Are you looking to hire a Chief of Staff? In this article Movemeon’s co-founder, Rich shed light on how this role can be different depending on the size of your organisation, what salary you need to pay and the most important thing to get right when hiring a Chief of Staff.
Author Movemeon Co-founder, Rich Rosser
The Chief of Staff role is a perfect fit for the consulting skill set. Beyond strategy & transformation teams, it’s a common home for consultants making their first job move out of consulting and into “industry”. It’s a role that can exist in everything from startups to multinationals to public sector organisations, and it’s very commonplace in Private Equity backed portfolio companies too.
1. What alternative job titles are there for a Chief of Staff?
The job title “Chief of Staff” is enough to put some people off hiring one. Let’s face it: the title is very vague, somewhat grandiose, and conjures up images of the West Wing. That’s why many organisations prefer to use a more descriptive job title, like “Right Hand to the CEO”, for the purpose of marketing this opportunity.
Plenty of larger organisations also have a “Right Hand to” for various senior team members, like the COO, CFO etc. In smaller organisations, the Chief of Staff can be a shared resource for the leadership team (rather than purely for the CEO / Founder).
What alternative job titles are there for a “Chief of Staff” or “Right Hand to”?
Other job titles I’ve seen used include:
“Strategic Assistant to”
“CEO’s / Founder’s Associate”
“CEO Office Lead” / “Head of the CEO’s Office”
Equally, roles such as “Head of Special Projects” or “Head of Strategic Initiatives” tend to have very similar remits. In itself, the “Chief of Staff” job title tends only to be used in larger organisations (including the public sector).
The job title “Chief of Staff” is very vague, that’s why many organisations prefer to use a more descriptive job title, like “Right Hand to the CEO”.
2. Startups & scaleups – Why hire a Chief of Staff?
It has become very commonplace for a growing business to hire a Chief of Staff. In these types of startup businesses, the title “Right Hand to” or “Strategic Assistant to” is more widely used, particularly outside of the US (where Chief of Staff is more usual).
The main reason startups and scaleups hire a Chief of Staff is to give the CEO / Founder and senior leadership team more bandwidth. Typically, these organisations are not yet big enough (e.g, 25-250 people) for a fully-fledged strategy or transformation or special projects team. Therefore, the Chief of Staff fulfills that remit and typically, as the organisation grows, goes on to lead a larger team within a more established / formal organisational structure (commonly COO, Strategy & Innovation Director).
The main responsibility of the Chief of Staff is to take ownership of important projects that the members of the leadership team don’t have capacity to deliver, but are important enough to be on the CEO’s to-do list. These projects can range from researching new market entry, to creating organisational processes, to developing an early insights-type function.
In smaller startups the CEO tends to do multiple roles as the team is not big enough to hire a dedicated COO / CFO / Head of Insight etc, and if there is a Co-Founder, they tend to be technical (i.e, focused on the product). So the Chief of Staff becomes a “mini me”, helping the CEO / Commercially Oriented Founder deliver across all these areas. Simply puts it doubles the CEO’s capacity.
The main reason startups & scaleups hire a Chief of Staff is to give the CEO / Founder and senior leadership team more bandwidth.
3. Startups & scaleups – How much do they pay a Chief of Staff and what experience do they look for in candidates?
Startups favour a more junior hire for Chief of Staff than larger organisations. In our experience of supporting 1,000s of startups hires through Movemeon, someone with ~2-5 years of consulting experience is what startup Founders and CEOs look for.
In joining a startup, consultants are happy to make a sideways (or sometimes slight downwards) move in terms of basic salary. So, in the UK, the basic salary for a startup Chief of Staff is normally between £70,000 – £100,000, depending on the seniority desired.
Equity / options are very much expected for a Chief of Staff and the startups able to recruit the highest potential talent will have these in place. After all, the Chief of Staff often goes on to become a future leader as the business continues to grow (e.g, Commercial Director, Country Manager, Chief Strategy Officer etc).
Startups favour a more junior hire for Chief of Staff than larger organisations. In the UK, the basic salary for a startup Chief of Staff is normally between £70,000 – £100,000, depending on seniority desired.
