How to manage recruiting for hyper-growth: A case study on Omnify

About Omnify

Omnify is a Global SaaS platform for small services businesses. Thousands of professionals across the world use Omnify to sell and schedule their services online. Launched in 2016, Omnify is growing at a Trailblazing speed.

Omnify has grown quickly in the last two years, going from two members founding team to over 15 people. The rapid growth has come with its own set of challenges. The chief of them is – recruiting.

We sit down with Kabandi, Co-founder and COO at Omnify to understand how they are putting together a kick-ass team.

Manan(M): What are your major recruiting challenges?

Kabandi(K): We’ve been growing fast. We are currently doubling our revenue every year. This kind of growth comes with its own set of problems. But recruiting remains our biggest challenge and a top priority. Currently, we are rapidly scaling up our sales and engineering departments.

We faced several challenges. The major ones being

No full-time recruiter on the team

At Omnify, we believe in objective evaluations so that we can minimize bias in our hiring process. For this, we have instituted that for every position, we will send our candidates a take-home test.

Because we don’t have someone who could coordinate these activities, it wasn’t easy. We struggled for a few months trying to streamline our recruiting process. A lack of full-time recruiters put immense pressure on team members with admin tasks. Coordinating and managing recruiting activities was a huge drain on our team.

Sourcing qualified candidates

It is not easy to source qualified developers. We decided we needed to give different channels a try and experimented with them. It turned out that LinkedIn as a channel worked best for us. So we went heavy with that and started posting sponsored job postings on LinkedIn.

Getting the team together to recruit

This was by far the biggest challenge. We were tracking our progress in different spreadsheets and our process was all over the place. It is hard to keep track of candidates and collaborate with your team members on spreadsheets.

M: What made you choose Recruiterflow?

K: As I said we had a few challenges. Before we checked to recruiting software, we zeroed in on the top priorities that we had. Our top priorities were,

Automate the menial tasks of recruiting that used to take up hours of our time
An ATS that enables us to collaborate seamlessly and helps stay everyone on the same page
Most importantly, something that is super easy to use and no one on the team should have any trouble getting onboard.

We looked at several recruiting software out there and decided to go with Recruiterflow. I love the way it is designed and it is super intuitive to use. Our team got onboard in just a few hours and within minutes of signing up, I was able to set up everything! We got our jobs live, the careers page, and set up recipes that have helped me save hours every day.

M: Tell us a little bit about your recruiting process:

K: We have a fairly straightforward recruiting process. We put a lot of emphasis on take-home tests and use them as a baseline to assess technical skills. Our recruiting process is divided into four stages.

Take home test

All our positions have a take-home test. As I said earlier, we believe it’s the best way to assess technical skills and minimize bias.

Phone/Skype interview

The second stage is a short phone or Skype interview. In this interview, we talk about the candidate’s interests, and motivations and try to get a sense if they would be a good fit.

On-site interview

The final stage is an on-site interview where we invite the candidate to our office for a few hours. This stage has two interviews. One technical interview and one culture interview.

We maintain scorecards for each interview. Our interviewers take detailed notes about the candidate’s responses and their impressions of the candidate. At the end of the recruiting process of a candidate, all the interviewers give their opinion individually. If everyone agrees that the candidate is a great fit, we move quickly and extend an offer!

M: What’s one feature in Recruiterflow you can’t live without?

K: I love the new Recipes feature! It’s heaven-sent! We post and promote our job openings on various job boards and especially on LinkedIn. I love the fact that I could post our jobs for free on LinkedIn with Recruiterflow. LinkedIn is our biggest source of qualified candidates.

We’ve set up a recipe that sends out a personalized email that prompts candidates for the take-home test. It’s sent within an hour of receiving the application. This promptness has increased the number of people completing the test and severely improved the drop-off rate. Earlier, we missed out on a lot of qualified candidates because we couldn’t reach out quickly enough. Now, that doesn’t happen. Due to the recipes, now we reach out to the candidate really quickly and get far better responses.

M: What are your other most used features in Recruiterflow?

K: So, here are the other couple of features that we use extensively and our team loves.

1-click sourcing extension: The Sourcing extension really helps anyone on the team be a sourcer. It has made it really easy for all members of the team to add a candidate to Recruiterflow. Now, we are running sourcing hours every day. I sit with someone on my team and get them to source candidates for us from their network. We are closing our openings much faster now!

Email and calendar integration: The second feature that team loves is email and calendar integration. It has just saved us so much headache and back-and-forth slack messages.

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M: What impact has Recruiterflow driven for Omnify?

K: After implementing Recruiterflow, we have much better visibility in our recruiting pipeline. More importantly, we’ve been able to make our recruiting a team effort. There are no more silos and everyone knows what needs to be done next!

We have decreased our time to hire from 56 days to 39 days! That’s huge for us. Our candidate drop-off rate has halved. But these numbers actually don’t tell the full story.

The most important changes that we could bring with Recruiterflow are

Freedom from status meetings and spreadsheets
The entire team is onboard and we can now effectively collaborate heavily when recruiting
We can now deliver a fantastic candidate experience that helps us recruit top talent
I’ve personally saved at least 2 hours everyday automating a bunch of our workflow with Recruiterflow