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3 recruiting rules for startups in 2021

“Those who survive ‘are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.’” 

When Sequoia released their public letter to founders and CEOs earlier this year, this Darwin analogy would come to mirror the largest contributor to the tech industry sidestepping complete pandemic doom. 

Although a horrifying wave of startup layoffs hit the market in March, this sharp upward trajectory progressed into a stagnating graph for the next 6 months. Business is still booming in tech, with VC fundings in the United States during the third quarter of 2020 hitting a 7-quarter high at $36.5B and 88 US-based companies raised funding rounds of $100M or more. 

AI Sourcing software for high-growth organizations, Hiretual, had a unique opportunity to understand how tech teams moulded a new workforce to meet business goals in the pandemic. User activity on our platform after May 2020 showed a steady increase in searches for tech roles, while software engineers and software developers topped the list throughout the year. Enterprise hiring teams are preparing for the Great Rehire, and startups are expected to feel the heat of competition from tech giants in the new year. 

To adapt to change, startups can take a page out of the playbook hiring teams are using to overcome pandemic restrictions by focusing on primary drivers of innovation of growth — new talent.

1. Know who your competitors are looking for

In a Hiretual survey of 350 recruitment professionals this past November, almost half of respondents anticipate employer competition making quality hires to be their biggest obstacle. With more tech companies joining the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft in adopting long-term remote work arrangements, companies can now access highly skilled tech professionals anywhere in the world. 

To compete against bigger tech names, our customers use Hiretual’s AI-driven labor market insights to make strategic shifts in the talent sourcing process. By implementing data intelligence when sourcing candidates, recruiters are able to build iterative searches based on target companies within their geographic footprint. 

We learned from our customers that to attract the right talent, you need to know what your desired candidates are looking for. How long do they stay at their next company? What’s the average market value for people with their last job title? What’s their education background? Where are they located? These are the questions recruitment technology aims to answer. 

2. Find answers where others don’t dare look

Five years ago, LinkedIn was the top choice for recruiters. However, recently, an explosion of content on the platform has made it difficult for recruiters to connect with job seekers. According to Hiretual’s survey, only 9% of recruiters plan to use LinkedIn as their primary sourcing channel in 2021. Taking the lead are other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, virtual tech communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow and Kaggle along with internal sourcing with an organization’s own Applicant Tracking System (ATS). 

To support the need for multi-channel sourcing by recruiters in high-growth organizations during the pandemic, Hiretual expanded partnerships with job boards, open web platforms and search engine APIs to give teams more visibility into talent communities outside of LinkedIn. With AI Sourcing, recruiters are able to conduct searches across 45+ online platforms simultaneously and use our Chrome Extension to quickly analyze and pull candidate information from profiles on Google Scholar, Twitter, GitHub and more.

“Out of curiosity, how did you find me?” a candidate asked a recruiter recently after an exciting introduction to a hiring manager looking for experienced developers at a disruptive consumer brand. The recruiter found this candidate while browsing GitHub repositories, and used Hiretual to find their contact details and resume information. The result? A perfect fit for an open req.

By using data intelligence tools to diversity hiring channels, you have more opportunities to differentiate yourself from other employers and pitch your story to candidates who don’t expect to be contacted by recruiters about a new opportunity. 

3. Implement flexible technology

Image Credits: Hiretual

Finally, your technology needs to be flexible if you want to build an adaptive team. If your recruitment workflow is made up of autonomous software that requires manual data synchronization for each and every prospective, it disrupts the flow of your recruiters. They’re going to end up spending most of their time on administrative housekeeping tasks instead of building plans to drive employer branding or boost candidate response rates.

Just like how you would want to integrate your sales and marketing tools, you should make sure your hiring channels are integrated to your email servers, scheduling tools or video interviewing software. At Hiretual, our marketplace of partnerships and integrations evolves alongside your tech stack, and we value your feedback so that we’re sure to support the tools recruiters use in the workplace. This allows teams to stay on top of a quickly changing market by consistently finding candidates, placing them into different priority buckets and following up with them without missing a beat. 

Don’t forget to catch a breath

Hopes are high for 2021, and so are the stakes. We don’t know when things are going to go back to normal, and we don’t know if things are going to somehow take a turn for the worse. What we do know is that digitization and online business models have opened up a million doors for people all around the world — and that is here to stay. 

Now that you know what to expect, catch a breath and get your company ready with the people you need to lead you to success. Keeping these three tips in mind is going to help you take control of one of the most volatile aspects of your business this coming year.