The Power of Partnerships: How to make multiple hires and scale effectively
By Oli Clarkson. Oli is a Senior Consultant at Zeren, and is based within our London office, as a member of our Commercial hiring team.
During my time at Zeren, I have been lucky enough to partner with some of the most innovative and ground-breaking technologies, who are genuine change makers helping to shape our future. This article will cover the key elements that can help achieve an effective working partnership, and the methods applied to find the right talent to facilitate growth, but not at any cost.
The foundation to an effective search is understanding the client’s needs and their true intent to hire. It sounds simple, but often this is overlooked in the rush to deliver results quickly. It is hugely important to identify what good looks like in their eyes and equally what doesn’t, usually based on learnings from previous important mistakes made.
Our job as a Consultant is, to listen, present an unbiased picture of the market based on key criteria outlined by the client, and then advise based on our own insights. This time and effort spent at the beginning of the search will pay dividends when you take the roles to market and add huge value to the candidate qualification process.
Below are three critical areas to understand before starting your search:
- Calibration – Get to know the DNA of the company. What makes it great? Values, culture, mission, people. Reflect what’s important to them in your work.
- Strategy – Spend time identifying your addressable market and devise your search cadence. Knowing where to look and how quickly you can cover the ground is half the battle.
- Messaging – Drive engagement with impactful and authentic messaging. Candidates decide within the first few moments of a call or the opening paragraph of an outreach if the role is a fit. Be considerate of how you would feel with another generic outreach. Personalise your content.
Another critical part of hiring strategy is identifying the barriers to hire. In this highly competitive market, where candidates are the commodity, candidate experience is key to drive engagement and create meaningful interactions that will increase ‘buy in’ and build a sense of belonging to the brand.
By outlining factors that can cause interruption to the flow of an interview process, you reduce the bottle-neck to help achieve a better outcome for all.
Below are some key areas to establish before kicking off the search:
- Process – Have a clear interview process where each stage drives engagement and shows the value of both your own proposition and highlights the impact the candidate could have on your path to success.
- Flow – Maintaining a good rhythm with no lengthy intervals between stages. This eliminates any feelings of doubt, or opportunities for competitors, and shows that you are strong operationally.
- Time management – Set realistic expectations of yourself to be able to interview. This is true on both client and candidate side.
- Transparency – Give honest and considered feedback at each stage. A lot of learning can be drawn from an unsuccessful interview for both client and candidate. Remember, that candidate could be a client one day!
- Candidate experience – With a buoyant market there are plenty of opportunities for candidates. Think how can you separate yourself from the others and cut through the noise.
The core benefit of retained search is that you become a fully integrated arm of the business with which you are partnering. You share the common goal of working together to create an environment that encourages collaboration, trust, and growth.
Once the search is underway, the importance of a clear communication channel with the hiring manager, internal HR teams and candidates is paramount. Information is shared continually throughout the search which allows you to react and modify the search parameters in real time and get invaluable insight into the way the business is run and what they need to grow.
Lastly, when making multiple hires, it is hugely important that you are conscious that your team reflects the diverse socio-cultural balance that exists in today’s thriving technology ecosystem. When given a blank canvas, it is a chance to build an environment that gives equal opportunity for all to flourish and learn from one another.
In my time at Zeren, I have been lucky enough to work in a high-growth environment that is facing all the same challenges that our clients face. I think that this enables us all to understand the demands and identify the pain-points to better serve our clients. The culture we have created echoes that to which most of our clients strive. With the tech scene continuing to boom and innovation and opportunity in abundance, I am hugely excited to see the limits to which our growth can take us and continue to partner with today’s change-makers!
Zeren exists to empower the world’s change makers. We do this by building high-performing teams in the world’s most innovative businesses, to accelerate growth by connecting visionary leaders and ambitious talent.
We are a leading global Executive Search & Recruitment firm with teams and offices in San Francisco, Houston, New York, London, Berlin and Frankfurt.
We partner with both high growth, VC/PE backed businesses and ambitious Corporate brands placing senior leaders, building exceptional teams, or providing critical interim and consulting talent.