How Take-Off Recruiting Sets Early Stage Companies Up for Success

Wondering how we embed as an outside recruiting firm? Here is a step by step guide.

Hiring Manager Intake. First order of business is to have a meeting with the hiring manager (could be CEO, CTO, Head of Talent, etc). We get to know all your hiring needs, timelines, prioritizing each role by level of urgency and ideal profiles. We deep dive into what makes that profile “ideal”: is it years of experience, a certain tech stack, industry domain knowledge from a given sector, being involved with a startup previously that has notably scaled? You tell us, we take notes!
Tools and Process. We identify what sourcing tools are being used (if any) and understand the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in place. If there is no current infrastructure and tooling, we work to build that out with quality of service, as well as company budget, in mind. We have used sourcing tools like TopFunnel (now Teamable), Gem, and Betterleap. All great options for varying reasons. We have built out ATS’ for clients, such as Greenhouse, Lever and even used Notion in the past. Sourcing and general recruiting Systems are necessary to maintain data integrity and overall efficiency.
Candidate Calibration. This is a pivotal step before we launch into sourcing. After the in-take, we send a minimum of 20 candidate profiles to the hiring manager and have them provide feedback as to whether we are on the same page, or missing the mark (and why). This allows us to calibrate, change keywords in our boolean search, etc.
Sourcing. Based on average intersted response rates and open positions for each role, we work backwards to figure out how many weekly reachouts we need to hit to ensure that we have proper top of funnel inputs. While volume is a priority for any recruiter to hit hiring goals, one never wants to sacrifice quality. This is where the expertise and intution comes into play from top recruiters versus the rest of the recruiting field: we are able to hit high volume while targeting the top 1-10% of candidates in a search and drive traction right out of the gate.
Screening. We conduct most first calls for the startups we embed with (unless it is a “Send On Behalf Of” email where the CEO/CTO might be the ones technically sending the email to a candidate, or if the current recruiting team wants to handle first calls for process reasons). We get to know how to pitch the company well, pique a candidate’s interest, but also screen out for mitigating factors like location, comp, and other HR related aspects.
Scheduling. We push our candidates through by scheduling interviews and onsites.
Closing. One of the most crucial parts of a recruiter’s job is to close a candidate. That could mean delivering the offer letter, overcoming objections and getting a signature. It could also mean prepping a CEO/CTO to extend the offer, and how to sell the candidate based upon the candidate’s expressed motivations in earlier calls. Either way, closing is paramount and necessitates tight comms and cross functional efforts, including sell calls from individual contributors, etc.

Want to learn more or get started right away? Reach out via email: cam@takeoffrecruiting.com