Running the gauntlet with a smile :)

[Series] 10 Weeks to open a 5-person startup office Paris — Chapter 3 — Candidate Experience is Key

If you’re looking at opening an office for your startup in Paris, this series will give you every tool, hack & workflow that I used to scale up from nothing to 5 people in 10 weeks. Each section has a bullet-point summary at the top, so feel free to scroll past the story-telling if you just want tips to hire/open an office. I’ll also talk about a few of the key decisions we made and how you can approach those decisions.

If you haven’t already, check out Chapter 1: Spinning up Recruitment & Chapter 2: Recruitment Automation & Process to get started.

It was around mid-April, only a 2 weeks after I had gotten my process in place and only 4 weeks after I sent my first cold outreach email, that I realized we needed to be proactive about Candidate Experience. The first experiences had already played out — polite rejection from candidates — and we made sure that candidates knew that (1)we were happy to hear they were happy where they were, and (2) we would be around in the ecosystem and were always happy to talk about relevant engineering topics.

For candidates who didn’t politely pass on our outreach, we looked at three main criteria in order to be mindful of their experience:

1. Be Explicit: At the end of each call, we made it clear what they could expect next. We documented it together (and iterated as we learned) and the list of possible next steps was finite. Additionally, we made sure that what was expected of them was clear upfront at the beginning of the process and at the beginning of each call — in short, we gave them everything they needed to excel in our process (including our criteria).
2. No Candidate Left Behind: We paid attention to how long it had been since a candidate had talked to one of us, and tried to make sure that candidates advanced to the next stage in the quickest possible time. It’s not enough to keep communicating, you have to make sure they’re moving forward
3. Be Mindful of their Time: It’s OK to ask them to do a long assignment early on, but you need them to see that you’re making a proportionate investment to what they’re putting in. Try to filter early on and not waste candidate’s time — they can have a good experience even if they don’t make it to the second phone call.

Detail-oriented recruiters excel at Candidate Experience, because it’s not enough to be super enthusiastic (like I can be), you have to use your time wisely or you’ll spend too much of it on a promising/exciting candidate and neglect 7 others.

I, unfortunately, am not detail-oriented. What I am is process-oriented, so I looked for a tool that would make the Candidate Experience a fluid and trackable process — and I didn’t look far.

Lever — oh, how I love you.

I’m going to try to sing their praises as little as possible, but I started using Lever at Algolia, so it was a natural selection for me coming into MadKudu. It creates your careers page, it assigns owners based on positions, it has admin rights, it connects to Hired — it is, as far as I can tell, the product that best turns a previously manual process into something automated and manageable. It’s Salesforce for Candidates.

Instead of listing all the features, let me run you through the candidate experience:

Once we had validated interest on both parties (applicants who had been screened, cold outreach that had a response, or talent platforms where the talent accepted our initial offer), candidates have a full-fledge profile in Lever. The pipeline went as follows:

1. Phone Screen (30 min) — conducted by myself or Sam (our CEO), in order to make sure there was a hard skills fit & a quick-check for culture fit
2. CEO Screen (60 min) — conducted by Sam, focused on diving deeper into their technical skills (Sam has done a lot of the data engineer work up until now, so he’s intimately familiar with the problems they’ll be facing)
3. Assignment/CTO Screen — we bounced this around a lot, but ultimately found that, prior to the assignment, Paul tended to want to see more before making a judgment call, so we dropped the initial CTO screen and had Paul meet the candidate for a review of the assignment
4. “On-Site” — I met the candidates for coffee/lunch, as I was the only person who was in Paris to actually meet the candidates. This was really just a red flag hunt, where I was looking for things that might’ve been missed over skype.
5. Reference Call — we talked to people that the candidate had worked with to see if their feedback lined up with our experience.
6. Offer.

Having a structured pipeline early meant that we could let candidates know what to expect (be mindful), we knew what we wanted out of each step (so our assessments were standardized), and we knew at the end of each call what the next step was (no candidate left behind).

Lever has other awesome tools to help you keep your process efficient and courteous: email templates, interview schedulers that take into account everyone’s schedule, feedback forms after interviews with automatic notifications, and indicators when a candidate hasn’t been interacted with in a while. This will help you keep your candidate pipeline tight, which in turn creates a better candidate experience, as time is of the essence.

Conversion Rate & Candidate Velocity

A few weeks in, we leveraged Lever’s analytics features to look at conversion rate & candidate velocity, two metrics that helped us reverse engineer an idea of how many candidates we had to reach out to before making a hire — this number turned out to be ~300 candidates for 3 hires; however, we were anticipating almost double that with our early projections, which gives you an idea of how hard it is to predict your pipeline early on.

Predicting success is good for setting recruitment goals, but the unintended outcome was that we saw the bottlenecks in our funnel — for example, because our CTO Paul is very busy and only had so many available times in his schedule that overlapped Paris & California timezones, we noticed it was taking too long (nearly 2 weeks on average) for candidates to get through that step and on to the assignment — this was part of the reason we ultimately switched the funnel around to have the assignment come earlier. In addition, I also took over initial phone screening quickly because (1) two interviews with Sam was less useful than exposing the candidate to as many people as possible, and (2) Sam’s schedule is a lot more packed than mine.

As a result, we were able to reduce the average candidate experience from 45 days (6 1/2 weeks) down to about 30 days (4 1/2 weeks), which we communicated to candidate as early as possible so they knew what to expect (be mindful).

No On-Site? No problem!

We weren’t in a position to do an on-site, because we didn’t have an office at the same time, so I met with candidate for lunch to tell them about my initial impressions and get an idea for how they handle chit-chat. Not all positions requirement clear communication to be successful; however, as a company located in two different continents with just 10 employees, expressing oneself clearly to colleagues was going to be key.

We had one formidable candidate who checked all of the hard skills boxes, and was even open about telling us about his past troubles with colleagues in previous companies. It was a tough decision, because we agreed that he seemed to genuinely want to improve on this front — specifically, he had trouble getting along with colleagues that he didn’t respect intellectually, something I’ve been guilty of in the past — but ultimately, we knew that we didn’t have the direct superior in the same office with him from day one, and we couldn’t assure ourselves 100% that we would make them successful, so we had to pass.

More to be done.

It’s still early days for our candidate pipeline, and as we plan future recruitment sprints, we’re looking a lot at how we can improve the process but also how we can give a voice to candidates. In the future, we’d like to plug Glassdoor into our process so candidate who reach a certain phase are automatically invited to review their experience for other candidates to see. In addition, Lever recently released an amazing feature to anonymously assess diversity & inclusion in your candidate experience. Our first 5 employees are going to be men, and while we understand that the nature of the positions we’re hiring for early on (data engineer) skew the outcome, we also want to be mindful that our top-of-funnel isn’t skewed as well. You can learn more about that Lever feature here.

The offer, the office

It’s hard to get through an interview process without the obvious question coming up: “where are you located?” Early on, we told candidates that we expected that we would be ‘central’ — between Republique and Opera straddling the line 3 or line 8/9 — but as I started having more in-person lunches, we knew we had to pull the trigger.

I’ve gone office hunting in Paris a number of times, so I had my options narrowed down quickly, but for those who have never found an office in Paris before, navigating can be quite a pain — even I made some rookie mistakes this time. In Part 4, I’ll run through how we found a Paris office.