4. Large organisations – Why do they hire a Chief of Staff?
In larger Private Equity-backed businesses, large domestic corporations and multinationals, the Chief of Staff role is typically aimed at a more senior candidate (although hiring for a more junior “strategic assistant” is not uncommon, perhaps in combination with a true “Chief of Staff”). While an element of “special projects” remains, a larger part of the role is to act on behalf of, or deputise for the CEO. The role involves a lot of stakeholder management of other senior colleagues and, as such, CEOs and other Execs hiring for a Chief of Staff typically seek candidates with ~7-15 years of experience.
In the largest organisations, the Chief of Staff will normally manage a team within the “CEO Office”, including analysts to support project delivery & research (to give the Chief of Staff bandwidth). It’s important to note that the Chief of Staff is not typically in charge of the CEO diary and there would be a separate Executive Assistant in that role (not to be confused with the “Strategic Assistant” – a common job title for a more junior Chief of Staff).
Chief of Staff is normally a stepping stone role performed for 12-24 months before moving into a commercial or operational leadership position. In this way, and similar to how strategy teams can be used for talent acquisition, hiring a Chief of staff every 1-2 years is a way to create a pipeline of high potential “future leader” talent.
In large organisations, the Chief of Staff role is typically aimed at a more senior candidate. Hiring a Chief of staff every 1-2 years is a way to create a pipeline of high potential “future leader” talent.
5. Large organisations – how much do they pay a Chief of Staff?
Chief of Staff is not a role confined to the private sector, as it is also commonplace in other types of large organisations (e.g, government, public & charitable sectors). While pay may be lower within non-private-sector organisations, typically the annual basic salary for a Chief of Staff in the UK is between £120,000-175,000. The Chief of Staff would expect a performance bonus in line with other colleagues at the same seniority and to benefit from a long term incentive plan (as is common for leadership tiers within big businesses).
Typically the annual basic salary for a Chief of Staff in the UK is between £120,000-175,000
6. What’s the most important thing in hiring the right Chief of Staff or accepting this position?
The piece of advice we are given more than any other is to make sure you get on well with the person you are hiring / CEO you’ll be working with. The nature of the role means that this is a very close working relationship. You’ll be spending lots of time together and in that environment any friction can quickly build into an extremely unhealthy working relationship. So take your time in the interview process, ask lots of questions and make sure you spend some “non interview” time together before making / accepting the job offer.
The nature of the Chief of Staff role means that this is a very close working relationship, make sure you get on well with the person you are hiring
Recruiting? Contact Movemeon for strategy and management professionals
How have consulting firms changed their employer value propositions (e.g, salary, work-life balance etc) following COVID-19? And – based on Movemeon’s data – what does this mean for employers of all types (from startups to corporates to consulting firms themselves) trying to recruit strategy and management consulting trained professionals in 2022?
Movemeon’s co-founder, Rich answers these questions below and looks into Movemeon’s data & experience supporting 4,000+ organisations and 60,000 professionals in strategy & transformation recruitment.
Why did COVID-19 create a perfect storm for consulting firms?
I remember April 2020 vividly – it felt like tumbleweed was blowing through our office (well, as I was working from home, it may well have been). Our monthly revenue fell 90%, as every employer around the world focused on getting their workforces set up to work effectively from home.
Fast forward 3 months to July and we were the busiest we’d ever been. Some sectors were benefiting from COVID-19 and two of these rely on Movemeon for support: tech businesses and consulting firms.
Firstly, they say that consulting firms win in any economy. When everything’s growing, companies need support growing even faster. When there are problems, they ask for help to address them. Covid was a very big problem for many and a growth super-turbo-charger for some.
Secondly, Private Equity funds (one of the consulting industry’s mainstay client groups) pounced through the latter part of 2020 and into 2021. The COVID-19 pause of Q1 and Q2 had built up even more dry powder and the economy had created some new buying opportunities.
Naturally, the flood gates opened and consulting firms were inundated with due diligence work.
What impact did this perfect storm have on the consulting workforce?
Compared to some other careers that consultants will have considered (e.g. financial services), consulting has never been well paid (particularly from Analyst to Manager level).
Movemeon surveyed consultants as to why they joined consulting firms, the main reasons are:
Variety of work
Travel opportunities
Learning from inspiring colleagues
During 2020, each of the main reasons for joining a consulting firm was either totally removed (travel) or substantially chipped away.
Let’s face it, while we’ve all learned to live with Zoom calls, when it comes to learning and getting energy from your colleagues, it doesn’t come anywhere near being in an office around a whiteboard with your team.
