How to manage your Dover recruiter
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.
Treat your fractional recruiter like a member of your team. Give them a company email, add them to relevant Slack channels, and introduce them to key team members. This embedded approach ensures they represent your brand properly.
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: Decide what you want your source of truth to be. Run the process in a real ATS (like Dover) 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.
Give your recruiters the tools they need
Ask them what tools they've used and liked for previous engagements.
Some tools they need access to on day one:
@company email + calendar
Zoom/Meet
Slack
ATS for source of truth for candidates, notes, and interview plan
Ask your recruiter if they prefer a specific source of truth like Dover ATS
If they suggest paid tools (LinkedIn Recruiter, Pin, and Juicebox are currently popular), give a small trial budget—say $100–$300 for the first month. Keep what helps, cancel what doesn't.
Set up weekly recruiting syncs
A 30-minute standing sync with your recruiting team is enough when you share a source of truth. Treat this sync like your GTM standup—consistent, focused, and action-oriented.
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. The fractional recruiter you chose is a member of your team—treat them like it. 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.
Control your recruiter's hours and costs
Dover's hourly model turns the cost of the search into a dial you control. Start with reasonable weekly hours (15-25 hours), then adjust based on needs. When you need more speed, pair your senior Recruiting Partner with an Associate Recruiter to help with execution (sourcing, scheduling, interviewing) to keep quality high while increasing throughput.
When the pipeline is healthy, reduce hours. Think of capacity like a portfolio: spin it up for four to eight weeks after a raise or a big launch; spin it down once critical roles are filled.
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 end of Week 2, you should be calibrated on the search and interview plan. You should also have an early channel producing reliable candidate responses.
Week 2+: Recalibrate when needed
Don't be afraid to adjust 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.
Weeks 3+: Focus on results
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.
By the end of Week 4, you should see pass-through rates improving and a steady cadence of qualified screens and onsites flowing in. If you're not there, don't simply ask for more volume—fix the constraint, re-run the experiment, and inspect outcomes on the next weekly.
The founder's job
Set clear goals. Make fast decisions. Give your fractional recruiters room to work while holding them to results. Look at the same data each week in your ATS. If something's stuck, fix the bottleneck rather than adding more noise. If a reset doesn't help, change the plan or the recruiters. Your job is to keep the bar high and the path clear.
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