The Applicant Tracking System All Fast-Growing Teams Must Have

Hiring is one of the most difficult tasks when it comes to the management of a business. Determining what kinds of talent are needed for a company to succeed and then finding the time and effort to recruit them is something that hinders many entrepreneurs. The fact is that successful hiring is expensive and time consuming. On the other hand, unsuccessful hiring can be disastrous for the health of the company.

What makes hiring complex is that it’s hard to find help in the hiring process. External recruiters can be expensive and, sometimes, do not perfectly meet the interests of your company. Books and online articles do offer some guidance, but are not always thorough and specific.

We have reached out to founders at super fast-growing teams for their advice. They approach hiring with a strategic mind to ensure that their business wagon is run by the finest machines. With these three tips, you can excel at recruiting, and get the best talent that grows your business exponentially.

1—Scout all year round with your whole team

“It can be overwhelming when your company takes off and there is a continuous need for new team members.” Mark Studholme, co-owner at CROWDYHOUSE, told us. “As a founder, your role changes from keeping track of daily operations, to managing team members and recruiting new people. We couldn’t have scaled up this fast without a system like Recruitee. I would advise start-ups to hire throughout the year (not just when you need new people), and keep all your candidates in an online tool. Give all team members the power to scout new talent, as it’s the future growth of your company.”

2—Balance cash and people

Marc van Agteren, CEO at Usabilla, echoed Studholme’s experience in his latest observation. “Start-ups seem to be either short on cash or short on people. Don’t make the mistake of having both of them in the same year. After you’ve secured a funding, you’re likely to scale up quickly. Having a pool of potential candidates on ‘standby’ will save you a lot of time (and probably cash). Free job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor help us fill up two “low hanging fruits” easily – multi-posting them via Recruitee. Sourcing and adding candidates manually takes about 50% of our recruiting efforts.”

3—Engage with potential candidates

“Start recruiting even if you don’t have open spots!” Bas Kohnke, co-founder at Impraise, said. “It can take a great deal of time to find the right candidates once you need them, so make sure you start looking for new talent way ahead. Especially developers can be hard to find, so ideally keep a watch list of talent that you can approach later. We save them in Recruitee and use that as the back end of our growth. We try to keep in touch with the ones that do not fit at this time, but who may want to join the team in a later stage. Send them an email, invite them for a party. Just keep them in the loop.”

4—Constant optimisation of the hiring process pays dividends

• Use surveys

Getting candidates is only the first step. The main battle boils down to how you handle and process them efficiently, as demonstrated by David Darmanin, CEO and founder at Hotjar. “We start always with a survey. We like doing really long surveys: 10-12 detailed questions. The reason for that is: ‘If you don’t really believe in joining us, that’s the perfect kind of filter upfront.’ Then we have all the email [response] automated from Recruitee. We love that.

• Use video interview

Then we would request videos. We decided to do this because we’re doing tons of interviews. When we calculated the time on that, it was a huge waste. Because we’re constantly reviewing and optimising how we use our time, we said “Ok, what if instead of us 13 doing 30 interviews, we do 30 videos, and out of them we choose five?” So we created the questions and the flow for that. We have again, very intentionally, five standard questions and these cannot be changed by a role. They are standard because the video stage is purely to see “Will they match culturally?”

• Implement a paid task stage

From the videos, we then invite them to do an interview. If the person makes it through that stage, we go to what’s called the task stage. Everything is done purely via [online] chat. Because our work is remote, we want to evaluate how good they behave in that environment. They’re given a task in a Word doc. There is no video, no audio, so that we can see how they ask questions, how quickly they understand things, if they can communicate with us. They’re given two to three days, which is a paid period. If we believe in what they’ve done, that’s the stage where we then negotiate.

What’s great is by doing this – as we call it – “performance recruitment,” at the stage when the person decides to join, we literally just change their email and HipChat and they’re ready to start working with us.”

5—Extra tip: Centralise your hiring in one platform

The next persons you bring in will continuously define your culture and business. Be strategic about who you need, starting from who you are, plan way ahead, and constantly refine your practices as you go. Feels overwhelmed? Use a platform to support your growth ambition like Recruitee. Recruitee is one of the best software to help with hiring, and is considered to be the best applicant tracking system in the market.

Recruitee wants companies to have the best possible experience and focus on the right candidate(s), so it is designed to present a comprehensive overview of all candidates and hiring stages, with a very interesting and useful drag and drop interface that makes the process much easier.

But Recruitee’s capabilities go way further. It also features an employer branding editor, allowing to style and brand a mobile-ready careers site with ease, to make sure that candidates have the right experience when using it. That careers site can also be used to showcase the team and explain the company’s culture, all with social media integration.

Advertising and promoting job openings is also an important part of the hiring process, which is why this software also shows the best places to do exactly that, on free and paid outlets. It has a browser extensions for Chrome, in order to ease the pain of finding and importing passive candidates scouted from different sources, such as Dribbble, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Facebook or Twitter.

Recruitee is a useful software for almost every business, especially the ones looking to empower their team with the best possible candidates. If you are interested, be sure to check out the software’s free demo.

Author bio: Perry Oostdam is the co-founder and CEO at Recruitee, a collaborative hiring platform for teams of all sizes. Recruitee helps optimize the entire hiring process, from candidate relationship management, employer branding, and job posting to candidate sourcing and applicant tracking.