The concept of scaling one’s business is relative. For enterprises, it likely equates to adding a few dozen (or more) new employees per month. For SMBs, it may mean hiring just one or two new people monthly.
Regardless of the size of one’s organization or scope of their respective hiring goals, one thing is clear: Their talent acquisition teams need recruitment technology that helps them grow their workforces as desired.
Regulation Crowdfunding company Wefunder understands this.
That’s why Wefunder VP Operations Suzanna Rush turned to the recruitment technology marketplace: to identify a single, easy-to-use solution with robust TA and recruiting capabilities her team could use to find the right talent, nurture them efficiently, and hire the top candidates.
The result of her research? Invest in Lever to address Wefunder’s TA needs — notably, streamlining the team’s volume-hiring efforts and becoming a more data-driven and analytical recruiting organization.
Wefunder’s goal: Hire top engineering talent with advanced recruitment technology — and ditch dated TA tools
Prior to the pandemic, Wefunder was a modest crew of 18. Rapid customer growth and rising interest in its services (allowing the general public to invest in early-stage startups of interest), though, meant a greater headcount — particularly on the engineering team — was critical to its success in 2021 and beyond.
One barrier that prevented the company’s TA org from accelerating its hiring process, per Suzanna, was the lack of a true applicant tracking system that could also help it with its talent management strategy (i.e., better organizing and leverage candidate data) and recruitment marketing (i.e., promoting the brand to prospects).
Wefunder relied on a legacy applicant tracker to store job applications and info on candidates and employees. However, it quickly recognized the inefficient system wasn’t a viable long-term solution for its talent team.
Add in the fact Suzanna wanted her team to source thousands of engineer candidates and pare down the list of candidates to the ‘best’ fits, it became evident the applicant tracker was no match for our complete TA suite.
“When we started down that path and were thinking about the logistics of continuing to use this [applicant tracker] to process thousands of applications, we were just like, ‘This isn’t gonna work,'” Suzanna said.
That’s where Lever came into play.
After evaluating the leading recruitment technology providers, Wefunder ultimately decided to invest in our ATS and CRM to empower its talent staff to better source across the job market and streamline its TA processes.
This talent acquisition tech switch paid both immediate and long-term dividends for the business:
- In the short term, Wefunder’s TA org was able to collaborate on sourcing qualified engineer candidates while preventing any sourcing ‘overlap’ (i.e., multiple team members reaching out to the same individuals). This has led to improved productivity across the board.
- In the long haul, no more candidates were slipping through the cracks. Suzanna noted how tracking candidates via its applicant tracker and knowing who to follow up with and when became impossible. Too many prospects were being forgotten about or nurtured in an untimely manner.
The biggest benefit as it pertained to Wefunder’s distinct hiring objectives, though, was it developed an entirely new, more streamlined process for connecting and communicating with candidates.
And the fruits of the TA team’s labor came in the form of doubling its engineering workforce in six months — growth that has helped Wefunder continue on its upward trajectory and enhance its crowdfunding offerings.
Intuitive UI, analytics capabilities, more effective volume hiring: Wefunder’s many reasons for investing in Lever
This hiring initiative was certainly a big Lever use case for Suzanna and her talent acquisition staff. That said, it’s far from the only one she and her team of recruiters want to tackle this year and in the near future.
For instance, Suzanna said she wanted more data associated with her org’s sourcing, nurturing, interviewing, and hiring efforts. Lever’s built-in analytics supplied these new insights Wefunder previously didn’t have.
The engineering hiring ramp was the first area of which Suzanna was able to conduct a deep-dive on to understand what worked and what didn’t as it pertained to her team’s collective recruiting efforts.
What’s more, Suzanna was happy to be able to share recruiting data related to the initiative with not just her TA specialists, but also other stakeholders across Wefunder, including the leadership team.
“I think it was really helpful to see the analytics that Lever provides in terms of how many people pass on to different phases of the pipeline,” Suzanna said. “It’s helpful to share … because this was a big priority for the company and people were really interested in knowing how people were converting through this pipeline and what that looks like.”
In addition to tapping into talent data to refine its recruiting processes, Suzanna explained another advantageous use case for her team is to better ‘turn away’ unideal candidates in a more streamlined fashion.
(That is to say, one that doesn’t take up considerable person hours of her talent acquisition team members.)
“[Lever] allowed us to move away a higher volume of applicants at a much lower touchpoint,” Suzanna said.
For example, applicants Wefunder receives for its open engineering roles who aren’t deemed good fits are easily and quickly archived by each talent specialist, thanks to the real-time, shared view of all candidate data in our TA suite — something many legacy TA and HR technology solutions don’t offer today.
When Suzanna and her talent org were funneling through several hundred candidates in their pipeline each week, she said “it was really easy to keep track of everybody and know where they sat and to collect feedback.”
“[Lever has] just been a volume game-changer for us,” Suzanna added, adding the intuitive user interface means she and her team can find the right information and data they need in a matter of seconds.
Learn more about how Wefunder uses Lever’s recruitment technology to get more talent in its pipeline, meet lofty hiring goals, and provide a first-rate candidate experience.