Principles of a Perfect Search: Understanding

There’s no such thing as a perfect search. I’ve been recruiting for startups for 7+ years and lucky enough to make a few solid hires along the way. Some have been smoother than others, and while I’ve learned a few tips and tricks to create a better experience for all, I’ve realized perfection isn’t attainable over time.

In recruiting, people are the “product”, and every product has interesting features and bugs of their own. Every “end user”, in this case a hiring manager, has their own desires, needs & requirements to make the product a fit for their team.

And while it’s better to accept the fact that “Perfection is the enemy of progress”, it’s also fun to dream about the perfect search.

No matter the role, seniority, skillset or industry, the “perfect search” starts with 4 principles in my eyes: Understanding, Communication, Persistence & Expectations. Focus on knocking these out as a startup and the rest will fall into place.

Open-sourcing my thoughts over the next few weeks, starting with understanding here.

Understanding

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll have a hard time finding it.

One of the biggest gripes with recruiters is when they have no idea what the role of the function they’re searching for actually entails. And to their defense, they often recruit for wildly different roles without ever spending a day in those shoes.

Try hunting for a lead devops engineer when you’ve never written a line of code in your life. Easy way to get humbled.

But if, as a recruiter, you take the time to research those roles, pick the brains of hiring managers, ask insightful questions to candidates, you’ll pretty quickly get caught up to speed. Enough to have an informed conversation and manage expectations throughout the process.

This concept goes both ways. Startups are trying to figure it out too. If they knew exactly what they were looking for, they wouldn’t necessarily lean on recruiters to fill these roles. But the vast majority don’t.

They’re trying to understand what compensation should be, what the ideal background is, what it’ll take organizationally for a candidate to thrive, and how to get a hire done while prioritizing everything else on their team’s roadmap.

As a hiring manager, perhaps you need to bring someone on to support new products & expand to different marketing channels. You may understand that you need a growth marketer, but things change quickly in the digital landscape. What worked a year ago in your industry won’t be the exact same as today.

The onus falls on the recruiter to inform the client of what’s out there, and the client to at least take that with a grain of salt. The best teams adjust and narrow their focus throughout a proper search.

Teams that understand rather than assume win more often than not in the war for talent.

And if you’re not trying to win, what are you trying to do?

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Need help with your search? Just holler — matt@grosearch.io + Gro

Keep going & keep growing.

Matt