates. That’s where a talent strategy comes in.
A talent strategy takes stock of where your company (and team) have unique advantages, what your constraints are, and begins to identify the tactics you want to use.
Where should we start?
For early to mid stage companies, a talent strategy doesn’t have to be long. The goal is to answer four questions:
1. What are our hiring goals?
Goals for hiring should always be SMART — two hires next quarter, ten engineers by the end of June, etc. Like many goals, they can (and will) get more vague as you get farther out in time. It might look like specific numbers and roles for Q1 and Q2 and more generalized statements like “additional sales hires pending growth” for later in the year. We want to balance goals that hold us accountable without being overly precise at time ranges where we can’t be accurate.
It’s also worth noting that hiring can have a big impact on your team. It’s worth checking in with your leadership team on questions like: is our culture reflective of the values and principles we need today? Do we need to hire a different profile of teammate to help shift the culture?
2. What resources or advantages does our company have when it comes to hiring?
Get creative here. There are the obvious things like your network, money, equity, but what makes your company unique? What can you offer that might be hard for other companies to offer? What are the top three reasons you love working there? Ask your team. Ask why they joined. If nothing else, making a place an enjoyable, motivating place to work can be huge in recruiting great talent–think excellent meeting culture and strong mission.
3. What constraints do we have?
These tend to be a little easier because you already know all the challenges of hiring. These are likely going to be things like cash, amount of time to dedicate to recruiting, ability to hire junior teammates, etc. I like listing these out, so it’s easier to see and address them.
4. What strategy fits our goals and takes advantage of these resources and constraints?
This is the tie-it-all together step. We’re building an ‘offering’ here that we’re going to be taking to market, so I like to approach it like I would a GTM strategy—thinking through different channels a la Traction and assessing what would work well for us. Again, interviewing and talking with the current team can be helpful here—how did they hear about you? Why did they join?
Remember that a good strategy can have multiple steps—there might be what you’re doing today and what you’re going to do six-twelve months from now based on needs and based on actions you’re taking today.
Let’s look at a short example for a seed stage B2B startup like Range:
Goals
We need to hire two teammates in the next three months and three more teammates in the second half of the year, pending growth.
We want to continue building our current culture. (I highlight this as a goal because if you’re significantly increasing the size of your team, it’s a unique time where you can drive cultural change simply through the hires you make.)
Resources and Advantages
We’re fully remote, so we can hire folks anywhere in the United States.
We have a mission that’s strong—our target audience of remote employees can strongly connect to it.
We have a very attractive day-to-day work experience: limited meetings, high trust, good work/life balance.
We have good early stage investors.
Constraints
We don’t have enough cash to compete with later stage companies, but we can offer competitive salaries and equity for our stage and size.
We don’t have a well-known brand.
Our team—and source of referrals—is small.
Strategy
Use our personal and investor networks to meet initial candidates.
Leverage our mission and working style to close initial hires.
Begin writing about how we work and our mission to build a brand to attract hires over time.
This seems simple, and in some ways it is, but taking time to take stock of where your company has advantages can help you identify opportunities to make hiring easier overtime. For Range, brand building ended up being quite successful for attracting hires. We worked with groups like Key Values and leveraged our team to write and share about their experience.
What’s the next level?
The talent strategy is the first section of a hiring doc. The ideal end result is a document that can be given to a new teammate to help them learn about and become part of the hiring process. It might include sections on how you handle outreach to candidates, your interview process and hiring rubric, how you approach delivering offers to candidates, etc. To start, simply document each step of the process that you do today—even if you know it’s not ideal or what you’d like to be doing. Make sure to allow your team to edit and add to the doc, so it can change as your company changes.
Remember to keep any specific candidate information in a separate, private system, so no new hires are surprised by accidentally reading about themselves!
Thanks for reading the first edition! For the next few topics, we’ll be staying in the world of talent to discuss onboardings and what happens if things don’t work out with a hire. Please take a moment to subscribe if you’d like to continue reading, and as always, comment with questions or follow ups.