As SaaS recruitment gets increasingly competitive, how can you stand our from competitors and find and keep top talent?
In 2020, offices, gyms, bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and shops all shut across the world. So, we turned to technology. We hung out on Houseparty (remember the heady days of Houseparty?), held work meetings on Zoom, chatted on Slack, and prioritised on Monday.com. Our entire workplaces became digital. As the physical places we socialised and worked grew smaller, the online world grew.
And SAAS companies went through quite the ride.
As the world started to open up, things got even tougher. Companies started to ramp up and they started to look for top talent. It’s well-known that people who are in roles are usually the best people, so companies were poaching the best people from competitors.
It’s All Had an Effect on SaaS Recruitment Teams
For some SaaS businesses, recruitment is one of the last things they really think about. Yes, they want the right people in place but with business moving fast, it’s more important to get products shipped, to market those products, and to sell.
Even established companies are having to make redundancies to keep their heads above water. If you’re not hiring anyone, one of the first teams to go are the ones in charge of the hiring.
And as Social Talent CEO Johnny Campbell highlighted in a recent chat, the role of Talent Acquisition professionals has changed. Rather than just focusing on acquiring talent, their time is taken up with managing internal talent, assisting HR teams, and learning and development.
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Which Means a Difficult Time for Acquisition…
We recently wrote a piece on RL100’s Talent Maturity Model and how businesses get more successful as they become more mature in their talent strategy.
Each area (process, data and tech, and people) have different levels from baseline to mature for planning, engaging, sourcing, assessing, and onboarding. Businesses at the base level are generally managing them at an ad hoc level, putting in processes, implementing tech, and hiring, as and when is needed.
Because they don’t have the time to be more strategic.
That’s problematic in SaaS recruitment where roles in strategy and leadership are hugely in demand and the market is competitive.
But, in addition to the high salaries these candidates and great benefits that candidates of these calibre command, it’s also difficult getting them to move roles in the current climate.
When we spoke to Rory Brown, Founder and CCO of revenue analytics and forecasting platform, Kluster, he told us: “Attracting top talent has definitely become more difficult. When the market is unpredictable, people are more likely to have a mentality of ‘I’m doing well, this isn’t the time to make a calculated risk.’”
To find and satisfy those candidates, teams need to be at the top of their game, able to use the best tech and processes to hunt them out and ensure your company is an attractive prospect.
The Benefits of Maturity in SaaS Recruitment
Finding candidates in a tough market is increasingly hard so businesses with a strong talent strategy are ahead of their competitors.
As job roles change continually due to market forces, automation, and AI, people also can’t just be hired for their current skills – they need to be future-proof too.
Companies who are mature in their talent strategy, are able to plan ahead better for these situations. They no longer need to reactively hire to achieve their business goals, and have more time to consider their options, getting the right people, processes, or tech in place.
This means, when they need to hire externally, they can plan ahead for it, use the best partners, and ensure their new employees stay long term.
But for many businesses, reaching that mature level is difficult while so many other pressures are in place.
An External Talent Acquisition Team?
What if, instead of struggling along at the talent maturity baseline, you could bring in outside help to ensure you were being proactive, rather than reactive? Your own “external talent acquisition team” that would work with your team to improve their internal processes, help hire the right people, and advise you on hiring when needed.
For many, recruitment companies are just businesses that find candidates. And that’s true of the contingent side of things. Contingent SaaS recruiters aren’t hiring for longevity, they’re picking up the low hanging fruit.
Businesses end up spending time and money continually hiring and training people and regularly rebuilding client relationships. That’s something which doesn’t work when you’re hiring for senior roles and need people to become an integrated part of the team and drive the business forward.
Rory at Kluster echoes this point, “We were using contingent recruiters previously and getting sent a lot of people who were out of work or actively looking for work. None fit and we realised that this role was so important that we needed top talent, passive talent. We just weren’t getting that from contingent recruiters.”
It’s why Rory started working with Solutions Driven – we used a process that activated top passive talent, identified a route to market and found people who would be interested in these type of roles.
Recruiters like the ones at Solutions Driven, work at the mature end of the talent spectrum. They can help put the processes in place, backed up by data and intelligence that get the right employee, first time, allowing your own teams to work on other projects. They also have the expertise to help your business put its own processes and procedures in place so that every hire, at every level comes with a good degree of longevity.
At Solutions Driven, we use RPI (Recruitment Process Intelligence) to find, hire, and secure candidates. RPI is a mix of human-powered processes, real-time data, engagement, and accountability, all culminating in a series of steps that ensure a 97% success rate in hiring the right candidate.
This means that your recruiter can blend seamlessly with your team, working as an extension of your own Talent Acquisition, while taking some of the pressure off.
