Tag: Marketing

How recruitment agencies can help startups build teams

Early-stage companies face a hiring problem that is structurally different from the one large employers face. A corporate hiring manager filling a role is adding capacity to a system that already works. A founder making their eighth hire is defining what the company becomes. The cost of a poor decision is not a wasted salary; it is a year of cultural drift and, frequently, the departure of good people who joined before the mistake.

Yet startups are also the least equipped to hire well. There is rarely a dedicated talent function, the employer brand is unknown outside a narrow circle, compensation cannot compete on cash, and the founders doing the hiring are the same people who must also build the product and raise the next round.

Where a specialist partner genuinely adds value

Turning an ambition into a specification. The most common failure in early-stage hiring is an unwritten role. Founders describe the person they imagine rather than the outcomes they need, and the search drifts. A good recruitment partner starts by converting the ambition into a specification: the three outcomes this hire owns in their first year, the capabilities that are genuinely non-negotiable, and the ones that are preferences in disguise. That conversation alone often changes the shape of the role.

Reaching people who are not looking. The candidates who can build a function from nothing are almost never on job boards; they are employed, well-regarded and not actively searching. Reaching them requires a warm route, a credible articulation of the opportunity and the patience to have a conversation that does not convert for six months. This is the part founders cannot easily do at volume alongside running a company.

Selling the opportunity honestly. Startups win senior talent on scope, equity and proximity to real decisions, not on salary. Presenting that trade-off credibly — including the risks — attracts people who are genuinely suited to the environment and filters out those who will be unhappy within a quarter. Overselling is the single most expensive thing an early-stage employer can do.

Compensation intelligence. Founders routinely over- or under-offer because they lack reliable benchmarks for their stage, sector and geography, particularly when hiring across borders. Getting the equity-to-cash balance right at offer stage prevents the corrosive internal inequities that surface eighteen months later.

Speed with structure. Early-stage companies must move quickly, but speed without structure produces inconsistent decisions. A defined process — consistent interview stages, agreed scoring criteria, a single decision-maker — lets a startup move faster than a corporate while making better decisions than one.

Choosing a partner that fits the stage

Not every agency suits early-stage work. Ask directly whether the firm has built comparable teams at comparable stage, whether you will work with the person who pitched to you, how they handle a placement that does not work out, and whether their fee model matches your funding rhythm. Contingency search suits volume; retained or fixed-fee search suits appointments where the specification is difficult and the cost of error is high.

Erdobar supports founders with cost-effective, fixed-fee hiring designed for teams that need to scale quickly without committing to a permanent internal talent function. We are transparent about pricing, we work to an agreed specification, and we will tell you when we think a role is wrong before we take it on.

Talk to us about your hiring plan and we will tell you honestly what it will take.

20 November 2024
Get recruiter’s insider tips for crafting the perfect resume

A recruiter filling a senior role will typically review several hundred applications. The first pass on each one takes a matter of seconds, and it is not a careful reading — it is a search for three things: what this person does, at what level, and whether there is evidence they do it well. If those three things are not immediately locatable, the application is set aside regardless of the quality of the underlying career.

What follows is what actually determines that outcome, from the perspective of the people making the decision.

The top third of page one decides everything

Most CVs waste their most valuable space on a generic profile paragraph. Replace it with four or five lines that state your discipline, your level, your sector context and two quantified achievements. A reader should be able to finish that block and know whether to continue. Everything below it exists to substantiate it.

Write outcomes, not duties

This is the single largest differentiator between CVs that progress and CVs that do not. “Responsible for managing the regional sales team” describes an assignment. “Led a team of fourteen across three markets, growing regional revenue from €8m to €13m in two years while reducing attrition from 24% to 9%” describes a professional. Where you cannot obtain exact figures, an honest approximation with context is far better than a vague duty. Aim for two or three quantified outcomes per substantial role.

Use the employer’s vocabulary

Automated parsing is a reality at most large employers, and it matches on terminology. If the specification says “talent acquisition” and your CV says “recruitment”, include both. This is not keyword stuffing, which is transparent and counterproductive; it is describing your experience in the language of the reader. Tailoring the top third and the skills section to each application takes fifteen minutes and changes response rates substantially.

Length, format and the things that quietly cause rejection

Two pages is correct for the large majority of senior professionals; three is defensible for academic, legal or research careers with publication records. Use a single clean typeface, conventional section headings, no columns, no tables, no graphics, no photograph unless local convention requires one, and submit as PDF unless another format is requested. Elaborate design fails parsers and signals unfamiliarity with the process.

