How to Build a Recruiting Brand

Hiring great talent is getting harder by the day. Big-brand tech companies are expanding, legacy enterprises are going digital, and the startup world is growing fast. For early-stage tech companies, it’s an uphill battle to outmaneuver the competition that’s now coming from every corner and land the right candidates.

What can early-stage companies do to set themselves apart? Deliver a better experience. 

That may sound ambitious at first – especially considering the size of the teams and budgets you are going up against – but it doesn’t have to be. As a startup, you have certain advantages working in your favor that large, well-funded recruiting organizations can’t compete with: speed, agility, and, most of all, humanity. 

Here are five key employment branding strategies to help you outmaneuver the competition and land your next key hire, based on 10+ years of experience helping companies like Google, Amazon, AppDynamics – and now Unusual Ventures – build their teams.

Put Candidates First

Yes, it’s important to have a presence on LinkedIn and create the right job descriptions, target profiles and compensation plans, but that’s all table stakes. For startups, the real key to making your company stand out in today’s crowded landscape is delivering a top-notch experience that puts candidates first.

There’s often a tendency to make candidates feel lucky that they are being entertained. This tactic can work for giant tech companies like Google and Amazon that can recruit on inbounds alone. But as a scrappy startup, you need to make the most of every touchpoint with candidates by putting them at the center of the experience. In other words, flip the mindset to, “We’re lucky that you are entertaining us.” 

What does it look like to orient the entire process around the candidate? In the pre-interview phase, ask the candidate questions about why they are on the market and what they are looking for in their next role. When they come into the office, tailor each interview to the specific candidate. Have pre-syncs with the interview panel to discuss the candidate’s background and come up with topics that are appropriate for the candidate’s skills and experience level, as well as the position they are interviewing for. Be sure to keep in mind their pain points as well – the reasons they are looking for a new job – so interviewers can work them into the conversation. 

Following on-site interviews, give them prompt feedback – even if it’s negative. Throughout the entire process, operate under a sense of urgency and always deliver on the expectations you set. 

This matters for every single candidate that comes through the door, regardless of whether they accept the job or even receive an offer. If you deliver an amazing experience that leaves candidates feeling positive about the time they spent with you, they will remember it – and likely tell their friends, too. That matters because the strength of your reputation plays a huge role in your ability to reliably secure talent over the long term.

Set Clear Expectations (And Deliver)

Taking the time to set expectations around the interview process – and then delivering on them – shows candidates that your company is organized and knows how to follow through. Likewise, having a well-structured interview process signals that your company is thoughtful and deliberate, which will make the candidate feel wanted. 

In particular, there are three areas where you want to have upfront and open conversations around expectations. The first is timing and sequencing around the interview process: Make sure you understand their overall timeline and any specific time constraints that will impact the interview process, and then do everything you can to accommodate. For instance, if a candidate can only meet at 7:30am for a screener interview, there’s likely an important reason for it, so make sure you arrive right on time.

The same goes with on-site interviews: Nobody wants to sit in an empty room idly waiting for the next interview – it’s disrespectful and reflects poorly on the company culture. Afterwards, communicate regularly, even if there are no updates. The last thing you want to do is go silent – if you do, they will move on. 

You also want to take care to set expectations around the role, the candidate’s scope of employment, and opportunities for upward growth. As a startup, you are looking for a particular type of individual – someone with specific, high-value expertise, and a willingness to flex themselves when the inevitable “all hands on deck” moments arrive. Sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to overlook. You have to figure out early whether candidates are comfortable in a startup environment, otherwise it can lead to serious heartburn down the road. 

Finally, compensation. A lot of companies tend to punt on this part of the conversation until the very end, and that’s a mistake. Have the money talk right up front and be direct – ask them what they need to come work for your company.

Throughout the interview process, confirm multiple times. Ask the candidate, “In our first conversation, you said that you need salary X, is that still the case? Are their any offer packages that have come in to change that number?” Then, when it comes time to make an offer, compensation has already been communicated and agreed upon – and the company looks good when it delivers the offer. 

