Recruitment as a Bottleneck for Scaling Your Company: How to Overcome It
Scaling a company is an exhilarating journey filled with potential and growth. But as you navigate the waters of expansion, there’s one common obstacle that can halt your momentum: recruitment. In the early stages of your startup, hiring is relatively straightforward—relying on your personal network or extended connections to build a small, cohesive team of A-Players – those in the top 10% of their profession. However, as your company experiences success and enters a hyper-growth phase, recruitment can quickly become a significant bottleneck, threatening to derail your scaling efforts.
In this blog post, I’ll explore how recruitment becomes a bottleneck, identify the signs that you’re approaching this critical point, and, most importantly, offer practical solutions that you can implement today to alleviate the block.
How Recruitment Becomes a Bottleneck
In the early days of your startup, hiring from your personal network is a natural and effective strategy. The close-knit team you assemble is deeply committed, shares your vision, and can navigate the tough early phases of experimentation and iteration. However, as your product gains traction and your company grows, the limitations of this approach become apparent.
The hyper-growth phase demands rapid scaling, but your initial recruitment methods—relying on personal connections or hiring people who “fit” your existing culture—are no longer sufficient. The volume and diversity of talent required to support scaling can’t be met by your personal network alone. Moreover, the founders and early team members, already stretched thin by the demands of growth, often don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate to an expanded recruitment effort.
I’ve said it before; there’s a reason ‘Talent’ is first on my 10 Point Plan For Scaling Your Business . It’s critical. Nothing is more important than attracting the right people to help you grow. Great companies are built by great people – there’s no getting away from it. Yet, for many of the CEOs I coach, recruitment is their biggest challenge. It’s an area that’s often overlooked, under-resourced or left on the ‘too difficult’ pile.
Without a proactive hiring strategy, your company’s growth can quickly outpace your ability to attract the necessary talent. This leads to overworked employees, slipping quality, and, ultimately, a bottleneck that stifles further expansion.
Signs That You’re Approaching a Recruitment Bottleneck
Recognising the signs of a recruitment bottleneck is crucial to addressing the issue before it becomes a crisis. Here are a few key indicators:
- Employee Frustration: As growth accelerates, employees may feel increasingly overwhelmed, leading to frustration and burnout. If your team is frequently stretching to hit deadlines or if you notice growing disagreements over workload and deadlines, it’s a sign that your current team is at capacity.
- Declining Quality: When teams are overextended, shortcuts are often taken to meet deadlines, resulting in declining product quality. This might manifest as bugs, outages, or increased customer complaints. If your team is constantly firefighting rather than focusing on innovation, it’s a clear sign you need more hands on deck.
- Key Dependencies on Individuals: In a growing company, reliance on key individuals can become a critical risk. If certain employees hold knowledge or skills that no one else possesses, their departure could severely impact your business. This is a strong indication that you need to hire more talent to spread expertise across the team.
- Underperforming Recruitment Process: If your recruitment process is slow or if you’re struggling to attract the right talent, you’re likely already facing a bottleneck. A time-to-hire that extends beyond 45 days or a lack of candidates who align with your company’s needs are clear signals that your recruitment strategy needs an overhaul.
Ten Top Tips to Alleviate the Recruitment Bottleneck
To scale effectively, you must proactively address recruitment as a strategic priority. Here are four solutions you can implement today:
Here are ten solutions you can implement to alleviate recruitment bottlenecks:
1. Develop a Clear Recruitment Plan
Start by being deliberate about your hiring strategy. Define your company’s purpose, long-term goals, and the specific types of talent you need to achieve them. Without a clear vision, attracting top-tier candidates, also known as A Players, who are essential for scaling, is challenging. Regularly review and assess your workforce, mapping employees against company values and performance standards. Create a plan to elevate your B+ Players to A status, and if improvement isn’t evident over time, consider repositioning or replacing them. By setting clear objectives and continuously refining your team, you’ll be better positioned to attract and retain high-performing individuals.
