💼 Scaling Service x Rohan Shah: how to hire in a talent crisis
It's not rocket science, says the Reuben Sinclair founder, and yet still he sees agencies making the same mistake over and over again
Scaling Service is a newsletter from The Family. We interview agency founders and ask them about everything from funding to sales to exits.
I don’t know a single agency that isn’t struggling to hire right now. Which is why I was super excited to chat to Rohan Shah – founder of Reuben Sinclair – about all the mistakes he sees agencies making.
Rohan Shah, managing director and co-founder of recruitment agency Reuben Sinclair, is trying to put himself out of a job.
"My view is that everybody should work towards having an internal recruitment person at some point in time in their business," he tells us. "It sounds weird for me to say that."
It's a question of strategy. A business that is working towards bringing recruitment in-house, eventually, is a business that is thinking about how to make recruitment work.
"If you hire someone, you have to set them up for success. Have you got an employer brand? Are people arriving at your door? A lot of people make the mistake of going: right, we'll just hire a recruiter, they'll know what to do. That recruiter comes in, they've been used to having the backing of everything, the whole strategy behind them."
That's where an agency comes in handy. "What you also need to remember is that one person in-house is not necessarily the same as using an agency or an embedded agency with 15 other people back at base.
“Using an embedded agency, not only are you getting someone to come on site and do all of the things you need someone internally to do, but they've got access to all of that other talent pool at no extra cost to your business.
“You also don't have to have all of the tools because the agency will bring those tools with them: LinkedIn Recruiter, an applicant tracking system, job board advertising, etc. All of these things cost money."
How to hire on a shoestring budget
So what should agency founders be doing right at the very beginning, when the budget is somewhere between 'shoestring' and 'twenty quid plus a bag of crisps'?
"Recruitment isn't rocket science, we all know that. It's just time. I tell candidates that looking for a job can be a full-time job, and it's exactly the same for clients. But set yourself up for success in the future: create a candidate tracker, utilise job boards, and really look at your advert.
“Don't just use a generic job spec, and target niche job boards. And use your network. LinkedIn is probably going to be your biggest friend; if you can spend money on going Premium, do it."
The biggest mistake he sees agencies making when hiring
This all connects to what Rohan identifies as one of the main mistakes agencies make in recruitment: a failure to open up the job specification. "We go to an agency and they say: find me someone from within the industry. And then the sector. And then: we need them at this level, we need them in the office five or three days a week, they need to have a degree. This narrows the talent pool; what you want to do is open it as much as possible. Look at parallel industries, look at other agencies that operate in a similar way. Look for closely aligned experience."
He notes that things are getting better, at least as regards the requirement to have a degree: "When we started, I would say about 95% of our clients had it on their spec, and half of those asking for a Russell Group university. And that's fundamentally the reason the industry has its problems. But today, it's very few; from a gut feel, less than 20%."
Other mistakes that agencies make? "How long is your piece of paper? First and foremost, every single agency says their people are their most important assets. But I think a lot of agencies tend to treat recruitment as a transactional process. Just get bums on seats, someone to fill the role. And that's job done. They don't have a recruitment strategy that's ongoing."
Recruitment, he says, is about more than filling a post. "The root problem is not having access to the talent when you need it. When the same role comes up again, through growth, you're back to square one. I think 90% of agencies put wallpaper over the cracks rather than fix it.”
Recruitment as a marketing challenge
A PR practitioner will often find themselves telling clients to think less about tactics, and more about strategy. It’s the same challenge in recruitment: everything starts with your employer brand.
“Recruitment starts with attraction. And attraction starts with your employer brand, and that starts with your employee value proposition, which answers the question: why should I work here over anywhere else? And what's in it for me? All of a sudden, agency founders start mumbling."
Another mistake Rohan sees in the agency space is a failure to treat prospective hires in the same way as prospective clients. "If you think about how many people you've interviewed over the last three, four or five years, maybe you have an applicant tracking system that you can put those people on. They might have not been right for you at the time, but that's not to say that they're not right for you today. It's a great way of keeping in touch with your talent. And you should then track that talent incessantly and keep in touch with them. It's a really simple solution to having talent immediately when you need it." Networking can be useful here too. "There's no greater ambassadors for your business than your employees, and we definitely see businesses making the mistake of not allowing their employees to go out and find the talent for them."
Don’t screw up the interview: it’s your shop window as an agency
Then there's the interview process itself. Rohan sees interviewers that "haven't been trained in how to interview, and that really puts candidates off. It really gives them a bad experience, and they're very quick to go onto Glassdoor and say what a shit experience they've had.
“Also, when there's no definitive structure to the interview process, that allows unconscious bias to creep in and your business starts to pick up really bad recruitment practices that are hard to fix down the line."
By Rohan's estimation, the only way in which businesses get better at recruitment is through close attention. "Monitor data, generate key insights, continuously track. So few businesses know about their recruitment stats, their recruitment ratios, but these things equal time and money and efficiency. It will tell you everything you need to know. And if something's wrong with your process, this is where you're going to find out."
We ask him to pick out a couple of key stats to focus on, and he obliges. "First: interview to offer ratio. How many first interviews are you doing, against actual offers, will tell you how much time you're spending and if your process is any good. Five to one is probably what you want to be looking at. Higher than that, you've got to ask questions. But also lower than that: are you pushing the grey areas, opening the spec?"
The other ratio to look at is offers against acceptance. "This will tell you a lot about your process: whether people are buying into your organisation, what you're offering, all of that sort of stuff. Generally you should be aiming for over two to one. If people are going all the way through the process to an offer stage, they're genuinely interested. So why are you losing them at that last stage? What's going on in your process? What's actually happening?"
What he learnt launching during the Credit Crunch
Rohan founded Reuben Sinclair in 2007, just in time for the financial crisis. That experience, he says, taught them a lot about how to weather difficult times. Communication. Tight finances. And agility.
"We realised that we had to use our agility, being small, to navigate the crisis. So we focused on our existing client base, the people we had the best relationships with, and said: look, you think of us as a sales and marketing recruiter. Now think of us as your recruiter. And they did.
“We tried to focus on our good areas, and avoid the bad areas where you would just end up banging your head against a brick wall." There's a lesson there for new agencies, he says. "
If you're on a shoestring budget, the likelihood is you're probably smaller. Try and get some agility wherever you can when it comes to hiring. For example, not offering after one stage of interviews, but maybe making offers relatively quickly after the second stage. As long as you're absolutely sure."
Another area in which some agencies founder is their retention strategy. "The employee value proposition should play a massive part in your retention. You need to deliver on it. But over time circumstances change, and people want different things: they might have a family, they might change location. I'm a big fan of individual quarterly check-ins, and I'm a big fan of trying to individualise benefits." But at a fundamental level, "It's just about working out what you do bloody well, what you will deliver day in day out to your employees, and that you're not going to break any promises when it comes to that. That's why people will stay."
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