Hiring Remote Employees Can Be a Pain - That’s Why We Now Do Remote Recruiting*
It was nearly one year ago today - June 2020 - that our team decided to make it a primary focus to build product and find sustainable revenue models at Dynamite Jobs.Although we've long had small product offerings at the site, it more or less hummed along in the background. Our thesis from the beginning was simple: let's post great jobs from our members, and watch the candidate traffic roll in.And roll in it did!Thanks to 100's of unique jobs from remote-first companies, we saw traffic and subscriber growth like no other website we'd ever built.But traffic doesn't always equal revenue, and in our case we were spending a ton, but not making much.So we proceeded to recruit a CTO, and get to work throwing the proverbial startup spaghetti at the wall.We're making progress. Sometimes it's tough to know exactly how much when you're in the middle of it.Today, as I was writing yet another job ad for our own team (Jr. Recruiter), I decided to look back on what we've accomplished in the past 12 months.Here's some highlights:
Filled over 300 jobs
Inspired over 15,000 candidates fill out DJ Profiles
6x'd our average monthly revenue.
Recruited a CTO and (2) junior developers.
Recruited a Senior Recruiter
Launched 3 products: Business Pro, Remote Recruiting, and Candidate Pro
I'd love to have been here on the blog sharing stories of each of these exciting moments - and many more - but when things are moving fast in the first year of a startup the days, the weeks, and weekends can all blend together. Put it this way - no matter what happens with DJ - I'll have a lot of material for the next book!In the meantime, we've continued to be able to publish the podcast on a weekly basis, are getting back to hosting live events for our DC Members, and do our best to share DJ news and learnings there.One of the things I'm continually confounded by is how hard it is for myself - and other founders - to explain what they do. Especially when you're in the middle of it, moving fast, and what you do is a relatively complex and dynamic service. That's part of the reason I'm so excited about our services directory. This year we hope to work to make it easier for upstart entrepreneurs and established agencies to quickly build and test new services.It seems to me, that in the early days of a business, creating legibility is a huge part of the work. Building product. Writing specs. Taking notes on customer calls. Writing memos. And so on... Unfortunately for blog readers, it's the same energy. Hopefully in the coming years, we will achieve a greater degree of product market fit, and I can circle back and reflect more.In the meantime, I figured I'd share one written attempt to describe our recruiting service - a done-for-you service for remote-first companies who want to save time hiring.Of course, you can always find the inside story, and 1,000 others writing and participating it in (in-person events are back!) inside our membership.This following description was inspired by a conversation with my friend Noah Kagan, and for the time being sits on our sales page for remote recruiting. Note if you're reading this post in the future, our terms could have changed dramatically, so please check click over the DynamiteJobs.com to see the newest info.
* **
Hiring Remote Employees Can Be a Pain - That’s Why We Now Do Remote Recruiting*Many of our recruiting clients have met us in person or listened to us on our podcast, but for many who haven't, it's worth taking the time to describe our services in more detail.It occurred to me recently, while speaking with a friend who is coordinating an executive search for a large company, that the word “recruiting” can mean many things in many different contexts. If you’re familiar with the recruiting industry, you might have some of the same questions my friend had for me.So let me use their questions as a way to shed some light on our process, and how it might be of some value to you.After describing to me the nature of his search, he said:You guys do recruiting* too right?Yeah, well no. Not that type of recruiting. Executive recruiting requires that you contact (mostly) executives who already have jobs and sell them on the opportunity to join a new team. The process typically takes many months, and the commissions involved are steep. We could do this type of recruiting given we have a Senior Recruiter on staff - that is, someone with a lot of experience in executive recruiting - but we’d certainly charge a lot more than $4650.But you call it recruiting? I thought you did recruiting.Well, we’ve been calling it “remote recruiting.” Since the talent pool is global for remote first companies, and we have a large audience of candidates here at DJ, and a database a mile long of niche communities, job boards, and personal contacts specific to skills, locations, and salary levels, we’re able to organize marketing campaigns on behalf of our clients that don’t require the ‘poaching’ element that some executive searches require.So look at it this way, we basically do everything a traditional recruiter would do, minus the poaching part. I often say during our strategy calls, “if the right person is out there searching for your opportunity, we will find them.”And then your clients pay you when you hire?They pay us 50% up front, and 50% when they hire. Traditional recruiting charges a percentage of first year salary and therefore are ultimately incentivized to re-place their preferred candidates, whereas