How to Build the Best Recruitment Platform in the World? Step 1. Do Your Research

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Me and Maciej Adamczyk established ITCraftship in May 2017. We’re both software developers with years of experience, but as the case often is with developers, we wanted to look for new challenges in a bit different area of expertise. We decided to connect our tech background with recruitment and help startups find the best developers for their needs. During that year and a half, we managed to recruit some great guys for amazing companies like Headshed, Nabobil, RelayThat…

It was all great, but it kind of wasn’t enough. We received some very kind words, which assured us that hey, we’re actually pretty good at it! Maybe we should try to build a recruitment platform? We have already seen the challenges from both sides of the fence. It’s not easy to stumble upon a good project to work on when you’re a developer, and it’s not easy to find a good developer for a company either. Even though there are a few platforms offering that they can help you find a good developer or match you with a cool company, we have heard complaints from both sides that it doesn’t always work out as it should.

But there were only two of us and lots of work to do. Plus, we’re continuing our developer adventure.

The solution to our problem was quite easy. We teamed up with a company, First Engineers, from Oslo. They’re an excellent recruitment and consultancy agency working with both startups and big corporations from Norway and other countries as well. They contributed to building great development teams by specializing in their core market (tech) and providing the clients with a research-based methodology. First Engineers are a fast-growing and goal-oriented company, and it was quite natural for us to connect and join forces.

But where do we start with all of that? So as not to wander in the dark without a clear goal, we prepared a roadmap.

So we have a weekly plan for all our actions, and we stick to it. Right now, when I’m writing this article, it’s week 36, and we actually managed to complete everything up to this point. Having this kind of plan helps us to focus on our goal and try to reach it without unnecessary delays. To get the job done we also use Trello to remind us about smaller tasks, Slack to communicate on a daily basis, and once a week we have a status meeting via Zoom to make sure we’re exactly on track.

So, our work officially started on August 13. The first thing we had to do was our research. Inspired by the abovementioned quote, we were quite sure that after talking with lots of inspiring people, getting to grasp and understand their problems, it will be easier for us to sort everything in our heads and focus on what we want to achieve.

We wanted to start by sourcing for our future interviewees from the demand side. And we stumbled upon some more problems.

Problem 1. Where to find these people?

We decided to come after people who were looking for software developers. We checked some job boards, read the ads, checked out the company, searched for CEO/CTO… Quite a lot of work, isn’t it?

That’s why we decided to outsource it to a Virtual Assistant. She did a great job providing us with all of the necessary information in a spreadsheet.

Problem 2. How to approach them?

Our Virtual Assistant provided us with e-mails to the CEOs and CTOs. We decided to use cold-email marketing to reach out to these people.

This was one of the emails we sent. We used a software called Quickmail, and as you can see it allowed us to prepare quite personalized messages. We thought that it wouldn’t be so hard to get a few positive replies.

But it was.

We had around 40% of open rate, 8% of replies, people flagged us as spam, and as a result, we went straight into the Google Jail. It was quite a surprise because all we wanted to do was to ask some questions, schedule a call, and exchange experiences.

Problem 3. What to do if cold emailing failed?

Without much thought given to it, we started reaching out to people on LinkedIn. We have already done that while we were looking for developers to recruit so why wouldn’t it work for CEOs and CTOs?

This is one of the messages I sent to them:

So as you can see it kind of worked. CEOs and CTOs are quite keen on connecting with me, but not all of them want to share their experiences. As for now, I had 4 interviews with cold clients and 2 more scheduled for weeks to come.

At the same time, First Engineers conducted interviews with their clients. Their job was even harder than ours because not only they had more interviews scheduled than we did (14), but we were also a bit scared about the bias since the interviewees were their regular clients. What was great is that they work with both startups and big enterprises so we could check whether this affects the problems and challenges faced by them while looking for developers.

However, I think that we managed to overcome these problems. Thanks to these interviews we were able to see challenges from the demand side, some of which we have already heard of, and some of which weren’t so obvious at the beginning of our research. We have gathered a lot of fascinating and sometimes surprising data. Now we’re in the middle of analyzing it, and as soon as we’re done with that, we will be happy to share our outcome.

There may be an exception to our roadmap. Even if our research period ends, I would still like to go on with chatting with CEOs and CTOs. This research has proven to be beneficial not only when it comes to developing our platform, but it was actually great to talk with fellow entrepreneurs, exchange ideas and build a connection for the future.

If you’re a CEO or a CTO and you want to share with me some of your problems, contribute to our research, and get some actionable advice from me, don’t hesitate! Connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email at maks@itcraftship.co.