In business, it can be easy to think that more is more. Think more clients, followers, likes, profit, and
hires. Increasing your staff from 0 to 100 in less than a year may seem impressive, but only if
everyone hired is utilized to their full potential and benefits the company. The more minimalist flip
side—less is more—centers on reducing staff as a “quick” solution for financial problems. But an
obsession with driving down costs in this manner might actually cost you a pretty penny.
Sometimes more is not more. And sometimes less is not streamlined and efficient. Welcome to the
world of trying to get your hiring just right.
Meet London Co. and Paris Co., two tech companies on the rise in their Series B round of financing.
While their trajectories have had congruent paths, their approach to hiring could not be more
different.
London Co., a 1,000-person company, hired as many internal recruiters as possible to ensure they
were hiring the best talent for their growing organization. To give themselves the best leg up on talent
acquisition, they hired 30 recruiters. While these recruiters were hardworking and diligent, they also
cost the company $2.4M a year in overhead. After looking closely at their recruiter ROI, London Co.
determined that their hiring practices were not the efficient machine they hoped for.
Paris Co., on the other hand, had nearly the opposite challenge. They purposefully under-hired for their
internal recruiting positions to stay nimble and keep overhead light. They hoped that playing lean and
mean with their hiring would yield high ROI at a low cost. But that win-win was not what transpired.
Instead, they found themselves in a profound talent shortage—and were on track to miss their
revenue goals by 60%.
When looking at your go-to-market hiring goals and the spending behind that, you must calculate
what revenue impact these roles will have on your business. The opposite of planning for how much
revenue a filled position will bring in is measuring how much you stand to lose for however long that
role stays open. Simply put, for every month a revenue-generating hire is not in place, you are losing
revenue. You will need to keep spending on search recruiting—you’re not only losing revenue, but your
cost-per-hire will skyrocket.
London Co. needed to trim the excess cost from their overhead and turned to Betts to help them pivot
from over-hiring recruiters to finding a just-right solution. Connect let them cut their talent
acquisitions team by 75%, saving them $1.8M per year while maintaining their ability to hire and scale
their go-to-to market team.
Paris Co., on the other hand, understood that they had woefully under-hired recruiters and were under
the gun to grow their sales team to meet their revenue goals—and looked to Betts for a solution. With
Connect, Paris Co. hired 12 sales reps in just five months, with an average cost-per-hire of just $2,000.
Connect’s engaged and pre-vetted talent network of 1M+ let Paris Co. fill their sales roles quickly and
efficiently—and that got them back on track to hit their revenue goals by the end of 2023.
Because it allowed each to ramp their hiring up or down based on current, actual needs. London Co.
had overinvested in internal hiring infrastructure, which proved to be an inefficient approach. Paris Co.
had done the opposite, putting themselves in a precarious position of possibly failing to meet key
revenue goals because they had underinvested.
If you want to finesse your hiring so that you can turn it up or down depending on real-time needs and
market fluctuations, you want a Goldilocks solution that can scale in either direction, allowing you to
get your hiring just right. If you want to explore what Connect can do for you, reach out to us at here.