Attracting and Retaining Entrepreneurial Talent Across Africa
By: Lino Carcoforo — Head of Recruitment at Lori
Growing pains are inevitable for any company that’s scaling fast. You’re going to make some mistakes along the way — and that’s just fine. The key is how quickly you can learn from those mistakes and correct course.
1. Keep the Bar High
It is sometimes common for a high-growth business to lower the bar while hiring. This is usually as a result of pressure to cover off headcount.
When a company starts out, the founder is personally involved in every hiring decision, they usually hire the best and focus on attributes such as culture fit, competency more to ensure the success of the business. Once a company reaches a certain size, respective managers take on hiring for their teams. After a while, this becomes untenable as managers take responsibility for hiring.
Often, because managers are looking out for themselves as much as they are the company, they tend to compromise on talent. Managers naturally want to hire smart people but often not people who are smarter than themselves. Over time people hire people who are typically just a little less smart than themselves and this, when amplified, creates a dilution of talent.
2. Promote from Within
Most employees aren’t content to spend their careers in a dead-end job — and if they are, well, do you really want them on your team? The path to climbing the ladder isn’t always obvious at a fast-growing company. New departments and new positions are bound to emerge.
It’s essential, however, to put structures in place to allow for employees’ growth.
I’ve seen businesses tell their staff that they are looking to hire from within for a position, but all along they really intended to hire externally, This backfires on morale. If employees are given a chance to interview but no one from within is ever promoted, not only will the negativity fester and spread like a virus, but the new employee is now set up for failure with a resentful team.
To address this, the more employees grow and learn within the organization, the more invested their interests in the success of the business is. By giving the staff a voice on process improvements, and allowing them a chance to strive for a higher position, you’ll reduce training time, increase morale and maintain company loyalty through a rough growth spurt.
3. Mind the Middle
Middle management gets a bad rap, and not for nothing: Managers are subordinate to and lack the power of executives. But they still have to ensure that their own subordinates are working to carry out team and company objectives. It’s little wonder 18 percent of managers report symptoms of depression, compared to only 11 percent of executives. All the more reason to take care of your managers.
As many businesses grow, they don’t put enough resources into training middle managers. This can fall into the background because it’s seen as overhead — a day spent training a manager is a day both of you aren’t directly engaged in directly growing the business. Developing skilled managers has a huge long-term payoff but not much of a short-term payoff, which is why it sometimes falls by the wayside.
By giving management the support they need from the get-go, you’ll mitigate the possibility of a disconnect between top-level vision and ground-level execution
4. Develop Realistic Hiring Targets and Stick to Them
When business is growing faster than you can handle, it’s tempting to go on a hiring spree. With hiring that’s reactionary as opposed to strategic, you risk swapping one problem for another.
Many business owners will hire more workers than they need, and when growth stalls they are left with too many employees. Businesses that look forward and have income projections for two or three years out are able to avoid this pitfall and keep their head-count manageable and within budget.
5. Hire a Dedicated Recruiter
Unless you’ve got hundreds of millions in funding, most startups try to keep costs to a bare minimum. There’s a difference between saving smart and cutting corners, though.
The decision to go without a dedicated recruiter is the type of cost-saving measure that hurts companies in the long run.
Recruiting is viewed as a cost center, an area to keep as lean as possible for as long as possible. However, if nobody owns recruiting, then the process gets neglected. Every department head is busy with other things: IT is working on building a great product; Sales on selling, the CEO on fundraising.
Nobody will view recruiting for what it is: the area that will make or break your business. Once you put a dedicated recruiter in place, that person can be 100 percent focused on sourcing and hiring great people, and only then will you be able to build a great company.
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Lino Carcoforo is the Head of Recruitment at Lori. If you think you could contribute to our growing company, send him an email at lino@lorisystems.com
