Case study:
10X increase in hiring for a scaling startup
Project Overview: How we helped a Fintech Firm increase hiring by over 10X while reducing the time their engineers spent on each hire by 1,000% and only increasing their recruiting resources by only 40%!
Our client was struggling to meet its hiring goals, particularly in engineering. There was a general sense that the recruiting team was not generating a high enough volume of high-quality leads. When we started the project, engineering leadership blamed recruiting, and recruiting blamed engineering leadership for failing to meet hiring targets.
We helped by:
Assessing the company’s biggest capability gaps
Analyzing the recruiting funnel for critical roles
Understanding the drivers for poor funnel metrics
“Now I can finally see where the problems are in our engineering hiring funnel and have a plan to address them”
Every start-up’s struggle
Our client had built a successful vertical SaaS product that their customers loved. Customer feedback told them they had an opportunity to broaden their offering into adjacent areas and business processes. They are well-funded and profitable and were trying to add engineering teams to build adjacent products to solve their customers' needs.
Taking on new products and the heavy workload associated with recruiting were taxing the engineering team, which was conducting large numbers of technical screens and virtual on-site interviews.
The recruiting team was beyond frustrated and experiencing turnover. The client had worked their way through one head of talent who lasted under nine months, as he struggled to get support from leadership for the changes he wanted to make.
What other solutions had they considered before partnering with IC2?
Our client used Headhunters to help with candidate generation, but the Headhunters complained that the client's bar was “too high” and that placing candidates with other clients was much easier. The firms that stuck with the client told us that they used the client to start a conversation with a candidate but knew they would probably end up placing the candidate at another company.
Our methodology
We conducted our diagnostic assessment where we reviewed:
the company’s publicly available data – brand and reputation analysis, competitor analysis,
the internal “raw” data they provided us from their ATS,
their policies and procedures, and
we conducted stakeholder conversations with key org leaders, hiring managers, and members of the recruiting team
Here is a snapshot of how they scored against our diagnostic framework.
They had numerous gaps in their capabilities but scored particularly badly in 2 aspects of the diagnostic’s primary dimensions:
TA reporting. Their reporting was basic, partly because of the reporting functionality of their ATS systems and also because they had no reporting capabilities with the people team. They tracked basic measures like the number of hires but nothing that could help them understand where things were breaking down.
Inbound, CRM, and outbound candidate management. They were not generating many inbound candidates, employee referrals, or even candidates from agencies and were pursuing a “post it and pray” strategy for their jobs. Their outbound activities were uncoordinated and primarily consisted of one-off LinkedIn messages.
Our most impactful discovery
When IC2 got “under the hood,” we analyzed their recruiting data for their most critical roles.
Here was their funnel for their SWE2 role, a staple of their engineering hiring.
Recruiters conducted a screen against a standard profile, where they would validate tech skills, context such as project scale and their role, and cover compensation ranges.
The engineering team then reviewed resumes and screen notes before a tech screen was scheduled. The tech screen was a screen-share coding and basic architecture assessment. The on-site interview was virtual and consisted of six parts: three Engineering case studies, one PM interview, one Eng manager interview, and a final interview with the VP of engineering.
The team knew their offer acceptance was low but had no idea it had dropped this low. However, the real eye open was the onsite pass rate – only one in ten candidates who made the onsite received an offer.
Their funnel meant it took 129 tech screens—about a month of an engineer's time, just in tech screens—to make one hire! In addition, one hire required 40 "on-site" interviews, consuming 1.5 months of an FTE in engineering time!
In fact, they would have burned the equivalent of 12.5 engineering FTEs to make only the five hires a month that they were targeting for SWE2s. That's if they could have generated the candidates required for 645 tech screens a month!
This became their burning platform and opened the door to a significant fundamental set of programs for change.
“The reporting IC2 implemented & the transparent way they approached problem-solving reminded us recruiting is a team sport.”
The solution
We launched workstreams where we partnered with the client’s people team in the following areas:
Reporting, ultimately implementing a real-time reporting platform
Data integrity/process compliance
Outbound recruiting campaigns, which became 80%+ of their hires
Offer construct: Earlier role specifics and compensation/offer overhaul
Interviewer training & integrated selling throughout the hiring process
Remote working options
The final impact: +1,000% increase in Eng hiring
So, while increasing recruiting resources by only 40%, we improved Eng hiring by 1,300% and started meeting their hiring goals.
Here is their before and after funnel. We made no fundamental changes to any assessments; they still maintained their hiring bar. As a hiring outcome quality control measure, we tracked their new hire attrition rate before and after the transformation and saw no increase in this rate.
Not only did their hiring funnel yields improve, but so did the flow of prospects into the top of their funnel, mainly from their improved outbound recruiting campaigns.
“The TA leadership and partnership that IC2 brought to the table helped transform our hiring results – their diagnostic framework gave us a path to success rather than the talk/bill cycle other consultants were offering”