In the end, Emhoff, and the leadership team she works with at Protenus, considered the 2018 effort a success. The company was able to keep up with growth and met its hiring demands for 2018.

The company ended up hiring 36 people.

Looking ahead, Emhoff has already started to explore new ways to approach the 25+ new hires needed to grow the team in 2019.

“It’s great to have successfully recruited this many people, but now it’s about exploring what we can do to continue to improve,” she said.

Emhoff says they’re seeking ways to expand their pool for candidate sourcing. They’re reviewing how candidates found the company and seeing if there are trends that can be explored and scaled.

Employment brand is another opportunity. The company is also looking into opportunities to highlight its employer brand by participating with local events (like Technical.ly’s NET/WORK, which the company attended in 2018), and publishing content that elevates employee voices. For example, they’re currently working on a video to highlight company culture.

Looking back, Emhoff recalls a video conference call she had one evening with the company’s leadership team before she had officially started at the company.

They were peppering her with important questions she wasn’t sure of just yet: how to project hires, who to partner with, how to create a useful hiring roadmap, and how she was tactically going to run a smooth recruiting operation, she said.

It had left her with a bit of self-doubt.

Even without knowing the answers, the bottom-line was that the most important thing Emhoff could do was get out there, try new things, document and learn.

As 2019 sets in, she’s feeling the same pull that she did a year ago. It’s time to get to work.