Once a company has established market fit with their services and identified who they are wanting to work with in their client base, very quickly the bottleneck for growth becomes hiring and employee retention. This business model is heavily dependent on having enough staff to meet the demand of clients - and since marketing is scalable in a way that hiring is not, hiring tends to create the pain points in the business. There are additional challenges that have presented themselves since the pandemic - there is a greater expectation on flexibility, company culture, and pay than existed in the workforce prior to 2020.

Once of the ways to address hiring as a pain point in your business is to build proactive hiring pipelines. This is a practice of filling your pipeline with quality candidates, so that as you are bringing in new clients, you have candidates you would like to work with that you can make offers to and bring onto the team quickly.

The way I see it - there is always going to be pressure in your business on either the client side or the staff side. You will either be well staffed (and therefore have the pressure to go get clients), or you will have a lot of clients wanting to work with you (and therefore the pressure to go get more staff.) The reality of this business model is that we are rarely - if ever - in perfect synchrony. So with this in mind, I want the pressure on my business to be getting more clients. If my hiring funnels are figured out, then the pressure on my business to bring in new clients is something that I can figure out at scale, since there are so many marketing tools available to reach many people at one time. So, we want to aim for the following: the hiring pipeline is full and ready, so that as your marketing initiatives work, your team grows in tandem with the demand. 

So how do we manage a hiring pipeline?

1. We develop a marketing and acquisition strategy for your new team members.

Growing your team means having a regular pipeline of candidates, and that means we have to figure out where they are and how to compel them to work for us. There has to be a regular influx of candidates for you to keep your pipeline full. But to get these applicants, we need to figure out who we are going after.

To start, review the best five employees you have ever had. What made them so great to work with? What common themes can you find between them? Use that information to build a target team avatar. This will then inform the marketing strategy of how you are getting your application in front of these people.

Example: when I did this exercise in my business, I realized that I loved working with recent college graduates. If I could intersect with someone in the final Spring semester who is anxious about graduating, I could give them a soft place to land for the next 6-12 months while they figure out what they want to do post graduation. If I could get them into a Team Lead role during that six month window, the chances of retaining them for 18 months+ was high. So every Spring, I would focus heavily on hiring from local colleges. I would see if I could attend job fairs, I would post flyers around the college, and I would shift my digital marketing to specifically target up-and-coming graduates.

2. Accept rolling applications, all the time.

Part of filling your hiring pipeline is accepting rolling applications at all times. In the past, businesses I’ve worked with have been very anxious to do this - they do not want to have a job posting until they have an open position and need someone now. My experience taught me, however, that what candidates want more than anything is clear communication. Candidates tend to be okay with a more extended interview process as long as you are clear with them about what to expect and what that timeframe might look like (or, the fact that you cannot give them a timeframe - that in and of itself gives more clarity.)

An example response I might say to an interview if we did not need to hire someone right away, but I was filling my hiring pipeline: “Hi X! Thank you so much for your application - I really enjoyed reading about your experience and your interest in our team. I’d love to set up a phone interview with you to hear more. I also wanted to let you know - I’m anticipating our next hire will be 4-6 weeks out from now. When we don’t have hours available right away, I want to be transparent with candidates that there is going to be about a 4-6 week window before the next hire will be starting with us. Please let me know if that changes your interest - otherwise I’m looking forward to connecting more!”

You want to make sure that it doesn’t come across like you are guaranteeing they will be moving forward with your business in that timeframe - just that you are giving them clarity on when the next hire, whoever it may be, will be joining the team.

3. Set a Metric Target for your pipeline. 

I would recommend 3-5 qualified candidates at all times. If you are growing quickly, this may mean a high volume of applications coming into your business in order to sustain the metric of candidates in the pipeline.

Note: the metric is candidates in the pipeline. By setting this as the metric you are aiming for, it ensures that your pipeline will always have people to source into the business as a hire.

4. Keep close data on your scheduling needs.

Keeping close data on the schedule and what your staffing needs are is a fundamental piece to keeping your hiring pipeline moving efficiently. By keeping a close eye on your scheduling needs, you can start to map out your next hire proactively, and reorganize your pipeline to fit what you are going to need. This is one reason that having multiple candidates in your pipeline is excellent - if you have 5 qualified candidates, you can start to nurture whichever candidate has the closest aligned availability to what you are seeing the schedule might need, which can help prioritize the flow of your pipeline.

5. Determine if you are in a slow hiring season or a fast hiring season.

A slow hiring season is going to be one where you don’t need a staff member right that second, but you are nurturing them for a potential future hire. This can be done as long as you give the staff member extreme clarity about the timeline, and continue to move them along the pipeline in iterative steps. The reality is - most pipelines have several steps in them, and hiring takes time. Having a “slow hiring season” just means that you are letting the steps in your hiring process work for you to slowly nurture that client along.

Here is a fun exercise for you though - if you have a candidate in your hiring pipeline, why not make it a challenge to see if you can get enough new clients in 6 weeks to justify the hire? It does not take that many new clients to justify a hire - and with a lot of force behind your marketing, it is completely doable to bring on enough new clients in 6 weeks for a new staff member. 

A fast hiring season is going to be one where you are looking to bring on candidates as quickly as possible. This means you are moving candidates through your process, and heavily marketing for new applications. This is really the only difference between the fast and slow hiring season - how you leverage time against your process.

6. Have someone focused on your pipeline as part of their regular weekly work.

Nurturing your candidate pipeline is going to have to be something that is done on a weekly basis. Many businesses struggle with maintaining a hiring pipeline because hiring is something they only have on their or a staff members radar when they become short staffed. This means they are already playing catch up by the time they need to hire. Building the management of the pipeline into someone’s workflow ensures that this will remain a proactive focus of the business on an ongoing basis. 

Michelle Kline

DogCo Launch