Recruiting to manage hypergrowth

Hiring good talent quickly is one of the major challenges facing scale-ups. You need to recruit “fast” to keep up with the company’s growth.

But you also need to recruit “well”, which means hiring the right people at the right time in order to acquire new essential skills (hard skills) as well as personalities that fit the company’s culture (soft skills). The goal is to maintain your teams’ agility and performance level and to create a virtuous circle. This will ensure you continue to attract top talent in every domain, which will make all the difference over the long term.

The biggest challenge for our recruitment teams is managing this delicate balance between fast hiring processes and high standards for candidate profiles.

In this article, we provide an overview of the steps we are taking at Qonto to best support the business when it comes to hiring.

Our objective: to optimize our recruitment system continuously in order to make our processes and tools more efficient and maintain an excellent experience for candidates through human interactions.

A few key figures:

Qonto’s recruitment data from 2020:

• 10,369 applications reviewed
• 1,773 people interviewed
• 200 people hired (we doubled our Tech and Product teams)
• 30 days on average to close the recruitment process

We have set an ambitious goal for 2021, as we hope to increase our staff from 300 to 450 employees by the end of the year.

Step 1: Understand our “customers”

• Develop a strong business culture

Why do we refer to candidates as “customers”? Because recruiters work for the candidates and managers. We also place a strong emphasis on “satisfaction”: if both the candidates and managers are satisfied, we can continue to work together and succeed in our mission. We need to pay careful attention to each stakeholder.

One of the keys to adapting to our customers and their needs is to form closer ties with them by understanding the challenges unique to their professions and by developing our business culture. This is why curiosity is a crucial quality that we look for in our recruiters. At Qonto, our recruiters participate in meetings with the teams for whom they are hiring. They may even work alongside the teams for a period of time to help them get a feel for their expectations on the ground.

• Clearly define the prerequisites

Once we have developed a strong business culture, what can we implement to ensure good collaboration with our managers?

At Qonto, we take the time to understand before rushing head-first into our search for candidates. We determine which profiles we need, for what positions exactly, and in what team setting.

To this end, we conduct exercises that help us ask the right questions.

The first is to define a persona — a popular marketing tool — by asking the following questions:

Why is this role important at Qonto?

1. Why do we need this position right now (team and organization setting)?
2. What will be the mission of the individual we hire (try to go beyond the job description posted in the recruitment ad)?
3. What will a typical week look like for the selected candidate?
4. What technical skills and soft skills are required for success?
5. What checkpoints will we use to evaluate the candidate?
6. Who will take part in the recruitment process and what will be the roles of each contributor?
7. What is our sourcing strategy?

This persona is our bedrock, our roadmap, our cornerstone between the recruiters and managers. We will refer to it all throughout the process as a guiding model, but we will also make changes as we learn more.

• Ensure close follow-up and get managers involved

As we advance throughout the entire process, we will ensure regular follow-ups between the recruiter and the manager via meetings at least once per week. When the manager embraces a complementary role in the recruitment process, the more the recruiter will be invested and the better the results will be in terms of efficiency and quality.

In practical terms, what kind of investment are we talking about? Our goal in working side by side with managers is to recognize the added value each party brings. Once again, it is important to keep in mind the image of a virtuous circle in which balance is key. Everyone has a role to play in line with their skills and filling someone else’s role is hardly a long-term solution, as this will likely gloss over the initial problem (lack of time, skills, means, etc.).

Let’s take the sourcing of candidates as an example. At Qonto, we believe sourcing candidates is the role of the recruiter and not the manager. Why? We have 4 reasons:

1. Sourcing candidates will take time away from the manager’s usual duties.
2. We may not have a record of the communication between the manager and the candidate and this potential lack of coordination could make the company look bad if the recruiter contacts the candidate again.
3. The Tone of Voice and content of the message sent to candidates may be conflicting if it is drafted by several people. Plus, a recruiter invests considerable time formulating recruitment messages in order to make them relevant.
4. The quality of the screening process (a step that involves evaluating the resumes or profiles) is also prone to inconsistencies because while you may have a strong sense of the qualities you are looking for, deciphering them on a resume is tricky.

From the sourcing step (which consists of searching for candidates), we take an “all hands on deck” approach.

The recruiter will source candidates and send the first message to the candidate, who is also approved by the manager. Then, the manager will send a message to the candidate in order to confirm our interest.

Why is this technique effective?

1. This truly personalized approach shows the candidate that we have taken the time to fully study and validate their profile.
2. It highlights our team spirit.
3. The candidate is reassured that the manager and recruiter are working in tandem and, thanks to this trust, is more likely to launch the recruitment process.

In addition, having the managers and recruiters coordinate and combine their areas of expertise, with each working towards success, improves the chances of recruiting the best talent at the right pace.

