When you’re a CEO in the tech industry, your time and the speed of light are synonymous. Or at least it feels that way.
Each day is about change. The tempo for making decisions is fast. Volatility is standard operating procedure. And, as the leader, you have to make it all mesh in a path towards growth.
Time is your rare commodity, especially if you need to hire someone to keep that growth on track. The longer you wait to fill the gap, the slower you move.
From this perspective, how does a traditional approach to hiring work?
Well…it usually doesn’t. Traditional hiring creates new problems even as it solves others.
How Traditional Hiring Slows You Down
Time is money, but money is also money. The hiring process eats up both.
The traditional hiring process, where you recruit, interview, and onboard a new employee, works poorly for a tech CEO. It’s a process that seems to have built-in stop signs and there are multiple costs you have to consider when hiring.
- The cost of recruiting. This includes time listing jobs, interviewing, and associated costs. It can total nearly $4,000 per employee.
- The cost of training. 42 hours and $1,200+ later, you’ll have a trained employee. But you have to spend that time and money to get your employee up to speed.
- The cost of payroll (and benefits). This cost varies, based on salary and additional benefits. The overall cost of an employee, with taxes, benefits, and legal considerations included, is staggering. Someone being paid a salary of just $35K might cost you closer to $50K.
- The cost of integration. These costs include everything from the desk chair to making sure your new employee is a good fit on the team. Hiring someone who will work well with your team’s culture is tough; the interview process doesn’t really reveal true personality and work styles.
- The cost of productivity. New employees take time to ramp up to full productivity. Most employees don’t reach full productivity until 12 weeks. Until that point, you’re paying full salary for partial productivity.
- The cost of replacement. 33% of employees quit within 90 days. That’s shortly after they finally reach full productivity! It also means you have to start the hiring process all over again each time it happens.
If you need to hire someone right now to keep your company on a growth track, you don’t have a lot of options. But when you consider the time and cost, and how much is riding on making sure you get the right someone, it feels more like a gamble than mere standard business procedure.
They might stick around. They might fit in with your team. They might have the skills you need.
Or they might not.
Traditional hiring takes way too much time. It costs too much money. And the results aren’t always predictable or satisfying.
The Perfect Hiring Process For Tech CEOs
Setting aside the bleak hiring reality, what if you could make a wish list for bringing on new, much-needed talent? What would it look like to bring this person onboard?
Speed would be an obvious start.
Tech companies move fast. You’re dealing with constant iteration in product, design, and competitive landscape at not only a daily level, but almost an hourly level. When you need people on your team, you need them yesterday. If you could skip the recruitment, interviewing, and training part of hiring and get right to top productivity, that would help you out a lot.
Having more control over the financial cost (and being merciful to your budget) would be next.
Shave off some time as described above, and you’re automatically saving money. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could cut the hard costs, too? That would mean finding a way to save on recruitment, salary, benefits, and replacement.
And then there’s the issue of how long it takes a new hire to onboard and become fully productive. Paying for less than top work hurts, and it’s tied to who you choose to hire (i.e. how skilled and experienced they are) and if they’re able to gear up quickly and learn as they go.
With this wishlist in mind, you have a few options:
- Temp agencies
- Independent contractors
- Virtual assistant services
Temp agencies help you fill a spot right now, but there’s the whole temporary problem. Unless you hire them on after testing if they are a good fit, you’re caught in a permanent replacement cycle.
At best, temp agencies only fill spots quickly. They don’t resolve the issue of time and costs of onboarding, team integration, and the payroll costs of an employee (should you hire your temp).
Independent contractors can plug a hole when you need help, and they might seem a bit more budget-friendly because they aren’t on payroll, but there is still a recruitment issue. You have to find talented freelancers and independent contractors who have the skills you need. Plus, you have to be very careful that you’re in compliance with the laws surrounding independent contractors.
Virtual assistant services can provide you with highly capable team members and the flexibility of bringing someone onto your team without geographical constraints, but these services are not all alike.
Some might have a pool of workers, and assign you whoever is next in the pool, either permanently or on a project-by-project basis. That means you’re not necessarily matched with someone who’s a good fit for how you work.
Some virtual assistant services provide you with independent contractors, which means you still have the compliance issues to worry about. Others might provide you with someone you can hire as an employee, but that means you have to be in compliance with employee laws wherever the virtual assistant is located. And you’ll still have the payroll expenses to deal with.
Subscription Staffing Meets Every Hiring Challenge
At Boldly, we take a different approach to virtual staffing.
We start by finding only the best of the best, Fortune 500-trained executive assistants with 10-15 years experience, meaning we sift through thousands of applicants making sure we only hire those who are exceptionally talented, most with C-suite experience.
Then, we hire them.
As in, we make them our full-time W2 employees and part of the Boldly culture. We take care of all the compliance issues and payroll costs. They’re our team assigned to support you for the long-term in a way that allows you to integrate them as though they were your employee.
When you come to us, we listen to you so we know what you want in skill, experience, and personality. Finding a team member who’s a good match is very important, and we know we’re getting it right because some of our client-team pairings have lasted over seven years (which is very unusual in the virtual assistant industry).
But there’s more. We have an additional way to get your bottom line under control, bring on new team members quickly, and have confidence in having a flexible team.
It starts with a subscription.
Tech companies helped bring in the subscription economy. It makes sense to turn to subscription staffing as a hiring solution. You are essentially subscribing to your new virtual assistant, only paying for what you need.
Instead of lots of time and money to recruit and hire the best, you leave that to us.
Instead of dealing with W2 or 1099 compliance concerns, you access our employees and let us worry about that.
Instead of disconnected virtual relationships, you connect with a well-matched team member.
Instead of payroll, you pay a subscription fee.
Instead of a locked contract, you can adjust your subscription to meet changing demands, increasing or reducing your virtual assistant’s hours as needed.
Instead of wasting time when you need help now, you simply contact us and solve your hiring problem in days instead of months.
Yes, it really is that easy. We’d love to talk to you today so you don’t lose momentum simply because you need to grow your team now!
Topic: Remote Executive Assistant
