Whew, the results.

What we learned in building a recruiting cohort from scratch in 2022.

My 2022 plans didn’t include moving from recent history’s toughest tech hiring environment to sweeping layoffs in less than a year. We picked these 10 months to build a cohort of recruiters and here’s how it went.

Why did we do this?

Our process is unique and my hope was that in learning the Newance style early in a career, we’d build the skills we were having trouble finding in the market beyond incremental headcount additions. Crafting so many personalized messages is unusual. So is moving at our pace. And it’s a tricky combination but one that we’re committed to.

What was awesome?

• We brought a team from a diverse set of backgrounds together to learn and grow as tech recruiters. Each person brought their own strengths, experiences and unique gifts to the table. I truly enjoyed getting to know each person as talented professionals and lovely people.
• The cohort members really enjoyed each other too. They bonded and supported each other as we’d hoped!
• We had many wins from this group overall including successful hires despite the tough hiring landscape.
• Everyone involved whether as leaders, mentors or builders is leaving this experience with new tools, friends and skills that they didn’t start with.

What did we learn?

• The context switching (aka “variety”) that I love about this work can be very frustrating. It’s especially overwhelming for those who are new to it. Even for experienced recruiters, this can either be a huge benefit or a real challenge in working here. I need to address this at the core of the business. The sense of winning is critical and when too much time stretches out from a win, engagement suffers quite a bit.
• Finding the right zone of experience is so important. I messed this up in both directions. For those with no experience, it was too much to learn tech and foundational recruiting here even if phased and with support. We also had one builder with more recruiting experience who felt the content was too granular for them. They experienced the program as micromanaging rather than development. Not good.
• It stings more when it doesn’t work out in this setting. Turnover is always tough but the turnover we saw here was both higher than our typical rate (though a small group of 4 is tough to extrapolate to a “trend”) and more painful. The cohort is bonded. The training has been expensive. The investment of time has been very real. The people are great people. And even though we know some turnover is to be expected, it sucks when it happens.

Will we have another Buildery?

Yes but here’s what has to happen first:

• Less context switching/variety in the work overall. Solving this problem lives in our sales strategy not our hiring strategy.
• Fewer economic unknowns. We’ll never know everything but 2023 should be an interesting hiring year. We won’t make major investments into hiring for our team until we have more information.
• Redesigned selection process. We hit it out of the park on finding values matches but missed the mark in aligning on work style and goals thoroughly enough.

Happy to chat with anyone who has built up early talent cohorts or is considering doing so! amanda @ newance . co