The consultants of late 2020 were stuck at home, working even longer hours (there was LOTS of work) and generally doing less varied work. Some projects are impossible to do well if not at a client site; oh and there was all that well-paying PE due diligence work to get through too…
Cue the Great Resignation…
Yes, there were pull factors at play; many of us took COVID-19 as an opportunity to reassess what was important and kick-start a career pivot. However, if you were consulting at the time, the push factors covered above were very hard to ignore.
There was arguably no other sector more affected by the “Great Resignation” than professional services
All the while, plenty of attractive companies (e.g. e-commerce) were growing like wildfire and recruiting consulting-trained professionals.
Through platforms like Movemeon, the freelance consulting market had boomed and become more accessible than ever. Also, consultants typically make ~3x the day rate when working for themselves.
How did consulting firms respond?
There was no better time than late 2020 to recruit out of consulting firms into roles like strategy, inights, Chief of Staff, transformation, commercial management and other classic post-consulting homes. Or more smaller consulting firms to attract people from the larger ones. Sadly, those days were short-lived.
Consultancies are only as good as their people. So, you guessed it, they weren’t going to sit back and let their talent walk out the door without a fight.
It’s been widely discussed that one US strategy consulting firm changed their pay at below Partner level three times during 2021. While that may be at the far end of the spectrum, compensation at consulting firms was drastically reviewed during the course of that year. Much of this was planned (i.e, during the standard annual review cycle).
However, an astonishing 40% of consultants reported via a Movemeon poll that they’d also been given an ad hoc pay increase of some description (e.g, salary rise and “thank you” bonus) during the 6 months leading up to the end of 2021.
Consulting firms addressed compensation, and also took a long hard look at their wider employer value proposition.
Firstly, travel & client site work came back online, but in a more flexible way. Everyone, consulting firms and also their clients, accepted that working from home was as productive, if not more productive, for certain “focus” tasks, like building a model. This change was particularly welcomed by the Manager to Associate Partner cohort, who widely appreciate being closer to home (this is most typically the demographic with young families).
Secondly, more and more firms adopted flexible working policies – in particular permitting staff to take a period of extended leave (e.g, up to 4 weeks) per year. Logistically, this is easier for consulting firms than most businesses as the work is project-based.
Why does the freelance consulting market matter?
Not only did consulting firms improve their employer value propositions, but more and more organisations looked to benefit from the “professional gig economy”.
Businesses were facing unique opportunities/challenges and needed to solve them with particular expertise they wouldn’t need forever. Other companies in highly growing segments, and also consulting firms themselves, had so much to do that they looked to the freelance consulting workforce, via services like Movemeon, in order to rapidly increase their workforce capacity.
So put yourself in the shoes of a consultant: my current employer has really upped their game, and this new option to safely try self-employment and earn lucratively has also emerged.
What does this mean if you’re looking to hire consulting-trained talent in 2022?
Fortunately, recruiting people with a consulting background is still perfectly possible.
Large businesses – Consulting trained talent fits neatly into strategy, transformation and CEO office teams.
Startups and scaleups – The third common home, relying on the consulting skill set (often honed outside of consulting in another startup first) to fill General/Country Manager roles, COO, Right Hand to CEO, and so forth.
Consulting firms – last but not least, around 25% of consultants looking to make a job move are seeking to stay in or return to consulting.
In terms of compensation, fortunately, it’s a small minority of consultants who are looking for a large pay increase when leaving consulting, and they largely focus on joining PE funds. Our data shows that the great majority of consultants are happy to make a sideways move in terms of pay.
However, following that logic, the reality is that you will need to pay higher salaries than would have worked even 6-9 months ago.
The big plus is that the main reasons (according to the 60,000 Movemeon users) that make consultants want to leave (and they often have gone into consulting always planning to leave) or leave their current consulting firm in search of a new one, have not been changed by COVID-19 or consulting firms’ EVP revamps.
Work-life balance. Let’s face it, very few people enjoy working 60+ hours a week and often on the weekend. But that is the reality still for a lot of consultants.
So what? If you’re a company – and I very much include consulting firms here – with a more sustainable workload, it’s important to highlight that in your job description.
Nobody ambitious resents working hard and rarely are consultants seeking a pure 9 to 5, but some consulting takes that to an extreme.
Start doing, stop advising. Coming in a narrow second behind working hours, the main reason to leave consulting firms is to be able to describe to your grandmother what you do and who you work for.
