How we got from 0 to 100 great candidates in our recruitment pipeline
It has become almost a certain thing, whenever I meet someone new who runs a business (be it law firm, a media outlet, a real-estate agency, etc.) and I tell them that I am in the IT business, they immediately jump to “oh, you must know some developers — I am desperately looking to hire one for my project…”
When someone asks me what do I do for a living, I stumble in anticipation of this common next question. The real reason, however, why I am so embarrassed by the question, is that I want to hire great people for my startup (blindnet.io) and guess what, it is hard. And it is one of the most frequent reasons why start-ups fail.
It is hard to make the best people find about us and choose us when:
- we are just starting and we are not known like some later-stage startups or scaleups that the press talks about;
- we have a B2B product and people working for us can’t go to a family lunch and tell their grandmother that they work at a company who made the tablet she is using, or who made the car-sharing app she just installed;
- we still can’t offer above-market salaries.
All those thigs work against us in the tech job market where there are more jobs than candidates. If you are reading this blog, probably you have experienced the same feeling of fighting against the odds. And to make the odds even worse, we are very picky.
Obviously, we shared our job offers on different job boards and that got us to no results. We received many CVs but none really fitting for the jobs. We gave a chance to a few of the candidates, but as it turned out in the end, those people didn’t really want to work for a start-up and live with the insecurity that goes with it.
We were desperate.
And then, one day everything changed. One of our team members confided to my co-founder how, before working for us, he struggled to find a job. That shocked me, because he was the person who I knew we’d hire, from the first moment I saw him. He is very smart, reliable, with great communication skills, and I couldn’t imagine anyone turn him down. That’s when I started digging: What made others turn down our perfect fit? What is it that we are looking for, that others are not? And what is special about our organization that attracts a certain type of people?
Those are probably the questions that other start-ups should ask themselves. I guess the answers are different for everyone.
Here are the answers I found: We are different. At the time, we had 5 nationalities in a 6-person team, with very different backgrounds. We started during lockdown and didn’t even have an office. In order to operate efficiently, and include everyone in our development, our team actually has to deploy an above-average degree of respect, communication skills, and empathy.
We were not even aware of it. It turns out, people who are able to extend above average respect, communication skills, and empathy to others, also want the same in return. And that makes us a good fit for them.
So what did we do about it?
- We changed our job offers to talk about our values
- I started blogging about our product development approach and beliefs. Every candidate we interviewed was curious and has read it. People just want to know about the workplaces before they engage in the interview process.
- We reached-out to them, instead of waiting for them to apply. We looked for traces of like-mindedness on github and elsewhere. We then wrote to them.
We now have a thriving team, twice the size of when we started recruiting few months ago, and are proud to say that we have 37% of women (in technical roles for which they are underrepresented among candidates). We have a pipeline of great candidates, such that we even came to regret having to say no to some of them.
And we are still hiring:
