Talent Pipelining: solution for startups and growing teams
The speed of the talent market, the great resignation, the spike (or a ramp) in remote friendly tech roles makes it a difficult market to be in as an employer. Rejections, counter offers and increased time to hire for certain roles in the US and abroad can affect the speed of product development and the competitiveness of your product to the clients. We've been looking at the better way to do things in the current ecosystem and would like to elaborate on Talent Pipelining as a solution for scaling teams.
Talent Pipelining is a long-term process-driven solution that helps the growing teams to continuously source, select, and recruit the top talent based on the prioritised positions within the team. The strategy predicates itself on building long-term relationships with pre-selected individuals for your organisation over a long period of time. Your mindset here is switching from recruiting to fill an open position to thinking about who your team will need and should hire in the upcoming 1-2-6-12 month period, without being subjected to the rush search and therefore rush hiring decisions being made.
Talent pipelining isn’t a short-term strategy and takes time to develop and nurture, but in the long term, the benefits can 10x the investment. Outside of addressing the immediate demands of the growing team, it also works on the long-term goals and strategies. For instance, we work on developing the process that works well for the setup of the team to ensure smooth company representation, candidate experience, and internal processes. Talent pipelining is not necessarily suited for the specific seniority of the role or the field, yet I find it most applicable to IC-level hires at scale.
This shift from reactive recruiting to a proactive one has several benefits for the well-being of your team and your success overall:
Establishing a brand: consistently reaching out and talking to professionals in your targeted niche helps you build the image of the company as an employer. Even if you are not recruiting yet or considering to recruit in the future for a specific role, placing yourself in front of the right people and making a positive first interaction can increase the referrals and interest in your company overall.
Candidate focus: you have the liberty of time to listen to what the candidate actually aspires to do. This also allows you to measure the culture fit long before the candidate interviews in addition to technical assessment. Having a trusted recruiter relationship gives the individual a career advisor, and ensures there is someone keeping them in mind when it’s time for their next career move, be it in 3 or 5 months.
Better budgeting: by staying in touch with the talent you learn the expectations on salary and benefits package, making certain that offers you budgeted for are competitive.
Competitive intelligence: You keep the pulse on what your competition is doing, gaining valuable insight.
Time to hire shortens: talent pipelining allows you to be two steps ahead in the hiring process and saves time in actively sourcing and narrowing down the ideal candidate profile.
Personally, I favour the Talent Pipelining strategy for its long-term benefits and the brand it creates for the companies in the talent market. It allows us to focus on long-term strategic outcomes and increase engagement.
Why this is a strategy to consider for startups?
0-1 journey is tough and it's tougher to build your employer brand from scratch in today's competitive marketplace. Whether you’ve just raised seed round or you are moving your outsourced team in-house, it is never too late to dedicate your time and attention to building the core processes and core pipelines of the individuals you need to speak with. As you grow, and for some the jump from seed to series A can be as short as 6 months, it becomes essential to embed the processes that work for your team to ensure smooth operations and, therefore, revenue flow.
In the competitive market, you’ll need all the support you can get to establish your brand image, differentiate yourself in front of the candidate and develop a long-term relationship with the type of talent you are after, be it in the blockchain industry, AI, or cleantech.
Spoiler alert! We are soon to launch the talent-pipelining-as-a-service (TPaaS) to support growing startups and their product and engineering teams. Stay tuned!
