Life as a Start-Up Recruiter: Full Survey Results
A couple of weeks ago we released a sneak peek of our start-up recruiter survey. We’ve now analyzed all the responses and compiled both our favorite insights as well as the full survey results!
Why Did We Launch this Survey?
While helping clients build their recruiting functions, we answer questions that range across the whole life-cycle of talent acquisition - how big should the recruiting team be? How many roles should they handle at once? How do I build my interview process? How long should it take to fill an engineering role? While our team’s broad experience has enabled us to provide good answers to these questions, we thought it would be great to start gathering more data to support our recommendations - and hopefully learn some new things ourselves.
Who Took The Survey?
51 start-up recruiters completed the survey.
Most of the companies in our survey (81%) are based in New York or Northern California. The companies were pretty evenly split in terms of size - just over half came from companies with less than 200 employees. The companies ranged in age as well, with about half under five years old.
A Few Insights
1. Recruiting Team Size. As one may suspect, we found that in general that larger organizations have larger talent acquisition teams -
Recruiters from organizations with under 50 people usually have just one recruiter (88% of start-ups).
Organizations appear to add a second or third recruiter somewhere between 51 and 150 employees, with 67% of companies having at least 2 recruiters by the time they are 100-150 employees.
By the time a company is over 300 employees, the majority of them have a team of six or more recruiters.
2. Sourcing Support. The majority of start-ups (79%) did not have a sourcer on their team. While it was mostly larger companies that reported having a sourcing function, there were a handful of start-ups under 150 employees that reported having 1 or more sourcers, suggesting that the addition of dedicated sourcers can be more of a subjective decision than a function of company or team size.
3. Recruiter Experience. Interestingly, we found that start-up recruiters were very rarely new to the job; 97% of them had at least three years of recruiting experience, 67% had over six - and 32% had over ten!
4. Applicant Tracking System. By a landslide, the most used ATS in our survey was Greenhouse.
5. Scoring Candidates. Our team often debates using a 4-point scale to score interview candidates versus a 5-point scale. Turns out almost half of start-ups responding only have a 2 point scale - yes or no!
6. Time to Fill. The time it takes to fill a role appears dependent on the type of role being filled; recruiters responsible for technology and product roles were more likely to report that it took them 3-4 months, while those handling business and sales roles were more likely to take about half that time (1-2 months).
FULL SURVEY RESULTS
A smaller image of our results are below but you can get a larger version (or click on the image):
