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How to Find and Retain Top Talent in a Fast-Growing Company

The Recruiting Reel Episode 26: How to Find and Retain Top Talent in a Fast-Growing Company

In the 26th episode of The Recruiting Reel, Christine Amogan, the Chief Talent Scout at Precise Effect International, discusses how to find and retain top talent in a fast-growing company. Here’s the transcript:
Josh Tolan: My name is Josh Tolan and I’m the CEO of Spark Hire, the leading video interviewing platform used by thousands of organizations around the world.
And this is The Recruiting Reel, a video series in which we discuss real recruiting challenges with prominent recruiting experts to provide you with actionable tips you can apply to your own recruiting.
Today I am joined by Christine Amogan, the Founder and Chief Talent Scout at Precise Effect International. Her company helps startups and high growth teams address challenges during periods of change.
Christine has a vast amount of experience and is a headhunter warrior. She has doubled multiple tech and sales teams in a matter of months, executed numerous strategic sourcing efforts, and developed and deployed creative techniques to identify and attract diverse candidates at all levels.
Given her experience, I asked Christine what are the challenges of growing and retaining a quality workforce during periods of massive growth? And how can talent leaders overcome these challenges?
The floor is yours, Christine.
Christine Amogan: Hi, Christine Amogan, I am founder of Precise Effect International. We work with startups and high growth teams, helping them address challenges during periods of change.
The topic for today is one that I’m very passionate about, “What are the challenges of growing and retaining a quality workforce during periods of massive company growth?”.
So, when I think of periods of massive company growth, I automatically think of change. And by nature, people are pretty apprehensive when it comes to change. I always keep that thought in the back of my mind as I’m working with the hiring teams, hiring managers, and the leadership team.
What are a few major challenges that arise when hiring during periods of massive company growth? A few major challenges that I can automatically think of that I’ve seen both at startups and established companies during massive growth times are:
  1. How do you maintain your quality of hire during massive hiring periods?
  2. How do you maintain the company culture during massive growth times? and
  3. How do you maintain a quality candidate experience during these hectic periods?

What can hiring pros do to improve the hiring process and overcome these challenges? So, during this time, hiring pros need to be master project managers. Hiring pros need to ensure that there is a process in place, number one.

Number two, that people are communicating, and better yet, over-communicating during these periods. And to address the challenge of maintaining company culture, what I’ve done in the past is I’ve actually identified a culture ambassador who interviews the candidates just for culture fit.

How do you ensure that you’re quickly finding the best talent during these times of rapid growth? Every team has a different definition of what best talent means. Work with the teams, drill down to identify the key traits of best talent. And establish a process that is able to uncover these traits either at phase one or phase two of the interview process. You’ll be able to get to the candidates – the best candidates – quickly during this time.

These are my suggestions in addressing the challenges of growing and retaining a quality workforce during periods of massive company growth.

Josh Tolan: Thanks, Christine. My takeaway from your insight is that it is critical to have alignment within your organization on 3 things: your process, your culture and values, and the vision of the ideal hire.
These are all things that you can define with the key stakeholders within your organization and t sets a strong foundation for recruiting success when growth makes things chaotic.
Personally, I see fast-growing companies struggle the most with wanting everything to be perfect. They’re so used to hiring 1 person for a specific job that when they are tasked with hiring 5, 10, 20+ people for that position, they have a hard time making a decision on who to give offers to because they realize that not everyone who makes their shortlist is going to be an exact match for what they’re looking for.
That’s why it’s so important to know the absolute ‘must haves’ for someone to be successful in the position.
Find the people that check those boxes and then focus on potential and who you think you can best develop within the organization.
I want to thank Christine Amogan for joining us today. If you’d like to connect with her on LinkedIn, use the url below or follow her on Twitter @preciseeffect.
Thank you for watching The Recruiting Reel and stay tuned for more episodes. For additional HR and recruiting content, head over to hr.sparkhire.com and subscribe. Also, follow us on Twitter, @sparkhire. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the newest episodes of The Recruiting Reel.
Thanks again for watching and happy recruiting!

Josh Tolan

Josh Tolan is the Founder and CEO of Spark Hire, a video interviewing platform used by 6,000+ customers in over 100 countries.