Hyper-growth 1/4 🚀 Impact Hiring

Morning, Friday.

It’s Kerry from Try Catch, welcome back to the Try Catch Essentials Newsletter, we’re happy to be back in your inbox and look forward to engaging with you all during this new era.

In case you’re new to joining us, each month we curate must-reads concerning an important topic.

The January topic of Try Catch Essentials is Hyper-growth.

Hyper-growth is generally defined as the beginning-to-end of an S-curve, or visualized as a tsunami wave headed towards your company - a time that demands rapid, effective responses to weather the soaring tide.

As your company rushes to fill multiple positions in myriad departments to alleviate mounting stress from new responsibilities, this is a real sink-or-swim trial for most companies that undergo the test.

Ability to meet market demands and come out the other end with a steady hand - one not too shaken from the journey to hold the course after the surge - is a result of a bit of luck and an adherence to strict management practices.

But if you don’t take risks, you’ll never do any business.

Read on to learn more about “impact hires” and how important they are for companies during and after hyper-growth stages, what steps should be taken in preparation, and some helpful tips to help along the way.

If this topic is just what you and your team needed on this Monday morning, or if you know someone that would enjoy learning more about this hyper-growth, we’d ♥️ it if you’d share this newsletter to people in your network.

Or if you have a great contribution to this month’s topic, we’d love to learn more about any advice, insights, or reflections you and your network has accrued related to hyper-growth.

As always, we’re just a reply button click away. 📥

Nazy Kerr, Head of Growth at Harver describes hyper-growth in her interview with Recruitee‘s Adrie Smith as:

Nazy goes on to explain that in her usage, an “impact hires” share a defining trait regardless of their seniority level or experience: a great cultural fit for the company whose contributions are going to yield compounding results and resonate deeper within the organization than a standard hire-to-fill-a-role.

This is arguably what makes hiring during the hyper-growth phase so difficult, while everyone is scrambling to manage the mounting responsibilities during constrained working hours, the aim is to locate and hire special individuals to not just do their job, but have a deeper contribution throughout the company with their expertise, enthusiasm, or ability to be intersectional valuable.

Common similes for hyper-growth are that it feels like building a plane while it’s in the air, or a rocket after it’s taken off - not only are you building and keeping the business together through this surge of inertia - but you also need to be bringing on the best people to contribute in exponential ways while the ship is already in the air.

Chances are if your company is undergoing hyper-growth, no one is going to have the time to be reading newsletters, so we’re approaching this series as pre-emptive information to prepare anyone reading for things to be mindful of leading up to hyper-growth.

The startup to scale-up company compared to large-scale corporations have opposite employee to responsibilities ratio (a few people doing a lot vs. proportionately a lot of people doing less) which is why each member of a hyper-growth organization is required to punch above their weight in terms of what is required of individuals to maintain the strenuous course.

Watch/listen/read the full Recruitee webinar interview with Nazy Kerr to learn more about the creative and unconventional methods that she sources for impact hires to help companies and candidates achieve their best investment for growth potential.

Noor van Boven has plenty of experience with hyper-growth as the CPO of N26, Europe’s fastest growing mobile-banking service. She gave a great talk last year at H.U.G. 2019 that you can watch here. She writes and shares often about great insights and articles about hyper-growth on her twitter.

We’ll be in your inbox again next Friday morning at 9:10 discussing Hyper-Growth Preparation.

We’ll take a look at reflections from those that have weathered the storm of hyper-growth and what their advice is for organizations to prepare for their day at the beach.

We’d love to hear your feedback about this topic and others: hit reply or send an email to kerry@trycatch.tech, I reply to every message.

See you Friday!

~Kerry