3 Ways To Recruit Talent On A Budget

  Ross Palley

We invited three B2B tech startups in the Venture Lane community to participate in our Talent Acquisition Lab. Participants worked directly with a Mentor Committee of seasoned talent acq leaders in Boston tech to upgrade their playbooks for sourcing & recruiting top talent.

On the Committee, we had David Vencis (Head of Talent Acquisition @ Drizly), Taylor Roa (Talent Acquisition Manager @ Wistia), and Mitch Schneir (People Partner @ Google). Check out their key takeaways below!

Rally your team around the cause…

• Replace recruiter dollars with man hours. Instead of paying 20-30% salary of new hires to a contract recruiter, empower everyone on the team to spend 1 hr/wk reaching out to prospective candidates on LinkedIn. Cost economics will work out in your favor, and you'll get someone more aligned with team mission & values. 

• Get more for your referral bonus dollars. Definitely offer employees a referral bonus, but give some of those dollars to the employee's charity of choice. Your employees will rally behind the mission, and your company can write off the contributions! 

• Repurpose rockstar marketers.  If your marketing team generates tons of inbound leads for your product, they can do it for talent too. Have them spin up marketing materials and top-of-funnel motions for acquiring talent MQLs.

Absorb executive knowledge without paying executive salaries…

• Say yes to part-time. If you can't afford to pay senior talent a full-time salary, try to get them on a part-time basis. The deficit of man hours pales in comparison to the contributions they'll make to your company's brain trust.

• Use department boards as proxies. Can't afford a rockstar department head? Convene a few great leaders in the space once a quarter as your department advisory board. They can set strategic direction, and affordable junior hires can own execution. Particularly effective for product management.

• Recruit through your investors. Your angels & VCs have a rolodex of executive talent that would rather cycle through early stage opportunities in a lower salary range than take a leadership role at a large corporate.

Stay savvy when hitting a SERIOUS growth phase…

• Bring talent acquisition in house. If you raise a big round and need to fill 10 or more roles in the next 12 months, it's time to add a talent acquisition manager to the team. More cost effective than sticking with contract recruiters.

• Avoid redundancy. It's easy to create duplicative responsibilities when scoping out a lot of new roles. Take two similar roles, pare down job requirements to the bare necessities, and see if those two roles can be consolidated into one.

• Hire top down for new departments. It's tempting to staff new departments with a couple junior workhorses and save on salary, but department needs change frequently at the early stage. Hire leadership first so they can do a more thoughtful job scaling the department as needed and avoid wasteful bloat.  
  
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