Building Your Talent Strategy

Companies that are the most successful at consistently landing high-quality talent are those that place as much importance on recruiting as they do any other essential business tactic: as a foundational part of everyday operations.

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From developing a repeatable, strategic process and continuously working to identify ways to improve it, founders can take a number of steps to build a culture of recruiting. Sometimes, that means hiring a dedicated talent-sourcing and recruiting team.

“Having a recruiter to own and drive all the pieces involved in sourcing, interviewing, and hiring talent can be really helpful so that you have a central person to own it,” says Greylock’s Talent Partner Glen Evans, who works with portfolio companies as they build their core teams. “Then everyone else can focus on building the product and company.”

However, working with a recruiter in a way that best leverages the company’s existing strengths while providing additional benefit isn’t simple. From working with an outside agency to hiring in-house, founders and hiring managers must carefully consider their needs – including company stage, open roles, and growth trajectory – and be just as selective about the recruiter they bring in as they do with any other hire. Moreover, founders must still stay closely connected to the recruiting process.

Evans and fellow member of the Greylock talent team Dwane Hamilton sat down with Greymatter to discuss the role of a recruiter, how startups should approach working with one, and how they can continue to build a culture of recruiting into their organization. This conversation is part of our Brain Trust series, where you can find candid advice from experts in their field.

You can listen to the interview at the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode Transcript

Heather Mack:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Greymatter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I’m Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock.

Today I’m joined once again by my colleague Glen Evans, who heads core talent here at Greylock. I’m also pleased to have Dwane Hamilton here with us today. Dwane works with Glen on the talent team where he focuses primarily on finding and recruiting engineering talent.

As we’re all familiar, finding and retaining high quality talent is a constant concern. Never an easy task, the past two years have changed the process dramatically, from the hiring freezes in early 2020 to the labor shortages of 2021, and to today, halfway into ’22, when we’re all trying to wrap our heads around the impact of the many global and local geopolitical and economic challenges on the hiring environment.

So today we’re going to do a deep dive into one aspect of the talent search process: working with a recruiter. Glen and Dwane will walk us through best practices and provide some case study examples from their own experience.

Glen, Dwane, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Glen Evans:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dwane Hamilton:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me as well.

HM:
Awesome. So, we’ve talked about talent several times on Greymatter and have gone deep into a few different aspects of the practice. Each time, even though these conversations haven’t been that long apart, we’re operating in a different world. And so, before we talk specifically about working with recruiters, let’s set the stage a little bit. At a high level how would you characterize the hiring landscape today? Glen, why don’t you start us out?

GE:
I’d say the hiring landscape today has shifted to an uncertain place. The largest tech companies who seem to be on a nonstop hiring trajectory are either freezing hiring or implementing layoffs. Hopefully this doesn’t continue, but I do not think we’ve seen the end of this yet.

These cycles do help companies and candidates slow down and be a little bit more thoughtful. And over the past 10 years or so, we’ve been in a world where hiring demand has been so much higher than the overall supply of talent, that it’s created a very reactive and competitive environment. I think we could see more balance in the demand and supply in some cases.

Candidates and employees have had a lot of leverage as well over the past decade, and top talent will likely continue to have that demand regardless of market conditions. I’d suspect people won’t have as many options or as much leverage as they did in the past, or perhaps they’ll be less willing to make a move.

In general though, companies will need to be extra thoughtful when hiring and it is still a very good time to join a startup. I think a lot of people we talk to and recruit for our companies continue to view well funded and premier VC backed-startups as a great place to be during this time to grow their career, learn a ton, and have the overall upside that can come with it versus being at a much larger public company that has all the challenges that we probably can assume.

HM:
Right. And Dwane, what does this look like for you in these specific roles you’re working with?

DH:
Yeah, I think we’re in a very unique time. COVID, exponential growth, to now; this correction. However, COVID also gave people a lot of time to reflect and think about where they want to spend their time and what they want to work on, which has been good for startups. I think perks and stability are nice, but I think people are really seeking more meaning from their work.