Tired of PPT decks sitting on shelves getting dusty, consultants want to be closer to – and often in startup and scaleup roles directly responsible for – getting stuff done. They seek the kick of seeing the results of their labours.
Also, this changes slightly depending on the type of company you’re recruiting into:
Corporate firms, it’s vital to show consultants a career path into and then out of the classic post-consulting strategy/transformation teams that you will recruit them into. Some consultants will be happy to stay there (don’t worry), but the majority will need it to be an 18-36month stepping stone into a more “operational/commercial” role. The most successful recruiters talk openly about strategy, transformation, internal consulting and Chief of Staff / CEO Office teams being a talent pipeline and can showcase various people across the business who have proven that to be the case.
Consulting firms, many previously pure “strategy” firms have added capabilities for implementation. This can often be overlooked as a conversation to have with someone who may be looking to leave. Equally, many strategy firms are thinking about flexing up and down their capacity and using the newly expanded freelance workforce to do that, while often in-so-doing, adding to their diversity (e.g, this option is particularly favoured by parents who wish to pick and choose work to accommodate school holidays).
Startups & scaleups, these top 2 reasons for leaving consulting – work-life balance and “doing not just thinking” – really play into your hands. Don’t be scared about consultants who haven’t been in a startup before. They are typically fast learners and just because their job to date hasn’t given them the opportunity to “do”, doesn’t mean that they can’t. If you can demonstrate the market potential, seasoned former consultants who also have startup experience will relish the opportunity of a senior role making that growth happen.
Recruiting? Contact Movemeon for strategy and management professionals
What can a smaller boutique advisory firm offer to attract and win talent over a major player?
When we ask this question the reasons are usually pretty well known. Work-life balance, opportunities for quick progression, more flexibility and a sense of community.
These are all powerful reasons that boutiques can flaunt in the face of their larger adversaries competing in the race for talent…but are these selling points being marketed in the right way? Are candidates looking at the long list of benefits that boutiques can provide and being swayed enough to apply for their next opportunity?
Here are five hiring tips on what boutiques can do to drive home the point that what they offer is more than just a counterweight to lower base salaries
1. 40-HOUR WORKWEEKS DO NOT REPRESENT GOOD WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Sure – some employees are still clocking in 60 hour weeks, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are in competition with a large, large majority of players that stick to a 40-hour workweek policy. If you’re promising great work-life balance and yet, you’re not doing anything to differentiate yourself from other players, candidates aren’t going to take that point seriously.
There are plenty of things that boutiques can do to differentiate their work-life balance proposition, such as having a half-day on the last day of the month, or adding another 30 minutes to the typical 1-hour lunch break. These are small, but significant benefits that boutiques can market to differentiate themselves.
2. APPLY FLEXIBILITY TO YOUR SALARY MODELS
Boutique firms often mention flexibility as one of their greatest strengths and it also functions as a key selling point. The irony is that the same level of flexibility can’t always be shown when it comes to salaries. More than once, we have heard hiring managers tell us that they simply cannot go above a certain amount, or that their internal pricing scheme dictates that XYZ is how much they can pay.
More so than their larger competitors, boutique firms are better placed to bend their own rules. In a market as candidate-driven as this one, they’re going to have to in order to attract the best talent. However, when base salary is not negotiable, boutiques can add a signing bonus, or a hefty commission 6 months in to make their job offer more competitive.
3. SPECIALISM CAN BE YOUR SELLING POINT
At Movemeon we often hear from candidates how much they value the ability to focus on projects they love and find interesting. This is one of the top things job seekers look for when they consider a new role, along with the aforementioned work-life balance and salary expectations. Sometimes, the pursuit of the right development opportunities might even win over a bigger paycheque.
Candidates who are still exploring their options are likely gravitating towards the more generalist range of opportunities offered by larger firms. On the other hand, boutiques are the places where individuals looking to develop certain skills, or interested in working in a specific sector, can really thrive.
When marketing a role, boutiques should keep in mind that this is a big selling point and emphasise their expertise in their sector/niche. Also, we recommend including an overview of their projects and the clients they work with, highlighting opportunities for progression, development and exposure to senior leadership.