Explain gaps briefly and without apology — an unexplained two-year absence attracts far more suspicion than a one-line note about caring responsibilities, study or a deliberate break. Keep early-career roles to a single line each. Remove the objective statement, the marital status, the date of birth, the full home address and the phrase “references available on request”. Proofread twice and have someone else read it once, because a typo in the first three lines of a senior CV does real damage.

Make the digital version match

Recruiters will look at your professional profile before they contact you, and inconsistency between the two documents raises questions you do not want raised. Align dates and titles exactly, and ensure the profile headline states what you do rather than where you work.

A final test

Hand your CV to someone outside your field and give them thirty seconds. Then ask what you do, how senior you are and what you are good at. If they can answer all three, the document works. If they hesitate on any of them, the problem is structural rather than cosmetic.

Erdobar reviews CVs as part of our career counselling service and will tell you candidly how yours reads to a hiring panel. Find out more.

19 November 2024
Attracting the top talent: Strategies for hiring executives

Executive hiring differs from all other recruitment in one decisive respect: the people you most want are not available. They are performing well in roles they are not unhappy in, they are not reading job advertisements, and they will not respond to a generic approach. Any executive hiring strategy that depends on candidates coming to you is a strategy for appointing the people who happen to be looking, which is a materially different population from the people who are best.

The cost of getting this wrong is disproportionate. A failed senior appointment carries not only recruitment and severance costs but twelve to eighteen months of strategic drift, the disengagement of a leadership team that watched it happen, and often the loss of good people who reported to the wrong hire.

Define the mandate before you define the person

Most executive searches begin with a specification describing an idealised biography — sector background, company size, years of experience — and never articulate what the appointment must actually achieve. Invert this. Agree, in writing and among all decision-makers, the three outcomes this executive owns in their first eighteen months and the conditions they will face while delivering them. A turnaround mandate and a scale-up mandate require genuinely different people, and boards that skip this step frequently discover the disagreement at final stage, after months of work.

Approach passive candidates with a proposition, not a vacancy

Senior people respond to a compelling problem, not an opening. The approach that works describes the strategic challenge, the scope of authority, the quality of the team and board, and the reason this appointment matters now. It respects their time and expects nothing on first contact. This is slow, relationship-led work, and it is the substance of retained search.

Protect confidentiality deliberately

Where an incumbent is still in post, or where the appointment signals a strategic shift to competitors, discretion is a commercial requirement rather than a courtesy. This means controlled information release, named client identity disclosed only at advanced stages, and secure candidate data handling under GDPR. Leaks at executive level damage share price, customer confidence and internal stability.

Assess judgement rather than knowledge

By the time a candidate reaches an executive shortlist, technical competence is largely established. What remains genuinely uncertain is judgement under pressure, ability to build followership and integrity when nobody is watching. Assessing these requires structured behavioural interviewing against agreed criteria, realistic scenario work drawn from the actual challenges of the role, psychometric input used as one signal among several, and referencing that goes beyond nominated referees to people who have worked below and alongside the candidate. Panels that rely on chemistry consistently appoint people who interview well.

Move at the speed of the market

Executive processes fail as often through delay as through poor assessment. Strong candidates who are courted over five months by an indecisive board withdraw, and they tell their networks why. Agree the process, the panel, the dates and the decision rights before the search opens, and hold to them.

Treat onboarding as part of the appointment

The appointment is not complete at signature. Executives who fail usually fail in the first six months, through unclear mandate, unresolved inherited conflict or an absent stakeholder map. A structured first hundred days, an explicit statement of authority and a named internal sponsor materially improve retention. Erdobar builds onboarding support into every retained search for exactly this reason.

Widen the pool deliberately

Roughly a fifth of leadership roles are held by candidates from under-represented groups, and the primary mechanism is not overt bias but narrow sourcing from familiar networks. Structured criteria applied consistently, blind initial screening and deliberate outreach beyond existing networks expand the pool without lowering the bar — and they demonstrably improve the quality of shortlists.

Erdobar runs confidential retained executive search for C-suite and senior leadership appointments, combining AI-assisted mapping of passive candidates with rigorous human assessment. Clients typically see hiring cycles shorten by around thirty per cent against their previous experience. Explore our executive search practice or arrange a confidential conversation.

19 November 2024