Reinventing recruitment to stand out from the crowd

With competition for talent fiercer than ever, Qonto hosted a forum on November 4 to discuss the current recruitment landscape.

Having led the recruitment team at Qonto for three years, a period in which we’ve hired more than 675 people, I can testify to the fact that the role of a recruiter is undergoing constant evolution. In today’s environment, recruiters are key to the success of companies that, like Qonto, are experiencing hyper-growth. It’s exciting. It’s gratifying. Yet, it can also be baffling if we don’t have the right tools to navigate what can sometimes be treacherous waters.

In choosing the speakers for our forum, I wanted to spotlight recruiters whose work has contributed to the transformation of our profession and enriched it with renewed value. The following people agreed to share their thoughts:

• Gabriel Camoin, Recruitment Performance Manager at Doctolib. Amongst other things, Gabriel helps recruiters drive efficiency through data analysis.
• Alice Duranteau, founder of Recruiters Club, a talent recommendation platform and community that also acts as an innovation lab for good practice.
• Mehdi Lebel, CEO, and founder of Bloomays. After 10 years in the profession, Mehdi created his own startup dedicated to staffing tech profiles and providing ongoing training for tech recruiters themselves.
• Aurélien Drieu, Talent Acquisition Lead at Qonto, whose invaluable work and expertise have helped me fulfill the challenge of doubling the size of Qonto’s workforce every year.

The speakers’ profiles certainly set the tone: standing out from the crowd demands innovation and the constant development of new skills.

The importance of standing out

The challenges facing Talent Acquisition teams

Let’s begin by looking at the issues we face today.

As someone who’s always close to companies experiencing rapid growth, Alice understands perfectly the role played by recruiters: if, on one hand, they are the ‘shop window’ of the companies they represent, they also contribute directly to fast expansion by putting the right people in the right jobs as quickly as possible.

There are, therefore, certain questions that companies should be asking themselves:

• How and where can we find recruiters? It’s increasingly difficult to hire recruiters in the current market; according to LinkedIn, job offers for recruiters have grown sevenfold over the last year.
• Which tools will our recruiters need?
• How do we train our recruiters? Today’s recruiter is not merely someone “who’s good with people”; an evolving profession demands ongoing professional training.
• How do we retain our recruiters? What kind of career path progression can we offer them?

Equally, expectations are increasingly high from a recruiter’s point of view. Alice and Mehdi both emphasize that comparisons were once drawn between a recruiter and a salesperson, based on the various skills both professions share. They go even further, comparing the role of a recruiter to that of an IT developer: it wasn’t so long ago that there was no specific training to become either; IT developers and recruiters began their careers in other trades and then self-trained and took a new path. They are both blessed with curiosity, seeking always to learn new skills, master new tools and tap into their own networks in order to share good practice.

A good recruiter is just as much someone who manages to find good candidates as they are someone who can attract and persuade those candidates by using the right approach.

Let’s take Qonto as an example. Some 30% of our hires come as a result of direct outreach. That requires a skillful mix of personalization and automation. When the interview stage begins, the recruiter must ensure an excellent experience for the candidate because that could prove decisive at the offer stage. For that reason, a year ago, Qonto developed an interview guide that seeks to give candidates what they need to achieve a successful outcome. The result? An acceptance rate of 85% of our offers, compared to 80% previously.

Measuring the time it takes to recruit plays a part in both the candidate experience as well as the efficiency of the process. Hiring the right person is one thing, but hiring them in less than 30 days? Well, that’s another story altogether. And it’s the story we’re trying to tell at Qonto.

How to get results when rapid growth combines with stiff competition

Structuring a Talent Acquisition team

As we’ve seen, much is expected of the modern-day recruiter. They need to possess a blend of growth hacking, sales, and marketing, not to mention a solid understanding of the jobs they’re recruiting for. To meet those requirements and optimize expertise, recruitment teams are having to organize themselves differently. That’s the case for Doctolib, where, as Gabriel explains, the team is subdivided according to its members’ areas of specialization:

• a sub-team of sourcers is being put together to work hand-in-hand with the recruiters;
• a sub-team of coordinators who help schedule interviews, thus allowing recruiters to focus on their mission and not their calendars;
• a sub-team of Talent Marketers who develop a strategy to attract the best talent;
• a Talent Excellence sub-team responsible for training recruiters;
• Gabriel’s sub-team, which is tasked with finding the best tools, project managing, and driving performance through data analysis.