4. STOP LIMITING YOUR CANDIDATES BASED ON INDUSTRY EXPERTISE
Boutique advisories are often experts in a particular field, and it’s this unprecedented level of expertise that will give them the edge when competing with the bigger players. As such, they are also well equipped with all of the tools and knowledge to train their talent to become experts themselves. Yet, instead of looking to properly market these aspects, boutiques often expect incoming talent to possess similar capabilities and expertise around the sector. While the best-case scenario is to find someone who already knows what they’re doing, companies are seriously harming their chances at finding great talent by enforcing industry/sector requirements in their search.
A great method would be to have 20-30 minute chats with candidates to gauge why they want to change sectors and why they are interested in the field that the company operates in. Once the interest or passion within the candidates has been confirmed, boutique firms would be better placed to establish a strong training system. This would not only widen the pool at which boutique advisories can draw from, but it would also give them a very enticing and marketable benefit.
5. ELABORATE ON YOUR CULTURE
Boutiques are in a better position when it comes to creating a sense of community in the workplace, due to their size and flexible hierarchy structure. However, it is also true that boutiques will need to work a little bit harder to ensure that their company’s culture and values are conveyed, compared to the well-established brand names of larger companies.
Employees are becoming more and more eager to work for companies that share their own set of beliefs and values, and boutiques are prone to share many of those beliefs and values that candidates are looking for. The key issue is how they are showing it. Simply mentioning that you have ‘a great company culture’ is not showing candidates anything – other than potentially engraving in their mind that you have nothing more concrete to offer benefits-wise. Use the right keywords to better describe your culture. Is it fast-paced? Flexible? Collaborative? Innovative? Fun-loving? If so, give an example of how you promote that aspect of your culture in your benefits.
Recruiting? Contact Movemeon for strategy and management professionals
There have been a few ways to name the recruiting trends last year – a ‘candidate’s market’, a ‘talent squeeze’ or ‘The Great Resignation’… Whatever you want to call it, 2021 was a tough market to hire talent in.
The race for top talent is incredibly competitive right now and finding the right person is harder than ever. In this article, we highlight the reasons behind this as well as share a few insights and tips that should help you find the talent you’re looking for.
Why has it been so hard to hire talent?
Salary Expectations
Top-quality consulting talent has always been expensive. Following on from Covid-19, consultants were in high demand; businesses across the globe were looking to pivot to the new normal and consultancy firms were seeing unprecedented levels of business. This naturally has increased the value of top quality consultants.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to robust pay raises from top-tier consulting firms. In October 2021, first-year BCG employees’ base salary increased by $10,000, with more experienced consultants expecting far greater raises in the next promotional cycle. With this trend happening across the industry, this has had a significant effect on what was already a very tight market. As a general rule, you could expect to pay over £10,000 more for a candidate than the previous year. In the near future, this could rise further for candidates with more specialist experience or top-tier candidates.
Less desire to leave consulting in the first place
Although things remain hopeful that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, it’s fair to say that remote working and flexible/hybrid solutions are here to stay. Whilst many of us may rejoice in this relative adoption to flexible working, this has led to more consultants deciding to stay at their firms.
Historically, the lack of work/life balance and constant travel have been some of the most pressing reasons for consultants to search for new roles in industry. However, with remote working, consultants have been able to balance their work hours and their home life, and not have to spend their lives in trains or aeroplanes. This resulted in a significant number of consultants deciding to stay in consulting instead of making their move to an in-house role, coupled with the pay incentive that we previously mentioned.
Competitive job landscape
You might want to hire a consultant who could manage your strategy function, lead company-wide transformation, or even act as your Chief of Staff. After all, they are highly-skilled generalists that are adaptable and knowledgeable. The problem is that consultants are also highly sought-after by other scaling businesses and market leaders. It is true that every labour market is competitive, but none of them is quite as competitive as consulting. Our data shows that the average candidate is now in 4-5 interview processes as opposed to 2-3 processes this time last year. This leads to more dropouts, more counter-offers and even bidding wars between different organisations after the same candidate.
Thankfully, through working with our partners we’re able to share a few promising insights and tips that we recommend to ensure you get the candidates you want.
How can I hire the best talent for my team?
Invest time in the beginning
Interviewing candidates is time-consuming. It’s tempting to set a variety of tasks or a case study at the beginning of a process to ensure that you always end up speaking to the best candidates. However, this is a sure-fire way of getting the best candidates to drop out of the interview process. The feedback that we have received from our platform users is that the first conversation with the hiring manager is the most important factor in determining a candidate’s “buy-in” for a role.
