View from the Build — How we built a cohort of tech recruiters: recruiting & selecting

Continued from here — https://amanda-daering.medium.com/view-from-the-build-how-we-built-a-cohort-of-tech-recruiters-budget-plans-2c31c1e8e39b

3. Recruiting & Selecting the Builders

Ok, so we know we want to train people. Now what.

What do we mean by “junior”?

Recruiting (and especially tech recruiting) comes with a lot of rejection. And a lot of silence in response to your best efforts.

We know we need people who would both enjoy the “finding” elements of the role — searching and engaging but who could also handle the challenges.

There’s also a lot of professional norms that get learned in a “first job” that frankly, we don’t have the bandwidth to teach. I feel strongly about our recruiters having empathy for our clients and candidates. And it’s very hard to have that empathy without having had the experience of job searching or hiring before.

So, I landed on asking for 2 years of professional experience of some capacity. That could be teaching, recruiting, HR or sales… or whatever! My sense is that this will give someone a professional foundation and we can take them from there.

Our job description in full is included below.

Screening

Our process:

1. Screen with me by phone: focus on culture and sharing the vision for the company and program. I did more selling than screening at this stage. I like phone vs. video intentionally for first calls because it helps me focus on the conversation. And I grew up in recruiting doing “phone interviews” so it feels good for me.
2. We’re a Predictive Index partner and use that as additional information as to someone’s style & natural strengths.
3. Screen with Becca, our head of talent services, via video. Focus in this call is on technical skills — specifically what tools someone had used before, their ability to problem solve and any recruiting experience they may have had to date.
4. Call with my business partners, Angela & Jeremy, with a focus on culture fit especially around pace. Pace is the most underrated and most important element of “fit” and our pace here is very, very fast.
5. Offer.

I may add more of a project/work sample to this in the future. I prioritized speed in this competitive hiring market but I don’t know yet if that was the right call.

Sourcing

As a recruiting company, we love applicants but never solely rely on them. Ultimately, we sourced and contacted people whose profiles impressed us with listed achievements, a focus on data, a lot of personality or all of the above! We focused our outreach efforts on recruiters with 5 or less years of experience.

We also promoted the job on our networks and added it to LinkedIn. I was touched by how many people shared it as a friend to Newance. We got some really solid applicants though many were not in the right location for us (reminder — this is remote first but I wanted people to pair in person at first).

Selecting

In a wonderful, delightful, so grateful for it situation — we had a lot of great candidates to choose from. We had people who brought experience in other kinds of recruiting (hello, Army recruiter!), operations, public service and more.

Based on the strengths of our existing team, we look at success in recruiters across two angles:

Effectiveness — Do you apply both pressure and space wisely? Are you a keen listener?

Efficiency — Are you reliable? Do you utilize technology in order to move quickly?

I made a scorecard with a view of each top candidate across the categories that we believed would signal one or both of effectiveness and efficiency:

These categories each have their own definition for us and I weighed them evenly. For our next cohort, I’ll take what I learned and likely change some of these including weighting them.

I wanted the scorecard to take into account both experience and any track record that might not be specifically in recruiting but could help us to identify exceptional people.

Offers

We ultimately made four offers and all four were accepted!

How I’m feeling at this step: Delighted. Really surprised by how much applicable experience our group is bringing with them.

The next step: managing sudden overwhelming nerves on my part — https://amanda-daering.medium.com/view-from-the-build-how-we-built-a-cohort-of-tech-recruiters-managing-emotions-5da75a3edfc9

Recruiter — Here’s what we posted as our job description.

Join Newance in our Buildery. Perfect for junior recruiters ready to level up into tech recruiting or experienced sales, HR or teaching professionals looking to transition into recruitment.

This is no ordinary training as you’ll jump in on real work right away (with a ton of support!) and be a salaried employee with full benefits from the start.

We’re very remote friendly but the Buildery will take place only in Missoula, MT, Milwaukee, WI or Madison, WI as you will be doing some paired work in person.

What you’ll learn as part of the Buildery:

• Tech as an ecosystem — everything from the SDLC to the different roles in a venture capital firm. Don’t know what any of that means yet? You will!
• Modern recruitment — sending 100 mass messages doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead, learn the art and science of truly effective recruitment.
• Future of work culture — at both NEWance and our sister company NEWaukee, we’re leading the way in what work should be. We also take our own advice. What you read on our blog IS how we treat our team members.

What we can offer your career that other firms won’t:

• Interesting Work: As a result of our track record and process, you’ll get to work with amazing clients. Just a few examples include — Fractional.Art (NFTs!), Mpirik (saving lives & catching heart disease!) and KKR (global Private Equity leader with $300B in assets!).
• Expertise: Real software engineers through our Experts in Residence program decipher job descriptions and help you truly understand the roles you’ll work on. Start already ahead of most tech recruiters. Your trainers will include not only our great team but notable founders, coaches and other amazing leaders.
• Team: Expert level Talent Advisors and teammates at every step along the way. Our teams kick off every single search sourcing potential candidates together. We share info because that’s what’s best for our candidates, clients and team.
• Relationships: Our proven spam-free, relationship driven process defaults to empathy. You’ll build long term relationships and get to see your candidates flourish in their new roles.
• Quality Work: We only work on full-time, direct-hire positions directly with hiring managers. No short term contract spots, vendor lists, or games of telephone deal with.
• Growth: We’ve more than doubled revenue year over year (yes, even with 2020 madness) and will be doubling the team in 2022. This growth opens up new opportunities across our team.

The right fit for The Buildery has:

• 2+ years of professional work experience (internships count!)
• Positivity.
• Super responsiveness.
• Really exceptional organizational skills. Your clients & candidates need to hear from you often.
• Creativity. You’ve done some creative problem solving whether at work and/or in life.
• Flexibility.
• Tech skills. You don’t need to know software development yet but you should be very comfortable thinking about how to be efficient utilizing technology.

Compensation:

Salary range starts at 50k + quarterly revenue share (once up and running — typically 20k+/year and uncapped). We also cover 100% of your health, vision & dental premiums and offer 4 weeks paid and up to 16 weeks total parental leave for all new parents. 401k with match. Host of other perks like unlimited PTO and quarterly team retreats that aren’t just working all day.