About
We’ve been growing steadily for the past 3 years. However, since the beginning of 2017, we have been growing TREMENDOUSLY. Just to give you an idea; Our target for the year is to grow our revenues by 200%, quadruple our profitability and create an outstanding portfolio of products (still in stealth mode).
We started the year with a team of 15 people and guess how many we need to hire? 15 more! You might be thinking it’s a bit of a stretch, but rest assured, we’re still on target. 🙂
Enough with the warm up, let’s get down to how we went about hiring all those people. Well, let’s just say it was a four step process that we only started when we realized we desperately needed to hire:
- Filter resumes based on personal preference.
- Call for a quick phone interview, just getting to know the person.
- Interview the person, like him/her.
- Hire.
Isn’t this how basically everyone does it?
They go with their intuition. Driven by the desire and need to hire and grow fast. Personally, that’s what I thought, and I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Let me explain what happened next. Some new team members had difficulties handling projects independently, while others were faced with cultural mismatch issues. One batch of hires even quit in a matter of days because of commitment problems. In short, we saw it all.
Here it is, in plain and simple words: A wrong hire is bad for business. Really bad!
How bad, you ask? In our case, out of 5 hires only 2 passed their probation period, which accounted for one third of our team at the time.
In plain simple words: a wrong hire is bad for business. Really bad. How bad you asked? In our case, out of 5 hires, only 2 remained passed the probation period which was one third of our team size at the time.
The above infograph from the Fast Company clearly explains what happened to us. The impact of wrong hires created a lot of problems for a small startup like ours considering the effort, time and money put into the process. As a service company, a wrong hire can compromise our ability to communicate clearly and meet deadlines, which could impact our relationships with clients.
According to this Search Party article the cost of a wrong hire from the candidate’s annual salary is as follows:
- Wasted salary of up to 6 months (63%)
- Recruitment costs and time (5-40%)
- Training costs (and time) (5-20%)
- Impact on rest of team (5-50%)
- Missed business deliverables (infinite!)
I would love to know more about the failures and successes with your recruitment process. Wait for my next article with the other side of the story, on how we completely rethought our recruitment process.
P.S: if you would like to join us, we are hiring 🙂