our pricing structure aligns us with organizations who want to grow.But isn’t that just posting on job boards for them? Who’s going to pay for that? Why doesn’t HR just do it?Most companies with less than 100 employees don’t have a dedicated HR person who is well versed in the multitude of pay rates, nationalities, skill sets, and so on that a truly international (or even just time-zone specific) remote search can entail.And even if they do, the task of assessing, interviewing, and filtering candidates often must fall to high-level team members who understand the relevant skill sets and care a great deal who enters the company.You often have a situation where some of the most productive team members are spending full weeks of their time every year gathering and filtering applications, and ultimately speaking with handfuls of candidates who will never work at the company.And it makes sense why they do it.They’ll have to work everyday with this person. But for most companies, it’s a poor use of resources. But because of the lack of quality alternatives, these talented people mis-allocated their resources to a time-intensive hiring process by necessity.Our approach helps your most critical team members focus on the projects that matter the most while we bring them quality candidates who are ready to contribute.Yeah that does bother me. My team spends a ton of time speaking with people who will never work with us.And what’s worse is that they often aren’t particularly good at it - it’s not their focus or expertise. We have a whole team on this stuff. Our senior recruiter is going to help place 100’s of team members this year for our clients. We start to recognize patterns. Pick up on candidate tells and truths that they might not admit to employers, and do the repetitive and subtle work of selling the vision of your company to candidate after candidate, all while keeping our expert feelers out for fit.What kinds of roles have you filled recently?Just in the last few weeks we've filled:Some of those clients who do have HR? They’ve even started coming around to using our service. There’s plenty to managing HR that doesn’t have to do with executing a compelling job search.Does my friend really ask me questions like this?Strangely, yes. I’m thankful to have many smart entrepreneurs to spend time with on a day to day basis.So that’s the end of the questions. I’ll summarize.Here’s our process in TL;DR bullet point form:
We help you to define exactly what you need for your next team member. This includes specifics, like salary, skills, temperament, etc. We do this on our 30 minute strategy call.
We then organize a marketing campaign on behalf of your job.
We filter and assess the top candidates. A senior recruiter then pre-interviews them. He knows you and what you're trying to accomplish.
You get delivered only the best of the best, candidates who are actively seeking a job at your company.
That’s it.You pay, you grow, and we do it again.By saving the time of the founder and your top team members, we believe a our service not only saves our clients money, but ultimately gets them a better result then if they would have done it in house.That’s it for now. If you have more questions about the service, I can add them to this article. Email Ian@DynamiteJobs.com.DanFounder, Dynamite JobsPS, here's some other frequently asked questions (FAQs):How long will it take to find and hire my next team member?Typically within 3 to 5 weeks, although the parameters of your job will affect this a great deal. We can typically give you a basic sense for the ‘difficulty’ of your project on your strategy call.What types of positions can you help me hire for?From experienced web developers, executives, to junior marketers, we can help you fill any critical remote role. We have broad experience in multiple industries that will help us find the best candidates for you.What is the cost of Dynamite Recruiting?Our standard fee is $4650, to get started just make a deposit of $2325. Unlike most recruiting firms, we take a part of your deposit and create an outbound marketing campaign on your behalf. Because we don’t charge a percentage of salary, we’re able to remain objective on concerns of compensation strategy.Can you find [x] position in [y] country for [z] salary range?Probably! 🙂 There’s some complexity to these conversations, which is why all new clients talk to a senior recruiter who is experienced in both online business and recruiting first.What do you need from me before we get started?Our 30 minute strategy session is designed to clarify exactly what position you currently require, and how complicated the search will be based on your parameters (we’ve done this nearly 400 times, so the patterns of candidate, skills, compensation, location, etc jump out fairly quickly). Typically we’ll ask for a simple job description (we can help you develop that if you need), and a deposit, then we’ll do all the heavy lifting.Do companies with in house HR staff use DJ?Most of our clients do not have a full time HR staff in house, but this is changing as progressive HR teams are seeing that leveraging our team’s volume of experience (we’re processing 100’s of jobs a year) is a smart move that saves them time.Is your service appropriate for junior positions?Yes! Recruiting is historically thought of for high dollar value positions, probably because it’s been cost prohibitive. Our flat fee changes that, and helps you and your team save time, money, and hire better quality junior team members in the end.