Context
Jennifer Walsh works as the head of talent acquisition at a fast-growing fintech startup. In 18 months, her company grew from 80 to 250 employees, which makes intensive hiring for engineering, product, sales, and operations teams a never-ending necessity. Her lean recruiting team consisted of three coordinators who handled 15-20 open positions each. Like many in-house recruiters at high-growth startups, Jennifer could not escape operational chaos. She scrounged information about her candidates and their experience across five different tools. LinkedIn Recruiter for running searches.
A separate email finder tool for their contact details. Spreadsheets for tracking candidates across interviews and stages. Gmail for reaching out to them. A basic ATS that required manual data entry of everything to stay compliant and structured. Her team prioritized screening candidates, but the more time they spent administering with no visible upward motion, the less staffing they actually achieved.
Passive candidates who do not mention “Open to new opportunities” on LinkedIn cannot be found. As a result, everyone messaged the same percentage of active candidates whose response rates steadily declined over the years. Exciting deals about boldly stepping into the competitive market position and a lucrative stock option tasted like ashes to many frenzied company owners.
In the third quarter, her CEO told her to fill 40 critical positions across all departments. At the same time, we source candidates while maintaining quality and candidate experience. Jennifer knew her fragmented, manual process would not withstand scaling. She required an end-to-end platform that would let her run a fundable people engine. From sourcing through contact discovery to candidate management in a structured context, instead of the endless chaos of spreadsheets and hoping nothing falls through.
Introduction
Jennifer first found a mention of SignalHire’s ultimate sourcing and recruiting platform while researching all-in-one recruiting solutions through a cloud sourcing repository. After running a 7-day free trial, Jennifer realized that her newly-discovered platform could replace all five separate tools she and her team relied upon. After starting a free trial, she immediately saw how it could eliminate her operational chaos.
Her goals were clear.
- Convert five different solutions into one platform who does it all.
- Source candidates beyond LinkedIn ’s limited pool of visibility.
- Automate contacts’ discovery and verification instead of spending all these advertisement efforts desperately to find warm recruiting leads.
- Take candidates from sourcing through hiring in one organized context.
- Increase the amount of hiring her three coordinators managed by a seven-digit factor.
After comparing her prospective benefits with all possible disposition alternatives SignalHire emerged as the most strategic option. For the following three separate reasons.
- It provided an all-in-one platform that reduced hiring stack from five tools to one.
- It extended manual sourcing efforts too unfathomable number of 850M+ profiles from SignalHire’s recruiting database.
- Its built-in ATS backdrop was not a separate tool she has to figure out how to smoosh into her recruitment process.
Solution
SignalHire helped Jennifer get the talent. It was an all-in-one talent sourcing platform, which made her team more effective and the candidate’s experience better. The most significant features included:
- Database. Over 850M profiles. Unlike on LinkedIn, her team could find passive candidates all over the open web. They could reach engineers who weren’t there. There were new hidden talent pools to explore. They weren’t squeezed for time choosing the one from a limited pool.
- Browser Extension. Source from anywhere on the web. Jennifer found her candidates on GitHub, LinkedIn, people’s websites, or professional networks. Then, she clicked on the extension, and their profile data jumped right to her database. Every candidate profile had emails and phones, all verified. No more tabs.
- ATS. Her old ATS worked up to a certain point. Her team clicked, dragged, and built a visual pipeline. The comprehensive profiles included all her messages, contact details, and the interview notes. She assigned an owner and deadlines to the process. Everything was in one place without manual filling in the spreadsheet..
- Email Sequences. There were canned messages and job-sharing features so her team could easily follow up in their email. They created multi-touch campaigns per job or candidate type. They paused when someone replied and receivedA/B test performance tables. Jennifer and her team could focus on talking, not admin.
- Lead Tracker. She saw the visits to their career page per candidate. She knew when it was warm or they were looking closer, so she started engaging with them.
One-click CRM integration meant data flowed seamlessly. When candidates converted to hires, Jennifer exported their information to HR systems for onboarding. No manual data re-entry. No information loss between recruiting and onboarding.
Process
Jennifer began by consolidating her five fragmented tools into SignalHire’s integrated platform. She migrated her active candidate pipeline first, and then took the time to train her team on the consolidated workflow.
For her most urgent search, 5 senior backend engineers, she demonstrated the new platform’s power. Using the Database, she searched for Senior Software Engineers with Python, Django, and AWS experience. She filtered for 5+ years at venture-backed startups, located in or open to remote work. She was returned 3,429 candidates; significantly more than LinkedIn’s handful limit. Jennifer trimmed the filters down to prioritize candidates from companies with reputations for strong engineering cultures.
This brought her shortlist to 847 highly qualified prospects. She saved the top 200 candidates to a Job Project she titled “Senior Backend Engineers – Q3.” SignalHire automatically enriched all profiles with verified contact data. Email addresses were found for 92% of candidates, phone numbers for 84%.