2. Think Creatively About Talent Sourcing
Don’t rely solely on traditional recruitment channels or expect top talent to come to you. Instead, think creatively about where you can find the right people. For example, historically, you may have said you’re only going to hire graduates who’ve worked in your sector for five years. My experience is that these types of heuristics are unnecessarily restrictive. Consider broadening your search criteria as you may be missing some great candidates, particularly in more junior roles. Another approach is to consider the strategic advantages of different locations, as I did when choosing Southampton for Peer 1’s HQ, which became a magnet for top talent. Explore untapped talent pools, such as specific regions or industries where the skills you need are underutilised. Additionally, consider the benefits of creating ‘sticky’ jobs in areas where local talent might be eager for new opportunities, recruiting for attitude and culture fit rather than fixed ideas of experience needed – Far better to find someone with the right outlook and fill in the gaps with training rather than recruiting a dyed-in-the-wool, toxic A-Player who will quietly poison your business. This approach not only broadens your talent pool but can also align with broader business goals like improving community engagement or enhancing company culture. I’ve found some fantastic people who may not have been in the ‘traditional mould’ for the role.
3. Create Job Scorecards
Way before you start writing job ads, get total clarity on what you’re expecting from the job roles you want to recruit. Quality on your role expectations is your starting point. Here’s a secret that has been transformational for my CEO clients: creating a job scorecard. This method not only dramatically improves recruitment accuracy but also boosts motivation, performance, and energy within the business. The goal is to increase the percentage of A-Players. To achieve this, you need a structured approach to job performance and expectations that everyone understands and supports, alongside a recruitment process focused on attracting A-Players. A job scorecard replaces traditional job descriptions with a streamlined, prioritised list of tasks, each tied to key performance indicators (KPIs). By narrowing down tasks to the most critical ones and defining clear success criteria, you create a powerful tool for guiding performance, shaping interviews, and ensuring that every role is aligned with your business’s strategic goals.
4. Know and Communicate Your Unique Value Proposition
To attract top talent, you need to sell the job through an engaging advert to differentiate you from your competition. If you’ve done the work on the job scorecard, you can be crystal clear about the expectations of the role and the salary and able to clearly articulate what makes your company a better place to work. Identify and promote the unique benefits you offer, whether it’s flexible work arrangements, career development opportunities, or a strong, supportive culture. At Peer 1, we created a standout benefits package by reallocating a portion of our payroll budget to offer customisable perks, making our positions more attractive and difficult to match. Understanding and communicating your value proposition effectively can significantly enhance your ability to attract A Players who are motivated by more than just salary. People will self-select as they read your ad, and the field of applicants is narrowed down to the people who will do the role for the money you’re offering.
5. Enhance Your Employer Brand
Your company’s reputation as an employer is a critical factor in attracting and retaining top talent. Take control of how you’re perceived by actively managing your employer brand. Regularly monitor and improve your presence on platforms like Glassdoor, ensuring your CEO and leadership team have high approval ratings and polished LinkedIn profiles. Encourage current employees to leave authentic, positive reviews and showcase your company culture through photos and stories on social media. A strong, positive employer brand can make your company stand out in a crowded market, making attracting and hiring the best talent easier.
6. Use ‘Working Genius’ and ‘Ideal Team Player’ to assess fit
‘But Dominic We always hire for attitude’. Do you? In reality, how do you codify this to make sure it’s effective? Let me introduce you to two nifty tools that can help, designed by Patrick Lencioni.
The first is ‘Working Genius’, which, through a simple assessment, will give an accurate profile of a candidate’s talents. You can also use this to profile the strengths you need for specific roles. I often wish I’d come across this earlier in my career. There are jobs that people shouldn’t have hired me for. I have ‘Invention’ and ‘Discernment’ as my two geniuses (not unlike many of the CEO clients we coach). I’m comfortable at 30,000 feet, thinking strategically. Some of my past jobs have required execution skills such as ‘Enablement’ and ‘Tenacity’, which are my working frustrations. I’m a fish out of water in these roles. They didn’t bring me any joy or much success!
The second tool designed by Patrick Lencioni is ‘Ideal Time Player’. It’s a valuable lens that any hiring manager can use to interview for team fit. So helpful I devoted a whole blog to it!
7. Speed things up
You have to move fast to recruit the best people. A-Players don’t wait around whilst you grind on for weeks – in a week things might be different. There might be a change in their current role. Your talented candidate may think again about moving, or one of your competitors might snap them up.. Get all your touchpoints done in a week. Yes – that’s right. 7 days. No more. All the interviews, testing and offers should be made in this timeframe, allowing you to strike whilst the iron’s hot.
If I talk to our larger, more bureaucratic clients, they often lose out because they’re too slow. If you have someone senior involved in the process, this will give you some flex on salary (something that often holds things up). And in the same way as creating theatre around sales, make sure you create some recruitment theatre. Moving companies is an emotional purchase. How can you make the candidate think and feel differently towards you versus your competitors?
