CATEGORY : Founder/Senior Leadership/Recruiter

The Indian SAAS industry has been growing at a steady rate and India’s SAAS market is expected to account for 7 – 10% of the global SAAS market. With the growing trend of SAAS becoming more industry-vertical specific, there has been an emergence of a few roles which were not there in the past. With the growing industry, there is a relentless competition for talent in the market and companies are willing to pay top dollar, especially for sales, account management and product management roles. Along with the talent war, there is also a stop-start dynamic, which makes it difficult for hiring teams to create long-term, sustainable hiring strategies. It also means that the company quickly outgrows its new employees.

Here is a step-by-step guide for the hiring teams to avoid pitfalls and to craft and execute a successful hiring strategy.

1. The foremost step would be to firm up and understand the business trajectory of the future. This would include sitting down with the business stakeholders across functions and estimating talent shortages. From our experience, the high priority roles are generally sales leaders and product leaders.

2. This should ideally be followed by Skill gap analysis. Figuring out current and future skills requirements, identifying the gaps in the present workforce and squaring your business trajectory with the news positions that you need to recruit for. For doing skill gap analysis, it is imperative to conduct market research. The skills of today are likely to become obsolete in the future. Some of the examples could be changes in compliances, or from learning coding languages to shifting to a no-code tool for development.

3. Mapping out suitable positions and roles for the future.

4. Creating and communicating an employee value proposition. EVP should ideally consist of five (5) components:

1. Rewards (salary, stocks, soft perks)
2. Work(role interest-alignment)
3. Vision, mission and corporate social responsibility
4. Opportunity (career growth, learning and development)
5. People (company culture and colleagues)

5. Engage with and utilise multiple channels for recruitment. From referrals to career pages to LinkedIn, make use of different platforms to target active candidates. To reach out to passive candidates, collaborate with external partners including us who specialise in SAAS hiring for your requirements. Their expertise would come in handy and can save time, effort and resources.