Each profile included comprehensive details such as technical skills, previous roles, education, and social profiles. Jennifer organized the Job Project with custom hiring stages: Sourced, Contacted, Responded, Phone Screen, Technical Interview, Final Interview, Offer, and Hired. As candidates progressed, she simply dragged profiles across stages. The visual pipeline always showed exactly where she was at with each candidate. She used the Browser Extension while researching companies with impressive engineering teams.
When she found interesting profiles on GitHub, Quora posts, and company engineering blogs, one click captured the candidate with verified contact information and added them to her Job Project. This multi-channel sourcing helped Jennifer uncover hidden talent her competitors were missing. The Email Sequences Jennifer’s team launched Email Sequences for different candidate segments.
Outcomes
The results were astounding for Jennifer. In the course of just 3 months, using SignalHire’s platform, her team pipped 2,847 candidates for all the open-position pools. They have created 634 auto-interacting sequences with the candidates which are an engagement rate of 22% by contrast with 12% that they had had before. Her team has arranged 287 initial screens for phone calls with the suitable candidates. Two hundred eleven of them have moved toe-to-toe hiring managers.
Jennifer has managed to make 94 suitable offers in the examined time period while before that, with the other instruments, the number was just 67. With the acceptance rate being 62%, 63 of them were successfully hired.
Q3 90 days goal was outperformed by Jennifer and her team by 58%. Jennifer filled all of the planned 40 positions in record time. Sixty-three positions, concerning the key roles, were filled with high quality and candidate experience by means of three recruiters only when they had had to use six previously.
The time-to-fill number turned out to be decreased by 40%. The average number at this point decreased up to 28 from 47 days. The streamlined nature of an all-on-one instrument eliminated the need to hop from one software to another, resulting in streamlined sourcing-hiring indicators.
Jennifer also had the experience of her candidates improved vastly. They had nothing but excellent organizatio0n and on-time communication remarks. The offer acceptance percentage spiked up to 74 compared to 62%. The increased volumes did not scale down the recruiter’s involvement quality due to the systematic nature of the working routine.
The cost was significantly reduced by Jennifer. Five directing tools she cut-off, funding annually $42,000 on software expanded in the future. With the increased rate of functionality of a single all-in-one tool. Cost-savings windfall started to be introduced to businessside from the first month alone.
The happiness of her team escalated. No more complaints about all the administrative, paperwork, and countless time-waster tools. Work conversations have increased in the team by 70% compared to the previous 40%. They spent more time on the things they used to be passionate about – doing actual recruiting.
The sourcing outside the LinkedIn established the results far beyond the expectations. Forty-two percent of Jannifer’s recruits as a recruiter came outside LinkedIn candidates. Jenniffer also praised the comprehensive database of SignalEight that had access to the professional talent pools competition never placed fingers on. With the increase in size, even sixty-four positions were filled in the following half-year with the same systematic tool. The business reached the 400 employees’ mark without lowering the hiring quality and speed.
The Verdict
Jennifer’s big realization was, “integrated tools amplify a small team’s capabilities by an order of magnitude.” A small, overwhelmed administrative team was now a tightly run recruiting machine thanks to SignalHire’s talent sourcing platform. But her solution was no more about technology than it was earlier on.
She invested the time in training her team on the systematic workflows that we began with. She organized every search that they did as a proper Job Project, with organized stages. They crafted environments for each candidate persona with tactful Email Sequences. The platform had offered integrated tools, but Jennifer’s systematic approach is what turned tools into results.
For other recruiters at high-growth companies that were now facing the same scaling challenges that she had encountered, Jennifer recommends three approaches. Firstly, she advises consolidating tools into one integrated platform, which enabled them to eliminate the wasteful manual labor and lost context that had been hindering them.
Moreover, she suggests looking at a much higher volume of comprehensive databases for sourcing and not relying on LinkedIn’s extremely limited visibility which results in other recruiters not seeing the same candidates and not competing for them. Lastly, she recommends every search be systematized as a Job Project with stages, so volume doesn’t cause chaos, which is the worst-case situation that everybody likely has experienced even without huge databases.
SignalHire’s talent sourcing platform gave Jennifer’s small team capabilities on a level of an enterprise. Her tool chaos is no more, no manual data entry, hiring velocity higher than ever.
Start your free trial today and transform your recruiting operation into a systematic, scalable hiring machine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is SignalHire in recruiting?
A: It is an automated talent sourcing software through social media and the web, which exercises verified contacts and builds profiles for faster hiring. It includes database searching, browser extension, ATS functionality, and email sequences as its four best aspects.
Q: Does it connect to my applicant tracking system?
A: Yes, you can do it using the API, integrations, or, alternatively, you can export CSV. Profiles plus their activity are streaming into your ATS for hiring purposes. ATS functionality is also included by SignalHire so you can keep everything in one system.
Q: Can I use it for social media recruiting?
A: Sure, you can use it to search source from LinkedIn and other networks, run email search, and then message inside context. The browser extension works with LinkedIn, GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, and company websites to follow your candidates wherever you can find them.
Q: What data do I get on a candidate?
A: Verified emails and phones, role and company history, links to socials, notes plus tags for candidate management are included. Emails can be retrieved for up to 90% of people and phone accuracy ratio is up to 80%, with realtime verification at the level of 95%+.