8 . Make interviews great again
When you recruited your A-Team in the early days you were all over the recruitment process, obsessing over getting the right people with the passion, skills and drive to propel your business. Now you’re growing at pace interviews often get left to whoever has the time – and the results are.. variable! Here’s what I’d do different:
- Select your hiring team carefully – Here’s a bit of wisdom for you; A-Players hire A-Players, B-Players hire C-Players. If you want top talent you need to make sure the people who are interviewing are top talent. Don’t let the important job of recruitment be fobbed off on whoever has spare time.
- Make sure all your hiring team have interview training – It’s rare to find managers who know how to interview well. Too often, they’re unprepared and sloppy. Interviewing needs to be taught like any other skill.
- Make interviewing a team sport – The hiring team should interview together and debrief together afterwards. This enables two or more perspectives. I might say I wasn’t sure about this characteristic, and the other person might have a different view.
- Bring out the big guns – One of the things that motivate A-Players is influence. If they have access to someone senior early on, it will make them feel like they have this – that their opinion is considered valuable and they’ll be listened to. Lack of this is one of the leading frustrations I’ve found A-Players have their current job. Demonstrate this in your culture, and it will be a powerful motivation for them to join you. And did I mention it speeds the process up?
- Offer feedback to every applicant – Your HR team will hate you for this but it will give a strong and positive message about how you value your people. Don’t be one of those organisations that tell candidates, ‘If you haven’t heard from us within four weeks, assume you were unsuccessful.’ That’s miserable! And wrecks your employer brand. Give every candidate that applies to your company feedback. If you’ve written the job advert with clear specificity about your expectations, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly why someone didn’t make the shortlist and shouldn’t need to spend too much time on this feedback.
9. Create clarity over expectations right from the word go!
The first question in Gallup Q12 is I know what is expected of me at work. I can’t over-emphasise the value of every team member knowing what success looks like, how they’re going to be measured and how they should spend their time. Let’s face it. It’s so easy to waste 60% of your time dealing with endless emails, WhatsApps and Slack notifications. But this is almost always low impact. By prioritising the important tasks, team members can then time-box their day to ensure they’re giving focus to the things that matter. When expectations are clear it’s the best possible condition for growth and success; managers and team members are able to go through an iterative process together. The KPIs are a shared sense of expectation – between the team member and manager, and the whole team. When they start talking about performance, it’s based on an objective assessment, not subjective.
10. Keep Teams Small
Agility, customer focus, and passion are the defining traits of many small companies, driven by the energy and commitment of their founders. The straightforward, informal communication that small teams naturally enjoy often enhances these qualities. However, as companies grow, they often lose this edge. The increase in team size can lead to bureaucracy, stifling creativity and draining energy. Engagement can drop as employees start to feel like just another cog in the machine, and hierarchical management structures can create a ‘them and us’ mentality, eroding trust and cooperation. From my experience scaling up two companies and coaching numerous CEOs in the tech industry, I’ve learned that getting your team structure right from the beginning is essential if you want to sustain growth.
There’s a theory that the human brain can only manage around 150 relationships at once. When a company exceeds this number, it becomes impossible for everyone to know each other personally, leading to a lack of accountability and the emergence of ‘passengers’—employees who contribute the bare minimum. W.L. Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex, understand this well; they split their factories into smaller units once they exceed 150 employees to maintain efficient communication and operations. The principle applies to team size as well. Jeff Bezos once said that it’s too large if a team can’t be fed with two pizzas. While that might be an exaggeration, I firmly believe in keeping teams small—ideally between five and nine people, with no more than 12. Small teams are more agile, and this agility is crucial for unlocking growth.
Conclusion
Recruitment is often the unsung hero—or villain—in a company’s growth story. When done right, it fuels your company’s expansion and innovation. But when neglected, it can become a bottleneck that stifles progress. By recognizing the signs of a recruitment bottleneck and implementing these four strategies, founders can ensure that their company continues to scale smoothly, attracting the right talent at the right time.
Remember, scaling isn’t just about increasing headcount; it’s about building a team to support your vision and drive your company forward. By leveraging technology, expanding your recruitment strategy, streamlining processes, and embracing remote work, you can overcome the recruitment bottleneck and set your company on a path to sustained growth.