Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016 Update — it turns out that the role for Culture Scout had already been filled at the time of my publishing this piece. The team (Deborah) at Buffer reached out anyway and we had a wonderful chat. I’m happy to have forged new relationships and will continue to support Buffer in whatever way I can.
Long gone are the days of getting noticed from a well-written cover letter and beautifully-formatted curriculum vitae. The market today is full of talented people who know how to harness the powers of a strong online presence. Competition is fierce, and people are more creative than ever in thinking outside the box when it comes to getting noticed. Case in point: see Nina.
This post is my attempt to stand out upon falling in love with Buffer.
Before I proceed, a disclaimer seems apt here: I do not have any associations with Buffer outside of a strong desire to join their team. The data I reference and write about below have culminated from what I could find on public blogs and social media pages. These notes are simply my best guesses at what they might need and what I might do.
So, here we go — the 11 things I’d do if Buffer hired me as Culture Scout:
1Squeal. Too loud, for too long. (Out of joy, of course). Hug my boyfriend too tight, for too long, and thank him profusely for listening to me talk non-stop about how much I want to work for this company, and for brainstorming with and supporting me. Then proceed to do a little dance where I think I look like this:
…when I really look like this:
Now that that’s been shaken off and squared away, I can sit back and dive into the fun stuff. Moving on:
2Set up chats and follow-ups with those who have the most experience in each department (i.e Sunil from Product & Engineering, Carolyn & Asa from the Happiness team, etc.) to better understand the open roles and what to look for in an ideal candidate — the hard skills, the soft skills — in addition to being an excellent communicator and champion of positivity.
3Work with the team to understand and help set up recruiting goals and KPIs, which may look different from department to department. Some of the things that I’d dig into, define and discuss are:
- What are our hiring goals by department?
- What is a healthy # of qualified candidates (as in, they pass our initial screening) for each role?
- Can we reduce our time to hire? (We can set a goal like bringing the average down by 6 days in the next 6 months.)
- What is the offer acceptance rate we want to aim for?
- Create a survey to measure overall candidate experience and have consistent positive feedback.
4Ensure healthy growth in new applicants and maintain pipeline so that we always have qualified candidates lined up for a role. Track what causes spikes, and capitalize on them while keeping an eye on the qualified candidates to total application ratio. Based on the stats below from Deborah’s lovely November Hiring Report, we can see that in November:
- we had 745 more total conversations, 115 fewer new conversations, and 27 more conversations per day than in October
- we had 2 spikes in November, the latter of which is attributed to a possible blog post and the launch of the salary calculator
The goal is to maintain a steady ratio of the number of total conversations being had and the number of roles open. Having an extra person in this department should also up the average number of candidate conversations per day, as well as allow us to catch up on more conversations from previous months.
5Reduce the time lapse between a candidate sending in their application and getting a non-automated reply from us. If the average number of days is currently five, my goal is to bring that average down to three.
I think Deborah says it beautifully in her hiring report:
The group of people who check out the jobs page and step forward are very special to us. We’re conscious that it is a very vulnerable experience and we’re really committed to making it an enjoyable one, whatever the outcome is.
One aspect of reducing the time it takes to get back to a candidate is simply having an additional body on board to support in these conversations. The other aspect would be to track how many qualified candidates we’re getting on average for each role. If it’s a healthy number, then we continue to streamline the application screening process. If the number is low, then we may want to revisit how we’re presenting, posting and initiating conversations about open positions on their respective Journey pages.
6Structure, write and publish the hiring report monthly. After reading through all of the hiring reports from 2015, there was a clear trend for certain sections — a data-driven overview, “New Teammates,” “Outlook & Thoughts,” and “Over To You.” I don’t know if this is already set up, but I think we’d benefit greatly from having a template, which would not only make the write-up more efficient but also allow our readers to easily find the information they’re most interested in. Here’s what I have in mind:
- Intro/Short Blurb to say hello and introduce the contributor
- Last Month’s Wins to focus on new features launched such as the salary calculator, updates to hiring and culture
- Month in Review to share metrics of applications, conversations, open roles, current Bootcampers, NPS score, etc.
- Outlook & Thoughts to focus on last month’s challenges, learnings & opportunities
- Way Forward to focus on what we’re working on this month
- Hello to Our Newest Buffernauts! to introduce new team members
- Over to You to give space to our readers
We could even have a quarterly and annual wrap-up that’s a bit more high-level to celebrate the really big wins!
7Get a Journey section up and running! I know our Happiness section is coming soon, so naturally a destination for all things related to culture, hiring and HR should follow! I loved reading about Juliet’s journey, and the personal tidbits from Kevan’s share were great too. Based on some of the comments from our community, I think it’d be really cool to feature some of our Bootcampers as they go through their 45-day journey — perhaps a behind-the-scenes post? We can call it “From Hello to Hired.”