As Glen mentioned. I think that people have opportunities (and the last couple years they’ve had a lot of opportunities), and I think now it’s slowing down a bit where we might see somebody who used to have five to seven offers, might see one to three offers.

HM:
Great. And as we’ve discussed before, recruiting is an area where startups absolutely should never skimp in terms of the time and attention spent on it. And of course we’re talking about companies that may just have a couple of founding members who are doing multiple jobs at the same time and they’re trying to build their core teams and that’s where people like you come in – or don’t. How do startups know when to bring in a recruiter for help?

GE:
I’d start by saying it’s not one-size-fits-all. Some of the considerations that the team and I talk a lot about here: there’s the time factor. Are founders and early teams spending too much time recruiting where they can’t even focus on the product or building the company, et cetera? Or are they spending zero time as a result of all that focus on building the company? Then there’s the number of open priority roles you’re trying to fill. If it’s dozens of roles and you don’t have in-house support, and the agencies aren’t producing, or whatever you’re doing, that’s a factor, right? Just bandwidth and filling all these key positions to help you scale.

The growth rate of the company is also important to consider. Some of this relates to stage, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but I think the growth rate of revenue, product market fit, what stage they’re in, all of those things play a factor. And I think companies and founders almost need to look 12 to 18 months down the line and bet on themselves a bit and decide if things are going to continue on this trajectory, and if so, we may want to bring in a recruiter now to be ahead of this continued growth. There’s a lot of pros and cons to doing that.

DH:
Yeah. I think a good talent person could increase your capacity to win. There’s a lot of different factors where a talent person plays in to help augment the time of a founder. So if you have somebody working on recruiting a hundred percent of the time, they could be building out processes, and being a liaison between the candidate, the hiring manager, and the founders themselves. They can manage all talent-related tools, systems, job descriptions, career pages, et cetera. So, it’s just all about this trade-off between time and money.

GE:
And I would add one piece there, that having an in-house recruiter doesn’t mean your hands are washed and clean from ever having to be involved with recruiting again. Now founders and hiring managers and key people in the company can focus on having very impactful and meaningful interactions with candidates to help close, to help sell, to interview, and that kind of work is huge in getting candidates in the door. But having an in-house recruiter to kind of own and drive all the pieces that Dwane was talking about can be really helpful so that you have a central person to own it, and then everyone else can focus on building the product and company.

HM:
Yeah. So, depending on where the company is at in its journey, like which stage they’re at, what does the relationship with the recruiter look like? How does that differ? What are the advantages or disadvantages?

GE:
Yeah. So, Getting back to the considerations of time, growth, and number of open roles I mentioned earlier, those kinds of things come into play. So, I’d say series A, series B is when you want to start thinking about it, but only to make sure you’re building it the right way and you have the right foundation in place to scale it further as the company continues to scale.

HM:
Makes sense. And though, like today, in-house recruiting roles have become much more commonplace, recruiting agencies still exist. Are they relevant for startup recruiting and given the specificity of the roles you’re trying to help fill, what are your thoughts on using a generalized agency?

DH:
Yeah. Agencies are still very relevant. They were a huge help for a lot of startups in the past. I think when used effectively, agencies provide another channel for generating candidates outside of your network, or for founders spending time on LinkedIn, reaching out to people. From my experience with founders, I generally recommend using agencies for your difficult, important, or time-consuming hires. You shouldn’t be paying for something that’s easy.

GE:
Yeah. I agree. That’s well said, I would probably also add that agencies can be really useful for out-of-network roles. Oftentimes founders come with a certain background, they’ve worked with a certain amount of people, or skill sets that is, and getting an agency to come in to help you bridge the gap on your experience. Maybe it’s a go-to-market hire, or maybe it’s a role that you just aren’t familiar with. So an agency can be helpful there, and we do recommend proven agencies that we trust to our companies on occasion, but we typically will vet them and figure out if they have a solid track record.

