Recruitment Consultancy
Helidor Recruitment Consultancy – is represented by Ivonne Liebregts
I started my career in sales and marketing within ICT and continued in the field of Executive Search. After working as a Consultant for several agencies, I managed RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) projects within large corporate environments. I’ve also fulfilled multiple interim recruitment assignments for organizations at different stages of their growth.
I have a passion for scale-up companies in need of professional but flexible recruitment capacity. I’m convinced one of the most important processes for scale-ups is recruitment. Scale-ups are a unique working environment unlike any other. Business changes and evolutions are the order of the day, but the company has reached a size where it can no longer behave like a startup. To achieve growth you need to hire new employees but how to avoid the high risk of hiring the wrong person, including financial or legal issues is key.
Scale-ups are not for everyone. Very often employees are hired without fully considering the contextual characteristics of scale-ups and the qualities you should look for in candidates to make sure that the hired person firstly passes the probationary period and then engages in a long and lasting career path within the company. People employed in scale-ups must have special characteristics that combine elements typical of the mindset adopted in startups such as speed, adaptability, and creativity. They should have an attitude to change, but at the same time are not chaotic and confusing in their approach to work. People who don’t live well with change can suffer a lot emotionally, get disbalanced and therefore are not suited to work in a scale-up for a long time, for your sake and theirs.
There are some common mistakes that are made by scale-ups when recruiting new employees:
- overloading hiring managers with ‘recruitment work’
- relying blindly on the work of headhunters
It should be clear that selecting people requires a specific competence. It requires dedication, time, focus and attention. Hiring managers already have a job for which they were selected and many responsibilities attached to it, and when they are called to be a hiring manager, they must divert their attention from their main job.
Regularly the decision to outsource the search to a headhunter/agency does not lead to great results. Often external recruiters are part of large agencies that, in order to keep their fixed costs low, hire recent graduates or junior people to support clients in their recruitment processes. There are, of course, the exceptions like boutique headhunting agencies where those working as headhunters are people with many years of career history in a specific field, but this solution is the most expensive one.
I hired quite some people for scale-ups and came to this conclusion: Despite good interview-techniques, questions about a candidate’s work history inform us in a relative and limited way about expected future performance in a scale-up. Unless the candidate has had previous experience in other scale-ups, we need to focus our attention on other elements.
Personality questionnaires help in understanding the candidate’s real competences. The results should be compared with the needs/requirements of the role and the existing personalities in the team to balance them out. Having people with the exact same personality in a team is often counterproductive and could make the work environment un-challenging. You must have the right mix within the team of different but compatible personalities.
