We've spoken about hiring being an HR issue when it is actually a marketing issue. In this article, we shall discuss ‘Concierge Recruiting’.
Some recruiting decisions are so important that they cannot be left to HR and must be done by the entrepreneur himself/herself. To put this into context let us discuss 5-star hotels. They have concierges. These are employees of the hotel whom people contact for suggestions, ideas etc.
Concierge recruiting is recruiting that you must do as a founder in order to hire the right people. Every now and then, we need to break a few rules and do things differently than using a conventional HR approach. An example of this approach in use was when we wanted to start a new division of our business although we were already busy. We contacted a friend of ours who wanted to start a new business. We told him to work with us 4 days a week, which gave him 3 days to focus on his own venture. This arrangement was to be used for the first 90 days. We would then reduce it day by day until he was managing his venture full time.
We would pay him until he completely moved over to his own business. This was a solution that an HR employee wouldn’t think of. The benefit of this was the fact that it allowed us to get talent on board that we probably couldn’t afford a full-time. It allowed him to transition out of his corporate career and we were able to build a new division of our business and get it moving. It was a win-win situation.
The tactics used are, of course, used according to the situation. Before, we were working with an entrepreneur who wanted to recruit a manager. His pitch to the manager was that if he/she stayed with him for 3 years, he would invest in his/her next startup or invest in building another venture with him/her. There are many ways to think about this but the basic idea is that it must be entrepreneur-led. In the next post, we shall discuss how important it is to retain employees and how it isn’t all about big company benefits.