So, for any of our companies (or anyone for that matter) who are considering leveraging external recruiting support, make sure you’ve done your leg work on them, and figure out: Who are their customers? Do you have any back channel signals on them? And you want to make sure you’re not signing up somebody to waste your time, because time is valuable at this stage or at any stage for a startup.

I would also recommend monitoring or keeping an eye on what the fee structure is too, to make sure how they’re setting up the payments and the financial aspect of it makes sense for you as a company in your stage. Generally, make sure that they’ll support you and give you the attention you deserve. And then if they’re not producing, cut them off quickly.

HM:
That seems like a hard role to screen for. So, what should founders be looking for in a recruiter? What does a good recruiter look like?

GE:
I think some of the traits that I always anchor to for hiring a great recruiter outside of general background or track record (where they’ve worked, what they’ve worked on, what skill sets they’ve supported), is are they driven? Are they thoughtful? Are they good listeners? Do they have a growth mindset? In my mind, where do I think they can be in three to five years as they continue along in their career? So those are some of the intangibles, like low ego, great customer service, positive attitude, great teammate. All of those things really matter to me beyond all of the kind of core skills a recruiter could bring to the table.

DH:
I agree with Glen. Fundamentally the growth mindset and the ability to want to win are some of the attributes that I’ve seen in fantastic recruiters.

HM:
Yeah. And how do you find this out about them? What kind of questions should you be asking them when you’re interviewing them?

GE:
I like to dig into some of the open-ended questions around the hardest roles they’ve worked on and why, and have them give me examples and walk me through how they solved it; what they did to end up winning. What was the hardest feedback they received and why, and what did they learn from it? And did they ever have to give really hard feedback? Because I think those signals – and being able to let a candidate down , or have a hard conversation with a teammate or a hiring manager – are important skills for a recruiter to have. How would they pitch your company? This is especially important for startups. How would they pitch a startup versus an established tech company with a brand that’s easy to sell?

Also, what metrics do they care about? That’s telling to me. If they’re paying attention to the data and they’re really viewing their overall output, they’re thinking about that, because they know when to dial it up or dial it back.

I think another key one for startups is, if they joined tomorrow, what would they do to get up to speed? And let’s see how they’ve thought through that. It’s not just, “Hey, come in and recruit.” There’s a whole bunch of things to get to know and figure out what are the priorities, the pain points, the current process, what’s working, what’s not? All of those things are really, really critical.

DH:
I think, Glen, you hit all the great points there. I think it depends on the stage of the company and what they’re looking for and why. I think you need to look at those attributes. I like Glen’s point on the pitching part. It’s something that’s very, very important. As a founder, you should look at it from, Would you buy from this person? If they’re pitching you on this company, are they going to join? Do you have a conviction? Do you feel comfortable having this person pitch your company? They’re going to be the first person a candidate talks to.

HM:
Yeah. That’s a lot of responsibility on the recruiter!

So, both of you worked in house as recruiters at iconic tech companies, Google and Facebook, and before joining Greylock and working with startups, what can you share about tactics at the large companies as they overlap and differ from those at startups? And what should startup recruiters understand about their competition from these big, established companies?

GE:
Well, the big, established companies, especially Google and I’d say Facebook are the companies that a lot of people want to emulate in terms of their hiring practices, their bar, the repeatable processes and kind of having that rigor. However, startups don’t need to over engineer this stuff too early. They need to be scrappy and move fast.

The bigger companies have to build those larger machines to hire the thousands of people a year they’ve been hiring. Right? So it becomes a little more transactional, where I think one of the bigger differences in things we recommend to startups is it has to be very like, as I say, “white glove treatment.” Very hands-on, have many touch points, check-ins. Those candidates have to just be treated a little more like a relationship and building that trust as opposed to the repeatable, transactional nature of a larger organization that can get away with that because of their brand and the resources they have and the offers they can make and things like that.

