The canvas is blank, the potential boundless, you need people. Who should help you with hiring, or should you just do it yourself?
I always advise: Start with your network!
Create a post on LinkedIn, share that you're hiring. It's the first door you will open; it's a special moment. But now... Let's assume you are here because you do want help, but you are not sure if it is from a Recruitment Agency or if you should hire an In-House Recruitment team.
Recruitment Agency:
If you're considering the use of a recruitment agency, there are both pros and cons to weigh.
On the positive side: Recruitment agencies often bring speed, and you can work with lots of them at the same time because you will only pay for the service if they present you with the right candidate. It is a numbers game. A lot of unpersonalized approaches to get one's attention and send over to you as fast as they can.
However, as Immad Akhund, Founder of Mercury points out, there are significant drawbacks to working with contingency recruiters.
“The incentives are all wrong: You get deluged by unqualified resumes Applicants get trained to trick your job process You are pressured to close quickly No care is given to your company culture”
Moreover, the financial commitment, typically around 15% of a new hire's salary, can be a substantial investment that you could honestly just redirect toward enhancing the overall employee package, better salary, better benefits, better tools.
A better idea but that is still contingency? A company called Paraform. You might even find me there because I used to work with them. I love the model; however, with Paraform, again, it is speed but way more specialized than a regular agency. Conclusion: What about the culture? Nothing talks more to my heart than having a real relationship with the founders to actually work together to find the best people to build your team, and don’t stop there, also create the process, the onboarding, the payroll system, create a relationship with the new team and be the point of contact for all People operations. Contingency recruiters do not bring that to the table.
In-house Recruitment:
The advantages here include greater control over the hiring process, a deeper understanding of company culture, and the ability to tailor recruitment efforts to your own needs.
However, as noted by Noah from Priviom, in the early stages of a company, prioritizing essential roles like engineers should take precedence over investing in specialized HR functions.
Noah from Co-Founder at Priviom: I love your work. It makes perfect sense because an HR leader or in-house recruitment is not in my first 10 hires. It's not that I don't see it as important, right? But we have to have engineers and some other things first, so having someone like you to be that bridge between being ready for full-time hires or spending on really expensive recruitment agencies - but also not trying to do it all ourselves, which I'm sure happens a lot at this stage. If you hadn't reached out, I would keep doing this myself until I just absolutely couldn't anymore, you know?
Delving deeper into Noah's perspective, the delicate balance between scaling the team and establishing essential infrastructure requires thoughtful consideration. Noah's openness about initially handling recruitment independently until it becomes overwhelming resonates with many founders who wear multiple hats in the early stages. Founding, in this context, emerges as a strategic partner, offering support when it's needed most – acting as a bridge between the immediacy of key hires and the eventual integration of in-house recruitment capabilities.
Besides that, Founding works with more than recruitment, and you can see everything here: Hiring the founding team 101
Based on those perspectives, what is your next step?