When the stakes are so high, recruiters need to be supported by facilitators that enhance performance. It is far too simplistic to assume that the answer to increased recruitment needs lies in increased recruiter numbers. When teams grow, flexibility suffers. Low-value tasks begin to accumulate. It’s more efficient — and much less wasteful — to separate the missions of each team member and bring on board people who can keep the machine well oiled.

All these “new professions” provide avenues for recruiters wishing to specialize as part of their career progression.

The key role of data in driving a Talent Acquisition strategy

At Qonto, we don’t (yet) have a team dedicated to analyzing data purely for recruitment purposes. That said, data has figured in our thinking from the very start.

Using data as a lever for sourcing

We use LinkedIn’s Talent Insights, which allows us to visualize the data provided by the platform’s users and thus gain in efficiency in two main ways:

• Identify where we need to focus our search (the places that are richest in potential talent).
• Adapt our criteria by presenting the reality of the market to our managers (the number of suitable candidates on the market).

Building a dashboard with integrated notifications

Data helps us on a daily basis to manage our work by doing the following:

• Enhance our predictive modeling to better spread the workload amongst the team. For example, for any given job we know how many candidates we need to put through the skills test stage in order to be left with just one suitable candidate at the end of the process.
• Prevent rather than cure when it comes to detecting anomalies in the process, thus enabling greater control over the time-to-fill.

In concrete terms, this information is presented in table form, detailing the different steps in the recruitment process. We receive automatic alerts when we overshoot a given process checkpoint or deadline, or Slack notifications when a candidate remains inactive in the pipeline for too long.

Using data to measure our own efficiency

Analyzing data allows us to identify potential gains. Once we’ve tested counter-measures to address issues, we re-analyze the data until ideas and strategies emerge that we can adopt in the long term. Currently, we’re working on our ability to recruit faster without compromising on the quality of the candidates we select. By testing and analyzing several ideas, we’ve been able to reduce our time-to-fill by one week, which means we are today, on average, able to hire the right candidate within four weeks.

At Doctolib, Gabriel’s team carries significant strategic weight; their actions drive fundamental business decisions. For instance, data analysis highlighted a 50% year-on-year drop in the number of co-opted hires, prompting the company to change its co-optation program. Without data, it would have been impossible to measure this decrease and subsequently take rapid remedial action. Another example is Doctolib’s remote policy, which was guided by the number of offer refusals where remote-work flexibility was a determining factor.

Once convinced of the need for a structured team and a data-driven recruitment policy, companies have to think hard about the question of training and tools.

Giving recruiters the tools they need

By “tools”, I mean the whole spectrum of solutions, services, platforms, and innovations that exist on the market. It could be the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), for example, which allows recruitment teams to send email campaigns to candidates, or software that automates and boosts co-optation among employees.

Recruiter skills also fall under this category. These are central to how we do things at Qonto; the ability to learn new things is a prerequisite for joining the team.

On a day-to-day basis, this manifests itself through defining standards. What is a standard? It’s a tool that establishes the best way of doing something, such as ‘how to make the perfect offer to a candidate at the first attempt’. Initially, this requires us to define the objective (in this case, that the candidate accepts within 48 hours), and then establish a roadmap towards achieving that objective based on what we’ve learned previously.

Besides our standards, we analyze our negative results (such as rejected offers), but also our successes in order to generate re-usable learning. Herein lies the value of the role of recruitment team manager; it is they who will facilitate learning and team progression.

This is how skills are acquired and maintained. It’s a conviction we share with other companies. The more we understand the full value of recruiters, the readier we are to train them adequately.

Alice takes this principle one step further. She is surrounded by experts who help her build a training program that gives all recruiters an opportunity to be trained in all aspects of the profession. Among those experts is Mehdi. He believes that to truly stand out, a good recruiter must master techniques developed by Growth teams. That means putting in place automated processes for finding candidates; it means attracting candidates to a brand with techniques used by copywriters and paid acquisition teams. Equally, just like tech teams, recruiters must build their stack and a framework that can be developed over time.

Recruiters of the startup world, unite!

In conclusion, this forum helped shine a light on the fact that all companies and, by extension, all recruiters are confronted with common dynamics:

• Recruitment is key to a company’s growth
• The field is being professionalized quickly
• Organization is increasingly structured and data-driven
• It’s vital to master other skills and techniques

While we do hear the term “talent war” ever more frequently, the good news is that there is plenty of mutual help in the startup ecosystem. It is what makes the job of a recruiter so interesting.

It’s precisely that idea-sharing and experience-sharing that made us want to organize our forum in the first place and then to resume its main points here for those who couldn’t be there.