We recommend that hiring managers should meet with candidates before setting any task/case study. Not only is it a chance for you to learn more from each person but it also allows them to get a better understanding of the job. Even by spending 15 minutes with a candidate, you will significantly decrease the risk of dropouts.
Senior candidates are looking for new opportunities
If 2021 seemed dreary when it came to hiring new talents, 2022 is already looking a lot more hopeful. Interest from potential job applicants has seen a huge spike in 2022. Of course, this is quite typical for this time of year, however, we’ve found that candidate activity on the Movemeon platform is at an all-time high with greater numbers of views & applications than any other year. In particular, this seems to be the perfect time to hire Senior Strategy talent – Since the beginning of Q1, we’ve seen search results for Strategy roles at Engagement Manager level or above soar. Whilst the junior market is still tight, the more experienced talent pool are clearly on the lookout for new opportunities.
Hire through Movemeon
At Movemeon, we specialise in partnering with global businesses across all sectors to find top tier consulting talent for your Strategy, Transformation & C-Suite teams. Our platform is able to generate a shortlist of high-calibre candidates within 7 days. By partnering with Movemeon, your roles are visible to a network of over 55,000 consultants & ex-consultants using our platform. We’ve been able to source active candidates as well as tap into the passive candidate pool ensuring you receive a more engaged shortlist. Click the button below to get in touch with our team to know more about our freelance and permanent offerings.
The gender pay gap in UK startups & scale-ups is 25%, way above the national average of 15%. In the past, it was not uncommon that men and women would be paid different salaries despite holding the same role. Now the gender pay gap is driven by two main drivers.
If you’d like to receive a full bespoke benchmarking report covering specific and personalised insights into salaries, pay rises, equity, diversity and much more, click here.
Not enough women in leadership positions
The first of these drivers is a skew in seniority levels; men tend to be in more senior positions than women. In a salary and benchmarking dataset provided by our partner business Payspective, we see that across UK start-ups and scale-ups, the gender distribution across all employees is nearly equal (48% women vs. 52% men). However, once we look at the gender distribution in leadership positions (Director and C-level), the representation of women drops down to 33%.
When only looking at the very top (Founders and C-level), the representation of women drops further down to 19%. A key driver for this is that C-level positions within start-ups are commonly taken up by the founding team, and 80% of start-ups in the UK are founded by men.
A positive trend in the start-up space that’s currently unfolding is that the number of female founders is on the rise, having doubled over the last decade – while 21% of funded UK startups had female founders in 2018, this figure was only 11% in 2011.
Not enough women in tech roles
The second primary driver of the gender pay gap is a skew in terms of role by function that men and women work in, with men more frequently holding highly-paid technical roles such as engineering, software development and data science positions.
This driver holds even more weight in the start-up economy than the wider UK market as a whole as start-ups tend to have a higher proportion of technical roles than traditional businesses and so the gender skew within these roles has a larger impact on the gender pay gap.
What startups and scale-ups can do
So what can you do to close their gender pay gap? There are 4 main levers:
(1) Create transparency
Companies with less than 250 employees aren’t required to report their gender pay gap in the UK, but internal transparency around gender and pay within your business is a positive step to take nonetheless. It’s critical to understand how your businesses pay gap compares to similar companies and what the drivers of this gap are.
Transparency also helps in the recruitment process – including a salary range in job advertisements is not just a good practice in equal recruitment but also increases the number of applications you can expect.
(2) Support equitable progression of men and women into senior roles
Ensure that your culture and processes support women being hired or progressed into senior roles. For instance, think about whether a senior role you’re hiring for could be part-time. Flexibility to work from home and flexibility around working hours help ensure that work commitments can be combined with other duties, and allows candidates from a wider background to apply and be considered.
(3) Hire women into tech roles
Hiring women into tech roles is a challenge that many companies struggle with – and it’s an especially important one for the tech-dominated startup and scaleup scene. What can you do?
Make a conscious effort to recruit female tech talent. Go to women in tech events, focus on diversity and inclusivity on your blog and recruitment pages, and highlight success stories of women in tech roles within your organisation. The effort you put into hiring women into tech roles early on will pay off tenfold in the long run – hiring your 10th woman into a 20 person developer team will prove much easier than hiring your 1st woman into a 20 person developer team.
(4) Ensure you have the right processes for recruiting, salary negotiations and pay rises
Finally, make sure there are no structural or cultural issues with pay differences in your organisation. Men tend to be more comfortable asking for a pay rise than women so you’ll have to make sure that you have robust processes around salary reviews and pay raises in place (don’t just give pay raises to the people who ask the loudest).