And so I think startups can learn how to pitch against the competition by talking about all the obvious things like future vision of the company and where this could lead financially with the equity or how you can grow your career here.

In previous podcasts, I talked with Evan Reiser about almost having your career as a product at a company. That was an important thing to think about for startups. Like, “Here’s how I’m going to support your growth if you join me here on this journey.” So I think those are some of the things, I mean, I think any startup would be lucky enough to have a machine that big, because that means they’ve had wild success. So, I think they can draw some things from the best practices of it, but it can’t be set up to operate that way too soon. I do think structure and repeatable processes are helpful and that’s what I would recommend startups try and emulate.

DH:
So, to that point, being in venture capital has given me a unique perspective to see a lot of fantastic startup recruiters. And one thing I noticed that they do really well is they identify their unfair advantage and build on this.

So, a great example is like Google is known traditionally to win on brand or the business. But what if your startup was climate change focused and competing on mission, and the candidate’s most important criteria is affecting climate change? You need to find the right people that weigh towards your unfair advantage. So this could be stuff like your mission, your culture, the business opportunity, traction, leadership, technical challenges, the investment, and who funded the product roadmap or personal growth.

I think there’s a combination of unfair advantages you can play upon that you need to figure out in your startup that allow you to compete – both at your field, and your funding stage – but also against the juggernauts like Google and Facebook.

HM:
Right. And Glen, each time you’ve been on the podcast, as you were just touching on, we’ve talked about the importance of companies building that culture of recruiting into their organizations from the earliest days. And we’ve been touching on this through the conversation, but how do you do that from the beginning, especially if you can’t really bring on a recruiter or have someone helping you with this from the very beginning when you’re a seed company?

GE:
Yeah, it starts with the founding team and the early five to ten employees that are putting in time, setting an example on recruiting, reaching out to their networks, creating a great experience, not letting balls drop, not taking days or weeks to follow up with somebody. Keeping things moving. Everybody’s job is to recruit. And it needs to be a sense of everybody having all hands on deck to build this company and bring in the best people. But that only lasts to a certain point. During the seed stage you’re usually able to do that because everyone’s able to tap their networks and talk to their friends and get referrals. And as it scales, I think bringing in a full-time recruiter can take the reins from that initial recruiting culture that was built by the founding team and scale it further.

Start documenting the processes, train new hires as they come in, make sure they get that same kind of all hands on deck vibe on recruiting. And it might not mean now that when you have a full-time recruiter that the founding team is all sourcing or doing a lot of the recruiting outreach. You might just have a different impact by those people, as I mentioned previously, where they’re having more targeted and impactful recruiting interactions as opposed to spending half of their week doing it.

DH:
To build on Glen’s point here, I think you want to foundationally do recruiting in the very beginning and have it as a priority is people’s most important part because as you scale, it gets difficult to change that culture. If you don’t have that in the very beginning, that’s like what sets how everything is built upon.

HM:
Should startup founders be prepared that recruiters won’t want to work with them, or, what are the tough questions that they’ll get from recruiters?

GE:
I always advise founders to be as transparent as possible when they know they really want to bring somebody in. And that might mean talking through current growth, numbers or answering the harder questions around funding or the runway. Those kinds of things are important to be really transparent about with anyone. For that matter, you might be asked these things, and if it’s not leaking anything confidential, I think the more transparent you can be, and the more you approach someone – especially as a recruiter – as like, “Hey, I’ll be a great partner to you. I care about your career. I want to work with you to make recruiting amazing here.” And you have a responsive partner, recruiters love working with people like that. So if a founder or person recruiting or recruiter is not going to be that, then I think they’re going to have a hard time landing somebody great.

DH:
Yeah. I love when people ask difficult questions or tough questions. Generally, it means they care and they’re coming from a place where they really want to truly understand to make sure it’s right for them. So I think that there’s nothing wrong with the amount of transparency you can be able to give because they’re going to be selling your company and trying to advise you on what to disclose to candidates.

