Want to Know How OpenView Recruiters Add Value?

Often I find myself explaining to people what I do and how it differs from my previous role in agency recruiting. The role that an OpenView recruiter plays is an interesting balance between an internal recruiter and a consultant. Hopefully, I can provide some clarity around the value that we provide to our portfolio companies.

First and foremost, the OpenView recruiting team’s priority is hiring the top talent for our portfolio companies.

This requires skillful and copious amounts of sourcing candidates and scouring through inbound resumes. To begin with, we must have an understanding of the hiring manager’s needs. At the beginning of each search we schedule what we refer to as a “kick off” call with the hiring manager. There is one objective to this call: to make sure that the hiring manager and the OpenView recruiter working on the search have a shared understanding of what the ideal profile is and the best way to hire for the requisition. The information we glean from the call includes:

1. The best background for the role including years of experience, technical skills, industry, etc.
2. Appropriate salary range. OpenView does due diligence for our portfolio companies if they have not hired for the role before, or if they want to know what the market is paying for the skill set they are looking for
3. Title. As recruiters, we know what titles mean to jobseekers and which titles typically get the most responses. This can be as simple as changing an “Outside Sales Manager” to a “Sales Director” title.

After we have our kick off call we post an ad to LinkedIn, to OpenView’s website, and any other places we think we can extract talent from. The responses we get to ads become our inbound candidates. There is a lot of work to do when we get responses to ads. We read each resume and pick the best candidates to set up for a phone interview. This could mean mining through a couple hundred resumes simply in order to get five that look good for the role.

More often than not, however, the OpenView recruiters engage in outbound recruiting to get our candidates. This means sourcing. This is both the fun part and a challenge. We reach out to candidates in our network, or through LinkedIn or through referrals, and try to entice them with the opportunity at the portfolio company. People often overlook the salesmanship that goes into getting candidates interested in a particular role. Selling a company requires the recruiter to know the company, what is does, and how it operates, as well as what kinds of questions the candidate will be asking and how to best answer. For example, if we are hiring for sales people then we can guarantee there will be two questions prospects will want to know. First, how the commission plan works, and second, how the company is doing.

Even after we get candidates interested we need to set up a phone interview with them and qualify their skills. This step is time consuming, but very necessary. The recruiters set up a time to interview the candidate. From this interview we hope to learn about the candidate’s knowledge of the portfolio company, hear about their skill set, and get a feel for their expectations. If all goes well on this qualifying call, only then do we pass along the candidate’s resume for review.

The process is very detailed and we do our best to ensure that by the time we involve the hiring manager, we know the candidate could do the job and be a good addition to the corporate culture.

Although at first it may be confusing to grasp that OpenView recruiters are neither internal recruiters nor agency recruiters, it’s easy to see that we add significant value to every search we take on for our portfolio company.

Editor’s note: For more tips on improving your recruiting strategy (and helping your company grow) sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Tagged in

corporate recruiting hiring hiring process recruiting recruiting questions