Six months of hiring
a personal perspective with some stats
In one of my previous posts I talked at length about the way I structured the tech hiring process at Aidence.
One thing I did not discuss however was the way we structured the upper funnel of that process, how did we get people to talk to us, a pretty obscure dutch startup.
So now I would like to break that down for you, showing which sources we use and what was their cost and performance. Something I wish I had before starting.
For Technology I have used 6 ways of getting applicants:
direct applicants on our website
employee referrals
sourcing by internal recruitment
sourcing with recruitment agencies
curated job boards
search engines.
Let’s look at their performance, plus some pros and cons.
Our own website
As any company in the world we have our website, with a pretty typical job section: https://www.aidence.com/join-the-team/. It’s clean and well done, and contains everything you need to know about Aidence and the job.
Applicants: 151
Hired: 3
Cost: Depends on employer branding initiatives, we spent nothing on it
We hired roughly 2% of direct applicants, generally considered a good number. Most of those applicants where in Machine Learning, where our brand is much stronger than in other fields.
Pros: Cheap to implement, offers a direct connection with people that are motivated to join your company already.
Cons: To make it work you need to spend time and money on employer branding, and you are fighting with big brands with deep pockets.
Employee referrals
We offer a cash bonus to our employees if they refer someone and that person gets hired. The bonus is quite high because people that come through referrals are normally more senior and more motivated than the average, and have an higher success rate. Let’s see if it’s true.
Referrals: 14
Hired: 9
Cost per hire: High (3000EUR referral bonus)
That is a striking 64% success rate! Our theory was right, referrals do have an higher success rate than average.
Pros: Higher chance of hire, higher quality candidates, better to pay your own employees than an external entity for sourcing.
Cons: Risk of forming cliques and poisoning your own culture (i.e. a team formed only from former BigTech employees), higher risk of chain attrition if one person leaves, cash bonus has to be high to work well.
Internal sourcing
Our own recruiter takes care of reaching out to interesting profiles on sites like Linkedin, this is an hard job that has a lot of rejections so you’d expect it to have a much lower success rate accompanied by a very high number of candidates sourced.
Sourced: 1552
Hired: 4
Cost per hire: Medium (0.2 FTE)
As expected a tiny 0.25% success rate, with thousands of contacts. However don’t be fooled by those numbers, sourcing is really effective for positions that aren’t too common, especially in management.
Pros: Reach out proactively to people that might not know your company or might have been interested in changing jobs enough to look around, Great to sense the market, adjust your internal processes and build a brand for you company.
Cons: Is a number game, very time consuming.
Recruitment Agencies
To help our effort we also sometimes use recruitment agencies, the process works roughly like this:
we ask them to search a certain profile, normally in a call with some Q&A
they provide us with people they sourced and talked with
if we like the profile the person goes through the interview process
the agency gets a generous fee if we hire the person.
This is especially good for managerial roles and other low volume roles that might be too time consuming to source internally.
Accepted profiles: 10
Hired: 2
Cost per hire: Depends on agency, generally as high as a referral
Not bad! A 20% success rate is absolutely great when you are dealing with profiles that are uncommon.
Pros: Save time in the recruitment process, ideal for managerial and more senior roles
Cons: Expensive, candidates tend to be generally more senior than you asked for and less interested in the company itself
Curated job boards (paid)
We recently decided to try out the Pragmatic Engineer job board paying for the premium subscription (1000$ for a month) to advertise the our highest volume role of Backend Engineer (a difficult role to fill always).
We did so not only because we are in general big fans of Gergely’s publication but also because we felt that the audience of that newsletter was our target employee (we scored 11.5/12 on the Pragmatic Engineer Test).
Applicants: 58
Hired: 2
Cost per hire: 500$, pretty cheap
A 4% success rate, not bad for backend engineer! And a bit of employer branding as well, since a few direct applicants mentioned that they saw the ad on this board (so probably that success rate should be slightly higher).
Pros: One of the cheapest options to advertise your engineering roles, high quality candidates
Cons: You need to find the curated board that fits your target employees, and that might not be straightforward
Job search engines
Our recruitment software gracefully adds all our job posts to popular search engines like Indeed, plus we add our jobs to linkedin from time to time. In all fairness we don’t pay too much attention to them, but we still get candidates.
Applicants: 170
Hired: 1
Cost: Free
Unsurprisingly the area performing the worst, with a 0.6% success rate while adding a lot of admin to our process (rejections need to be written by someone for example).
Pros: If used properly job search engines can deliver an high number of candidates, even without us paying attention to it we got one person hired from there
Cons: Generally expensive to advertise, the ROI is lower than a curated job board
Conclusions
Total number of candidates: 2004
Hired: 20
After reviewing those numbers I am happy with our mix and my advise is that, if you can, using a mix of sources is ideal. I know of companies that hire only referrals, but for me the risk of cliques is too high to not go out and get someone with a fresh perspective using internal sourcing and talent agencies.
Curation is really important, so I will definitely invest again in curated job boards, while job search engines remain still something that I am unsure about.
A small note on methodology, at the beginning of our recruitment journey our data wasn’t that clean so take this numbers with a grain of salt, also there a few applicants coming from different sources and that might change those numbers (albeit not signficantly enough to change my conclusions).