HM:
Yeah. So working with a startup is also a big consideration for the recruiter. What advice would you have for them? What should they be concerned about or thinking about and what would be the advantages of working with a startup?

GE:
Yeah, great question. I talk to a lot of recruiters and I think generally I start with what’s important to them. I try to really understand what they’re trying to solve, what they want, where they are trying to be in the next number of years. And if they really want to grow and learn and move their career forward, I say, “Then I think you should consider a startup. And the reason being, you have a ton more exposure, you get to wear a lot more hats, you get to learn a ton about building companies and scaling and solving problems versus just being kind of a cog in a wheel and kind of keeping that machine moving and all of those things.”

And then, as they’re thinking about different startups, I always advise people, and this goes for anyone for that matter. But who are the founders? Who is the investor? What are their track records? What’s the product and the mission? Does it resonate with you? Can you get out of bed every morning and be excited to wake up and go to work and pitch this to a candidate you’re recruiting? Do you feel good about all of those things? All of those things matter. And then obviously the nuances and the hard questions we talked about earlier on runway funding, headcount growth, is this founder going to be a great partner and support my career and view me as a strategic partner to the business? All of those things really matter.

And then, I also tell people maybe this will change because of the macro situations, but don’t confuse yourself with too many opportunities. Really try and narrow it down to the sectors or the spaces or the stages that you’re really excited about. And being in an early stage as a recruiter is not as scary as you think. And there’s so much opportunity to grow and learn and all the upside that comes with it as well.

DH:
I think to add to Glen’s point on this, you can actually look at this from a founder’s perspective as well and look for the same attributes as if you’re looking for someone who was brought into wanting to know what early means, right? And has done their research and their homework on that versus coming from maybe a later stage company and understanding that they’re going to have to flex a lot of different muscles. And they’re excited about that.

HM:
Great. And it sounds like this is a really hard relationship to get right. So I’m sure there’s inevitably some mistakes that are made or some pitfalls that people need to watch out for when working with a recruiter. What advice would you have there?

DH:
Yeah, I think it all depends on the company itself. Like we’ve said a few times throughout the podcast, but one of the common pitfalls I’ve seen within the early stage (where we spend a lot of time) is indexing in two different ways. One part is maybe hiring too junior in the very beginning because they think they can do more, or maybe the admin side. And a lot of it would just be scheduling and maybe this person can also go out and find people, which is really, really difficult to train because of the fact that maybe sourcing or running these processes are pretty complex. So, I’ve seen that as a common pitfall.

The other side is indexing for skills that you don’t necessarily need at the stage that you’re at. So you have to really figure out and, like I said, that very beginning, what is important for you right now and what you need to solve for.

GE:
Yeah. And I would add to that as well. And once you bring in a recruiter, eventually, it’s not just wash your hands of it and you’re done. You still have to be a great partner, support them, understand that it’s still going to be hard. It’s not all of a sudden every req is filled in a month. Recruiting is a long process. And especially for startups, when there’s less brand recognition, less product market fit, or whatever’s going on. It’s a harder pitch to people. And so I think there has to be support and understanding that it’s not just now going to be suddenly resolved altogether. There’s still a partnership with that person and really understanding your needs and going after the right skill set for your stage is also, just to echo Dwane’s point, really, really important.

DH:
I think also you could seek out advice from other founders as well on how to onboard a recruiter or seek out advice from your venture capital. I think it’s very important, like anything in onboarding a person, but even a talent person is setting expectations of what you want to achieve and then actually measuring that out just like you would do with a salesperson.

HM:
Right. Yeah. Great. Well guys, thank you so much for doing this today. It’s been really interesting. I learned a lot as I always do from talking with you.

GE:
Well, thanks for having us. And it was fun to be here.

DH:
Absolutely.