Men also have a tendency to apply for a job even if they’re not a perfect fit with the requirements whereas women tend to only send off that application if they’re sure the job is a great fit and they meet all the expectations listed in a job description. So while a man who wants a part-time job may simply apply to a full-time position and try to negotiate it down to 80%, a woman would be less likely to do so. If there’s a potential for a role to be part-time – make sure to include it on the job spec.
Working for a UK startup or scaleup and looking to hire? Get in touch!
Do you have overburdened teams spread across too many projects? Do you see ad-hoc and internal work piling up and frustrated clients who wanted something yesterday? On the flip-side, perhaps you have too many people on the bench? Or are your team’s utilisation rates are low?
If either of these scenarios sounds familiar then you might want to think about capacity planning. In this article, we’ll help you find out whether everyone on your team is near a saturation point, and if you need to look further into integrating some tools and software to help your organisation build some capacity for team members. We also share some of our favourite tools to help your company and your team assess your hiring needs in real-time.
Stay up-to-date with our tips and insights, and receive them every month straight into your inbox:
Assessing the situation
Before investing in a new tool, you need to draw a clear picture of your current situation. This will help you assess your needs and that of your team. Take some time to see whether you can easily answer the key questions below, if you can’t then you will definitely need to look further into capacity planning tools.
Do you have the bandwidth to take on new projects?
What skills/ capabilities do you need to deliver – and what is missing from your current resource pool?
Is every resource assigned to the right kind of work?
Can existing resources be upskilled in these areas, or do you need to hire new people?
What are capacity planning tools?
Capacity planning software can help you here. There are various tools on the market that help companies evaluate their resource capacity needs to keep up with varying levels of supply & demand in the market – critical in a world getting used to various levels of lockdown.
This Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution is specially built for Google Workspace, which allows all your teams to be connected in one place. It works as an integration and so is easy to put in place within an organisation as it works like any other everyday tool.
Their resource management tool is especially useful for our concerns as you can track people’s availability and skills and assign tasks to the relevant team members in just a couple of clicks. All thanks to intelligent resource suggestions and automatic skill matching in your required time frame. This is as useful for next week’s tasks as for long-term forecasts as you can view people’s availability months in advance.
Vogsy also allows you to create placeholders for future hires so you know what skills to hire and for how long. It’s a valuable resource if you use a lot of freelancers and contractors so that you can plan their projects as efficiently as possible.
This all-in-one app allows you to integrate all your tools into one place for more effective project management. It helps employees track their time worked on projects and update progress in real-time.
This polyvalent tool helps you in every single aspect of your business, from HR to IT with helpful employee performance tracking and Agile workflow dashboards.
On their website, you can find a variety of examples of how you can use their tools, whether you lead a Sales team or are scaling your Startup. Especially in the latter case, this is an essential tool to have your team communicate effectively cross-functionally, even when working remotely while allowing the leadership to keep track of everyone’s work.
This minimalistic software has dedicated tools to support professional services, creative industries, marketers and product specialists. It allows you to ensure perfect collaboration with all teams within your organisation and is easily customisable for early adoption from everyone.
You can take a thorough look at how long projects take from ideation to completion, and react accordingly. Equally important, you can quickly visualise everyone’s availability and efforts. You can also assign tasks to the right people thanks to precise activity tracking and the possibility for employees to request time off on the platform, for instance.
This software will make your life easier by providing your team and you with automatic workflows, and fully customisable dashboards and charts. That way, everyone can have crystal-clear visibility of team-wide efforts and spot capacity gaps in an instant.
Conclusion
With a clear picture in mind and the precious help of any of the tools above, you’ll be able to plan any hiring needs well ahead of time. Team members won’t need to run over their capacity for extended periods of time and new joiners will have time to their marks to understand your business. These tools are precious help when it comes to looking after your employees’ wellbeing and running your business as efficiently as possible.
Did you find out that you need new hires? Movemeon can help you with hiring high-calibre talent from top-tier strategy and management firms across a diverse range of functional and sector expertise. We specialise in partnering with organisations of all nature, from FTSE100 and PE/VC funds to early-stage startups, across a range of industries. We’re also global, with offices serving the UK, DACH, France and APAC. Click below to get in touch with us now to learn more about our offering and platform.
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