Operate under a sense of urgency

One of the greatest advantages you have as a startup is speed – use it. Large companies are slow because there’s far more red tape and politics to wade through. At Google and Amazon, for instance, even just locking down an on-site interview can take forever, and that’s just the start. If they do want to make an offer, the recruiting team has to collect detailed feedback, submit a recommendation packet to a hiring committee, and so on. It can take weeks before a candidate hears about whether she or he is even potentially getting an offer. 

As a startup, you can run laps around the big players. Where does speed matter most? Immediately following on-site interviews. Gathering feedback from the team and making a decision is often the biggest bottleneck in the entire process. It’s also the moment when candidates appreciate urgency the most. The key is assigning a point person to collect feedback right after each interview.

Grab the interviewer, ask for her or his impression and any red flags or special highlights – or at the very least a simple thumbs up or down. If the first three of four interviewers all give thumbs up, chances are it’s a good fit. You can start working with the founders to determine a closing strategy right away. Ideally, you know that same day whether you will be making an offer – from there, it’s just a matter of sorting out the details. If you can move fast enough to present an offer the next day, you will blow the candidate away. 

I recently closed a key hire who was expecting an offer from another company a few days after our scheduled on-site interviews. Heading into the interviews, I told them that if everything goes well we would put an offer in their hand the following day. Sure enough, the interview feedback was great and we delivered on the promise. He couldn’t believe it. 

Lean into Founders

Want to hire the best talent? Be prepared to have your founders set aside 20-30% of their time for recruiting every week. That’s shocking news to most founders, especially first-timers who have only ever been involved in hiring decisions at large companies with established recruiting teams – or never at all. But this is the reality of competing in today’s competitive talent market. You have to commit, and you have to start early. The good news is that it always pays dividends down the road. 

You won’t see Mark Zuckerberg or Sundar Pichai attending meetups or sending personal emails to candidates — but you can make it happen. Take advantage of the opportunity to take a more personal approach with candidates to beat the competition. In the thousands of new-hire interviews I’ve conducted over the years, I hear the same thing from individuals time and time again: “The company is great, but it was the founder that sold me.” 

In the early days of AppDynamics, we had a super talented engineer moving quickly through the recruiting process. Halfway through, he received a counter offer – $50,000 over what we could offer. We immediately switched into “full sales mode” and brought in Jyoti Bansal, our founder and CEO, as the closer.

When I talked to the candidate later that night, everything had changed. He was blown away that the CEO of a 130 person company would spend an hour with him to discuss his vision for the company and why this role was so critical to making it a reality. He signed the very next day. 

Create a Culture of Recruiting

Getting the entire team involved in recruiting is a powerful way to fill the candidate pipeline and land key hires. But it doesn’t always happen organically – more often than not, fostering a culture of recruiting requires deliberate and ongoing efforts. 

One key area where the team can support recruiting efforts is filling the top of the funnel. In most cases, a startup’s team has better access to quality talent than recruiters. They know how to find and access communities of their peers, and how to communicate with them. This is especially true when it comes to technical talent. 

How do you get them engaged? Make it fun and create incentives. For example, host a working lunch every month – bring everyone together for an hour, provide lunch and have everyone comb through their networks to find potential candidates together. To encourage the team even further, consider introducing an incentive program, where the team gets a happy hour or some other perk, like a referral bonus, for securing interviews.

More broadly, the team can help establish and promote your hiring brand by attending networking events, having coffee with former colleagues, writing blog posts — literally anything and everything you can do to get the company out there in a positive and authentic way. To help make it routine, encourage people to block one hour on their calendar every week to focus on finding and connecting with candidates. Aim to scale it up to two hours within the next two months.  

I’m going to be honest with you – it’s a lot of work upfront and it can feel like a sunk cost for months, but laying this foundation is critical. You want to have it in place before the perfect candidate shows up. Once your employment brand and process are fully dialed, tech giants don’t stand a chance.