Scaling the Team

If you’ve made your first few hires - congrats! Hopefully you’re ready to start hiring more and grow your team as you scale for success.

By this point, you’ve likely already developed an interview plan and processes for when you interview candidates, but there’s several other things you can do to ensure your hires are set up for success.

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1. Implement an effective onboarding process. A comprehensive onboarding process is crucial for integrating new hires into your team. This goes beyond administrative tasks to include training on company culture, expectations, and how their role contributes to the organization's objectives. A well-structured onboarding process accelerates productivity and fosters a sense of belonging among new employees.

At Recruiting from Scratch, we’ve structured our onboarding process in a few different ways:

• We create 30/60/90 day plans for each individual employee, detailing milestones they should hit at 30, 60, and 90 days of employment. We go through these together when employees join our team.
• We outline all the different tools they’ll use in their roles and get them signed up immediately so they can start exploring and familiarizing themselves with all the features.
• We share best practices for specific tasks our hires will need to complete on the job (for example, in our line of work, this can be how to share roles to LinkedIn, or what to say when outreaching to candidates).
• We schedule regular check-ins and 1:1s right away so our team knows their assignment, goals for the week, and can ask questions as they get up to speed.

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2. Invest in training and development for your new hires. As your team grows, its never a bad idea to invest in training and development to enhance their skills and encourage career progression. This not only improves performance but also increases job satisfaction and retention.

On our team, we send out information regularly to all employees about courses and online learning opportunities we find. And depending on where individual employees see themselves growing in the business, we send them specific courses or opportunities we find in their area, such as in-person events to get connected to new candidates or clients.

We’re also big fans of learning on the job. After a few months, our team members will move from shadowing calls or meetings to leading them themselves, or being the main point of contact for a client (or several clients). This has helped us promote team members into new roles that are a great fit for their skillsets, and we’re happy to see people grow into new careers.

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3. Foster open communication from the beginning. Clear and open communication is essential for a growing team. Establish regular check-ins to ensure team members feel heard and supported.

Internally, we do this in a few ways:

• We make 1:1 meetings are some of the most important meetings at our company, where team members can come with questions and seek guidance for roadblocks during their sourcing/recruiting activities.
• We do weekly reviews of priorities. Your priorities depend entirely on what type of company you are, but for us at a recruiting firm, this includes which roles are a priority for the week, which clients are urgently hiring, which candidates are navigating multiple offers and how we can help them, and more.
• We hold weekly All Hands meetings where we’ll review our metrics for the month, share company updates, welcome new team members, and discuss areas of improvement.

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4. Make technology and tools your best friend. As you scale, leverage technology to streamline workflows, improve communication, and manage hiring more efficiently. From project management software to collaboration tools, the right technology can support your team as it grows.

Some of the tools we use internally to hire include LinkedIn, Recruiterflow, Betterleap, Crunchbase, Calendly, Airtable and more.

All these play different roles in our process, but we include information on each and best practices so our team can be involved in the hiring process as we bring on new team members, providing their input and feedback along the way.

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5. Measure success and adjust accordingly. Establish metrics to evaluate the success of your scaling efforts, including team performance, employee engagement, and retention rates. Regularly review these metrics to identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategies as needed.

Some additional metrics we measure include:

• The time to fill a role, from when the job gets opened to when the hired candidate starts
• The time between a first interview and start date (we often find that the best candidates move through the interview process quite quickly!)
• Client and candidate satisfaction via surveys