Post#4: How Zoho and Wingify look beyond pedigree to scale their teams
While hiring for pedigree makes sense, it makes sense for companies for invest in finding and grooming different talent pools.
We are looking for some smart folks.
Okay, what kind?
Well, they must be from top IITs or BITS.
It’s not uncommon to hear such conversations. If a company has good funding, they default to targeting top institutes such as IITs and other competing startups.
And sure, it makes sense. Why take the risk? It’s better strategy to go for the proven talent that got through the selection process at the top institutes or competing companies. Right?
Not quite.
Hiring based on pedigree works at a time when the competition is less and talent pool is big enough. But now, it’s the opposite - there are so many companies targeting the same folks - thus reducing the probability of your hiring them (and they staying at your company for long).
And then there is cost. Data from CutShort’s Startup Salary Report a few years ago had revealed that well-funded startups were paying almost 2x the salaries for the same level/quality of job roles as compared to other startups.
It all works out in your best case scenarios, but this cost overheads creates all sorts of problems when your business run into some bad weather such as COVID-19.
And finally, the worse part is – even after paying this high salary premium and fighting hard to hire this talent, the candidates don’t really stick around.
Lessons from companies such as Zoho & Wingify
But there is another strategy to hire great talent. Followed by startups such as Zoho, Wingify and QuickHeal, this strategy involves:
Tapping into the talent from less popular places
As per our search on LinkedIn a while ago, we had found that companies such as Zoho and Wingify hire a lot more talent from top regional colleges than the from the IITs.
Of course, doing this without compromising the quality of your talent pool is an important goal.
In older days, sourcing all this talent from so many places and assessing them was a huge effort. But good news is - doing this is getting easier now:
For technical roles, a lot of tools now offer technical assessments or code problems at a smaller cost.
For non technical roles, you can ask candidates to send audio responses to interesting questions that can reveal a lot about the candidate.
Candidates are now much more comfortable with online assessment/vidoe/audio recordings and have a reliable internet connection in a post COVID-19 world.
To give you an example. A CutShort customer recently sourced 300 filtered candidates from 10 conventional colleges + 2 new edtech companies, filtered them with the help of our team and ran automated assessments. They spent less than 2 hours of effort and got 10+ high quality potential-hires.
Here is a recent example
A VC backed company based in Singapore wanted to hire only engineers from top IITs. Despite being open to paying a huge premium their search ended 3 months later at a candidate who passed out from an unknown college in Amravati but had learned things on his own and had many awesome side projects on blockchain technology. His current salary was artificially low since he never cared much to increase it - again a sign that many recruiters might have associated with subpar quality.
This isn’t a lone case. We are seeing this repeated over and over again. Really selective companies such as Blackhawk Network, Urban Company and Bifourmis have hired multiple folks who come from non top tier colleges and are extremely happy!
Grooming their own talent
In fact, read this article from Quartz to find how Zoho has built a multi-million-dollar empire with not IITians, not NITians, but with an army of high school graduates. And this is not just a pep talk – Quartz reported that 15% of Zoho’s 4,500-strong workforce came from Zoho University, with 30 of them in leadership positions.
And only recently, I wrote about how ThoughtWorks is grooming talent with an innovative idea of “hiring workshops”.
The benefits of doing this are huge
Widening your search to uncommon places and grooming talent are great ways to
Scale up your organization without compromising quality.
Hire fast with far better joining ratios.
Hire people who are invested in your and stay much longer.
Saves a tonne of money and invest it in talent management and up skilling
The bottom-line: keep an open mind and decide based on your context
In today’s times, people are learning from their own homes and making not from a few top colleges. That’s an opportunity we recruiters should use.
Blindly competing with other startups in chasing only the top rated talent is not always a great strategy. The focus should be on finding the talent that is the “right fit” and one that will grow with them for the years to come.
Of course, if that turns out to be from the IITs and other top institutes, then by all means go, hire them!
P.S. An article on this topic was originally posted on our blog: https://cutshort.io/blog/hiring/hire-potential-not-brand-names