Your Company's Dunbar Number

Hello and happy Friday!

If you’re reading this, it means that you’ve almost made it through an entire week, post-Thanksgiving. So, congratulations! I’ll be the first one to admit that the week after a holiday weekend is always a grind.

If the name Chris Connors doesn’t ring a bell, don’t be alarmed. I’m the co-founder of candidate.fyi, an all-in-one candidate engagement suite that helps you create a better hiring experience for your candidates and increases efficiency for your recruiting team.

Now, if you work in Talent Acquisition, I’m assuming you opened your inbox on Monday to a flood of new inbound applications. Believe me — I’ve also sent my fair share of curious applications over Thanksgiving weekend.

My thoughts go out to each of you as you catch up with work in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve got a great newsletter and an interesting story for you at the intersection of recruiting and evolutionary psychology.

But first…

candidate.fyi corner

In case you missed it, candidate.fyi recently launched an integration with Workday!

We’ve added another great brand to our list of Applicant Tracking Systems, including Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, and many others (you can see the full list here).

Our whole team looks forward to helping Workday customers provide a world-class experience to their candidates.

Dunbar’s Legacy

A few weeks ago, I learned something from a TA professional that made me rethink everything I knew about growing a company.

At the time, I was interviewing a Talent Acquisition Manager who had spent years scaling recruiting teams across multiple companies. With the benefit of hindsight, he was able to share some of the most important successes and mistakes throughout his career.

Despite our long, in-depth conversation, there’s only one idea I haven’t been able to get out of my head.

He told me about a strange pattern he observed across every company that he worked for. When he joined many of his previous employers, he was often one of the first TA hires. His job was to build out the foundation of the company’s recruiting team, and then scale it as the company grew.

Of course, it was expected that the processes he built would be ineffective past a certain scale — That’s true for every team. As you grow, the things that work for a team of 10 probably won’t work for a team of 100.

What he found most interesting was the fact that, with each company, (regardless of industry) the Recruiting team’s processes would consistently break at the same point. The things that had been working at the earliest stages of the company’s formation began to fail as the company grew beyond a certain size.

And what was that magic threshold that sent Talent Acquisition teams into chaos?

Just 150 employees.

At first, this didn’t really make sense. What was so special about this number? After all, at 150 employees, your company is barely large enough for the IRS to consider it a medium-sized business.

But, I have a theory that the answer can be found in evolutionary psychology.

If you go back to your PSYCH 101 class, you might remember something called Dunbar’s Number. This number refers to a theory proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s. He believed that there was a direct correlation between primate brain size and the number of social connections they’re able to maintain at once. Our brains are impressive machines, but complex social webs are far more powerful. And it appears that there’s a limit to the number of those connections that we can maintain at once.

In Dunbar’s own words, this threshold is "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."

Each species of primate has their own number, and our number just so happens to be 150.

There’s even a famous case study of GORE-TEX applying this theory to their own company by capping the number of employees at each production facility. I highly recommend you check out the study for yourself — The results are pretty impressive.

So, while still a theory, it’s an interesting “coincidence” that a team’s recruiting process starts to break down at that very same milestone. Achieving 150 employees seems to represent a major inflection point in the company’s development, when teams can no longer rely on social capital and interpersonal relationships to help accomplish the business’s goals. This is the point at which bureaucracy is born — Size requires standardization so that an organization can remain efficient.

This message doesn’t come to you as a warning, but as an example. Companies are living, breathing systems. The better you understand the humans that make up that system, the better equipped you are to truly make an impact within your organization.

COMMUNITY RESOURCES

The What vs. How: Our friend and TA leader, Kaitlyn Tarpey Borea, wrote an incredible guest article about the challenges of working in Talent Acquisition when the job market slows down. She has one message for all the recruiters: There’s still so much to be optimistic about!

Today’s Hiring Process is Broken: This article emphasizes the need to prioritize the needs and preferences of both job seekers and employers, suggesting that a more personalized and transparent approach, coupled with advanced matching algorithms driven by AI and machine learning, can lead to faster and more effective hiring outcomes, benefiting both workers and employers in the long run.

Until next time,

Chris Connors
Co-Founder, 
candidate.fyi 

Want to learn more about what we’re building at candidate.fyi? We’d love to show you!