We’re hiring – and it’s easy!
Got your attention? I thought so, but don’t worry, we don’t claim success comes without hard work, and we have a story to back up the headline. We can all agree that hiring is difficult; hiring great people is extremely difficult. This time around, we did things differently.
Disclosure: We’re not a recruitment agency, but rather a fast-growing design and development company. We’re not representing the tools and companies mentioned in this article either. We’re just sharing our experiences, as hiring is critical for success, yet often significantly challenging.
Let’s begin with our current needs. Avalon CX designs, experiences, and develops software. In addition to employing product designers and developers, our field also requires user researchers, product, and portfolio managers. Our recent growth has focused on highly skilled backend developers. Our customer base is mostly North American, but many companies we deal with have a presence in Europe and beyond.
In mid-2020, we made a strategic decision to build a competence center in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Resources in Vancouver meet our and our clients’ high-quality criteria. Vancouver as a location has several advantages:
- People who live there are familiar with North American culture.
- It’s in the same time zone as several major US tech hubs like Seattle and Silicon Valley.
- The majority of the population are native English speakers.
- When the Covid restrictions lift, travel between the US and Canada will be easy again.
- We have an existing network of talented individuals.
“We wanted to leverage existing tools and processes to create a pleasant experience for our potential future colleagues and us.”
When we began recruiting, we wanted to stay true to our data-driven values and leverage practical tools and processes to create a pleasant experience for our potential future colleagues and us.
Behind the scenes
Through trial and error, we discovered what worked for us. At first, we managed our job postings and candidates directly through Indeed. Their tool was adequate and integrated with our website, but the styling’s rigidity did not satisfy our needs. Furthermore, integrating applicants from other sources into Indeed’s system proved to be more manual labor than we wanted to take on, so our search continued. We eventually found a fantastic HR solution called Bamboo HR. It integrated our entire recruitment process into a seamless onboarding and employee experience. Again, 100% transparency, we have no affiliation to Bamboo HR, and we are not receiving any kickbacks for this review. We’re simply sharing our experience so that you avoid making the same mistakes we made and giving credit where credit is due.
Bamboo HR allows us to manage job postings and integrates them into Indeed, Glassdoor, and our website. We can also manually add candidates into the system if we choose to. The entire interview process, including email correspondence, invitations, reminders, internal evaluations, and ratings, is built into the tool. And when a candidate becomes an employee, the HR-related information is already in the system. This, alone, removes a significant portion of a hiring manager’s HR onboarding tasks. Furthermore, Bamboo HR allows the admin to set access- rights that maintain security and privacy—a non-negotiable for our clients and us.
Best of all, the system is extremely intuitive to use. We began this process with little-to-no experience, yet we managed to set up our entire recruitment and HR process in a matter of days without training or consultation.
So, let’s review where we are at in our process:
We have customer projects with increasing resource needs. We also have the tooling and processes to create a compelling and enjoyable recruiting and employee experience.
Finding Talent is where we experienced our most positive surprise.
We published a few different but related software developer job postings, and within the first week, we received 99 applicants. We were impressed with the response and positively surprised by the quality of applicants; 60% had a matching skill set to our open position. Granted, many of them came through our network or recommendations but regardless, that’s a high early success rate. Speaking with a dozen candidates convinced us that we had attracted highly talented individuals.
To verify this, we set up a skill evaluation. Pre-Covid, we would have conducted in-person interviews at our office where our technical team members would evaluate an applicant’s skills. Respecting Covid protocol, we turned to online solutions. We considered several solutions that would allow us to assess coding, debugging, DevOps, Java, C#, AWS, and other skills. The tool we chose is called TestDome, which allowed us to create a custom test per profile and get comparable results between candidates. Our candidates also provided valuable feedback and ideas that allowed us to fine-tune the skill evaluation going forward.
Personal touch
“Speak with the candidates the same way you talk with your friends, customers, and team members. Be genuine and don’t sell the role.”
The overwhelming response to our job posting really surprised us. The fact that so many talented individuals want to join our team humbled us and filled us with pride. We realized that having great tooling and processes helps, but they can not replace the personal connection required to build a successful team. Speaking with talented, passionate professionals has been a pleasant experience for us and, hopefully, also for the candidates. What makes the experience enjoyable? I speak with the candidates the same way I talk with my friends, customers, and team members. I’m genuine and don’t sell the role. If there’s a match, that’s great. Equally importantly, I want to know if there’s no match. The overwhelming number of candidates has slowed the process down. We can’t take shortcuts, as we want to provide a good experience – after all, we’re in the customer experience business. Again, Bamboo HR has made it easy to keep track of things and keep people informed.
“We believe that interviews happen both ways; The candidate is under evaluation, and so is the employer.”
We hear that recruiting engineers keeps getting harder, but not in this case. What did we do better this time? A few possible reasons:
- We’ve been very open about our company culture throughout the process: how we do things and what personalities fit in the team. I believe our actions during the interviews back up our story. We believe that interviews happen both ways; The candidate is under evaluation, and so is the employer.
- Canada has benefited from a liberal immigration policy, while the US has recently become less effective in attracting diverse talent.
- Opening up a Vancouver role attracted many people willing to relocate from other parts of Canada, such as Toronto.
- While we can’t name our clients, or our candidates, we can assure you that we have exciting opportunities.
In summary, top talent has the luxury of choosing who they work for. Treating candidates with respect and being genuine demonstrates your ability to provide an environment where they flourish and feel fulfilled. As the saying goes: People don’t quit a job; they quit a boss. We want to provide an environment where people stay, and things are looking great so far!
We’re always happy to share our knowledge, so if you want to discuss this or other related topics, please reach out to us.
