How to manage your Dover recruiters
Max Kolysh
CEO
September 22, 2025
•
3 mins
You don’t need a long brief; you need clarity. Make success unambiguous and write it down.
Use this quick kickoff framework:
Outcome: Plain English, time-bound, and specific (“Hire one Senior Backend Engineer in ~60–75 days at X bar”).
Capacity: Initial weekly hours and a monthly cap, with permission to revisit weekly.
Ownership: Who owns each step (outreach, screens, scheduling, offers)
Comms: Where you’ll talk (Slack/Email) and when you’ll review progress (a short weekly meeting).
Source of truth: Run the process in a real ATS so pipeline, feedback, and analytics live in one place.
Put it in a one-pager or an email and use it as a reference point for the future.
Early days are about learning velocity. Your recruiter is testing hypotheses: target profiles, message angles, channels, and interview sequencing. Your job is to supply the context and decisions that shorten the path to signal.
Share a realistic scorecard (skills, level, traits). Explain your “why us, why now” founder pitch. Respond quickly—same-day on early screens when possible—and let the experiments run. The point is to test your bar and your story in the market.
If you see candidate activity but not quality: adjust title/level, widen or tighten the profile, refine compensation guidance, or remove an interview step that’s turning strong people off.
By the third week, your focus should tilt toward results: a consistent cadence of qualified screens, improving pass-through rates for each interview stage, and an emerging offer pipeline.
If those aren’t materializing, step back and diagnose rather than pushing for sheer volume. Sometimes the scorecard needs adjustments; sometimes the title is mis-leveled; sometimes your interview loop is slow or misaligned. Pick one thing to change, give it a short time to work, and measure the results.
The fractional model works well here. With Dover, you can add additional recruiters for more sourcing, interviewing and more at a lower cost or bring in specialists for an exec search or niche roles.
Run weekly recruiting syncs
A 30-minute standing sync is enough when you share a source of truth.
What we learned: Which channels/messages worked, where candidates stalled, what you’re doubling down on.
Funnel snapshot: A quick, shared view of outreach → replies → screens → onsites → offers.
Decisions & blockers: Comp ranges, title tweaks, interview loop fixes, bandwidth.
Commitments until next week: The two or three changes that will actually move the needle.
Take the sync seriously — use it to see how your team is tracking towards your hiring goals.
Manage for results, not process
If you hired a senior recruiter, manage them like one. Inputs (outreach counts, message variants) matter most in the first two weeks as proxies for learning speed. After that, hold the work accountable to outcomes—quality screens, pass-through, offers, and ultimately hires.
If you find yourself line-editing messages and reviewing boolean strings weeks into the engagement, either you’ve constrained a senior partner to act like a junior coordinator, or you’ve hired the wrong level of help.
Your recruiter should bring you a diagnosis and a plan; your job is to set the bar, make fast decisions on candidates, and clear the path.
Don’t be afraid to recalibrate the search
If you feel like you’re not hitting your hiring goals:
Self-check: Are you meeting your own SLAs (fast feedback, fast scheduling)? Founder latency quietly kills momentum for startup searches.
Adjust inputs: Broaden/tighten the profile, change title or compensation, streamline the interview loop, add recruiters for additional support, or temporarily increase hours.
Reset plan: If the two changes above don’t help, ask your recruiter to propose 2–3 specific bets to change course on the search, write out the hours required, and sets an expected “result by” a date.
If your confidence is still low after a reset, change your team. One advantage of Dover’s marketplace model is the ability to switch recruiters or add a new one quickly without losing momentum.
Give your recruiters the tools they need
Control your recruiter's hours and costs
What “good” looks like
The founder’s job
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