Here is a model of our logbook between the recruiter and manager:

• Focus on the candidate experience

From the perspective of the candidates, we strive to guarantee a positive experience that reflects Qonto’s human values. The recruitment process should not be viewed as a test for the candidate but rather as a win-win experience, as an opportunity to take stock of one’s career, improve and grow.

Having a carefully designed, well-oiled recruitment process enables us to focus on creating valuable, pleasant, and stimulating interactions with our candidates. The added benefit is that our recruiters enjoy their jobs!

As a result, the recruiter provides follow-up, or even coaching support, throughout the process and takes every measure to ensure the candidate is set up for success by providing them with a detailed interview guide. The candidate is thus able to plan ahead and is aware of the rules of the game. Then, the recruiter will remain in close contact with the candidate at every step in order to guide, reassure and support them in their selection.

The recruitment process is just one way in which we ensure that the individual will (i) bring value to Qonto and (ii) flourish at Qonto. We, therefore, have every reason to show interest in our candidates and understand their needs in order to guarantee that the final choice will be good for both the company and the candidate.

That is why all candidate experiences and feedback are received as an opportunity to improve and serve as a reminder that, although we sometimes face challenges, we are on the right path. On that note, thanks to social media and the freedom to speak out, everything is out in the open! Working hard to guarantee a positive candidate experience will only help to boost our reputation as a recruiter and hire our talent of tomorrow.

Step 2: Use problems as opportunities to improve

Like all Qonto teams, we use the Qonto Way tools.

Once the machine starts up, it is important to implement a system of checkpoints and corrections. If we focus on our wins, quality is highly likely to deteriorate.

This is why we regularly look at the bigger picture and spend a significant amount of time analyzing and questioning our practices. This enables us to detect problems and obstacles quickly and easily, and seize opportunities to change and improve.

• Use visual management strategies

What does this mean, practically speaking? In order to make progress, you must first have a clear vision of the problems. It is thus essential to make all steps of the recruitment process visible. We can then easily identify at what step in the process a problem has occurred and thus reflect on the corrective measures.

We call this visual management. Let’s lay it out in black and white:

• Who is working on what in order to take stock at the start of each day, to ensure the right priorities are taken care of?
• What problems have occurred that we need to put in our “red bins”? Similarly, we go over these issues every day as a team to find solutions as they arise and develop good practices in the long term.
• What are our successes (our “green bins”, naturally) that will help us understand why we were successful and how to repeat this success?

In addition, every morning, we take a long, hard look at our machine and we closely examine each of its working parts. This helps us to ask the right questions and continuously optimize the system.

Below is an example of our visual management tools:

• A dashboard to keep our objective in full view and to measure whether or not we are on track to achieve it;
• A dashboard to monitor whether we are indeed working on our priorities and if we are successfully recruiting on schedule;
• Our weekly conversion rate in order to identify obstacles;
• Our successes in order to understand what works and be able to repeat them;
• Our problems in order to take time to analyze them and find solutions.

• Monitor performance via key indicators

As previously explained, we must be able to identify the warning points and prevent the machine from seizing up. We have decided to use time as a key indicator. If we fail to meet deadlines or are late, then either we have some issues or we must work to improve the system to successfully deliver on schedule.

This requires making concrete calculations to monitor the following elements:

• the time it takes for a candidate to complete the recruitment process,
• the time it takes us to recruit, or, similarly, the recruitment pace for recurring positions that are perpetually open.

This time will encapsulate the quality of our work and indicate if we are able to recruit the top talent in the first round.

Of course, other indicators are monitored and analyzed when a problem is identified, such as conversion rates at each stage.

Finally, one particular indicator we follow is, of course, the pass rate for the probation period, as it enables us to verify if the recruitment was successful.

Below is an example exercise conducted between the recruitment team and the tech team in order to improve our productivity:

To successfully work in this way, it is essential for the manager and recruitment team to implement certain routines that enable recruiters to avoid entering into an endless, frantic race and, instead, be able to take the time to reflect and make improvements. At Qonto, we set aside dedicated time for this continuous improvement.

Conclusion

All throughout this article, I’ve used the word “machine” several times, which may convey recruitment as a dehumanizing and industrial process. But this could not be further from the truth! Automation of the recruitment machine should simply enable us to do away with purely functional tasks and ensure a more coherent process overall, a process that is rigorous and less vulnerable to bias and human error.

The real message is this: to recruit both fast and well, we need to build a genuine machine and streamline our working methods. Doing so enables our recruiters to hire smarter. This solid foundation allows us to concentrate entirely on the most important aspect of recruitment: the human dimension and the connection we can build with the candidate. Thanks to this machine, we are able to contribute, in our own way, to this amazing project launched by Qonto.