View from the Build — How we built a cohort of tech recruiters: budget & plans

Continued from here: https://amanda-daering.medium.com/view-from-the-build-how-we-hired-trained-a-cohort-of-new-tech-recruiters-56198c4b71c5

2. Doing > Deciding.

Deciding to hire a cohort is step 0.01 since you then have to decide how you’ll build it. And then actually do it.

My experience in building up junior level talent includes to start:

1. We’ve successfully taught 1 high potential person “tech” (crushing it, AW!). Our other recruiters have come in with tech experience.
2. Our Chief of Staff started with me years ago as a junior recruiter in another life but I can’t take credit for her nearly decade of experience beyond that.
3. Applicable years spent supporting an expensive and impressive cohort model building up junior engineers at Centare (thank you brilliant people there!)

What I learned first and foremost from these experiences is that this is an experimental process. We’re building for mindset as much as skills and that requires a fluid approach.

So, wasting years plotting and planning and tweaking is useless.

From inception to kickoff — 9 weeks.

Here’s my plan and some why behind each decision.

Name — The Buildery

This is the fun part! We already support senior recruiters through the Recruitery so the Buildery was a perfect fit to this approach to training.

Size — 3 to 4 new team members

I want as much joint, real work (vs. silly fictional exercises) as possible. I believe most people learn best by doing… but our clients rely on the seniority and expertise we’ve promised them. So, our Buildery recruiters will support our senior recruiters but not own individual clients or jobs while in training. We have 3 senior recruiters ready to train (and other wonderful team members ready to help!) so keeping to a manageable “pairing” level seems prudent.

At 2 or less, the investment doesn’t make sense anymore from a financial perspective.

These will be full-time team members. I didn’t do a “trial period” during training because I believe if you want the right people to commit to you, you need to commit to them.

The Budget — $390,800

$250,000 (hard costs — salaries & benefits)

$61,600 (hard costs — tech licenses, equipment, travel expenses & engineers/subject matter experts)

$79,200+ (estimate — time from current team spent training, Q+A etc)

We’re bootstrapped and debt free. I considered taking on debt for this but am currently planning on the business self funding it. I hope if I choose debt for this in the future that it’s out of aggressive growth strategy and not economic necessity. There will be plenty of folks reading this thinking this might be best to do with debt or investment dollars.

A few thoughts run concurrently for me on this. One, I worry that female entrepreneurs (like me!) do this out of fear and self-sacrifice in a way that my male counterparts may not. Two, we can pay for this and good financial decisions to date allow for that — I should trust my gut. Three, I love my current business partners and additional investors are not appealing to me at the moment. We do have a line of credit already if needed. I’m not sure yet if this is the right call.

The Plan = Tech -> Recruiting -> Consulting

I’ve always believed that context is everything in recruitment. When you know the team, you can gauge fit. When you know the tech, you can have a real conversation beyond buzzwords.

You have to know the puzzle pieces and that’s so much easier when you can see the box.

So, this training will take place in three parts and start with tech/startups before we talk about our recruiting process. For each phase, Builders (yes, Buildery participants get word play as part of this experience too!) will rotate pairings with senior team members giving them exposure to everyone’s style.

How I’m feeling at this step: this is the fun part where its largely theory which is more interesting than scary

The next step: selecting the cohort members. Read on here: https://amanda-daering.medium.com/view-from-the-build-how-we-built-a-cohort-of-tech-recruiters-recruiting-selecting-9d81117dad2a