8Trial a handful of recruiting/HR software systems to see if one of them might fit our needs and culture. Or, if we choose to continue with HelpScout and Trello, work to ensure that the process is as time-and-labor saving as possible. With how quickly we appear to be growing, it may make sense to shift gears and use a professional recruiting/HR platform. I read in the July 2015 Report that one challenge we’re facing is a more organized way to track applications and I think one of the companies listed below could help. (Though we may want to run some numbers first and see whether the time/labor we save justifies the cost!)
It seems that a few reasons we like HelpScout (aside from the fact that it’s a great service) is because it’s what we also use for our customer conversations, making it easy to use, track and monitor everything in one place. It integrates well with many other apps, provides conversation histories and detailed user profiles, and allows us to see when someone first joined Buffer, which can be helpful in identifying a great match. But as we continue to shift towards diversity and inclusivity, we should make sure to create opportunities for those who haven’t used Buffer extensively.
For example, we can propose 2–3 fun tasks or challenges (to better assess for passion and learning potential) on our Journey page for positions that require a deeper knowledge of our product (i.e Engineering & Product, Happiness, etc.).
Lastly, if we do decide that better organization and tracking of applications is a priority, below are my top picks. I’ve selected these based on ease of use and communication, features and integrations, customizability, workflow and their company culture.
- Greenhouse.io goes beyond ATS with tools to help track ROI and optimizing campaigns. They also have a fantastic blog and, like Buffer, seem to be a very people-and-culture centric company. Case in point: this post about culture fit from Maia, their VP of People and Strategy. The only drawback is that they are the priciest out of the bunch with a starting price tag of $6,600 per year.
- Workable comes in at $4,000 per year for 40 active jobs. It offers the same features as Greenhouse, minus the CRM functionality.
- Jazz.co offers similar features as both of the above but lacks a self-service portal. They wrote an interesting piece about culture being a top factor for millennials when choosing a company.
- Lever has fewer features than its friends above but has all the important ones such as assessment customizability, candidate & interview management, collaboration tools, a self-service portal and social media integration. They featured this great piece originally published in Fast Company on diversity in start-up culture.
- Jobscience is an all-in-one ATS & CRM recruitment platform built on Salesforce.
(I’ve signed up for free trials with each of these companies and am happy to send a full pros-and-cons report upon request.)
9Diversify our candidate pool. This is the area with which I’m least familiar and would spend the most time investigating and learning about. I’m hyper aware of the importance of diversity, especially as we shift towards a global economy — our product needs to be relevant across cultures, which necessitates having amazing talents from all walks of life sharing their knowledge, ideas and visions with us.
After the little bit of research I came across, I’m stunned by the continued prevalence of workplace discrimination and am fascinated by how subtle alterations in language can make a world of difference in inclusivity.
I’m inspired by Pinterest and their recruiting goals for a more diverse company, and would love to strategize with the Buffer team on how we can improve in this area. I love that we have a Diversity Dashboard to shine a light on how we’re doing, and am excited to learn from and have regular dialogues with these groups — here’s where I would start:
- National Urban League
- National Council of La Raza
- Diversity Working
- Girls Who Code
- XX + UX
- Hackbright Academy
- Code 2040
- Anita Borg Institute
- Diversity Meet-Up Groups (offline group in San Francisco)
Some of these organizations also have conferences and job fairs that I’d be interested in checking out.
10Set up, claim and monitor our Glassdoor page — the ultimate tool for candidate satisfaction and transparency!
11Attend the awesome Greenhouse Open, a 3-day gathering focused on talent acquisition, people ops and HR, to meet and learn from the industry’s movers and shakers. They have a peer-learning session on Diversity & Inclusion that I’m eager to check out. The goal of going to this event is three-fold: 1) to network, 2) to meet the Greenhouse team to learn about their culture and software, and 3) to have my mind blown by brilliance, so I can come back and share/brainstorm ideas with the team on how to improve our current hiring processes and strategies.
There are many such gatherings and conferences in San Francisco (and all over the world). Some hosted by the ATS companies I listed above. I would attend only those that I think are the highest impact and for which we would benefit the most from.
That’s a wrap! For now, at least. If someone from the Buffer team is reading this, thank you so much for taking the time and for the brilliant work you are putting into the web-o-sphere. Even if I don’t get an interview or the job, I’m so grateful to have stumbled upon Buffer and the individuals behind it. You are an inspiration.
Final disclaimer: there are likely a ton of things here that I missed, got wrong or am too late for (i.e processes that have already been or are being set up by Deborah and team). My intention is only to show my desire to contribute to a company I admire.
Final Note: I welcome any thoughts, ideas, and suggestions for improvement! You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, as well as LinkedIn. Thank you for reading to the end.
