As a tech organisation, we always strive to find suitable talent for available positions, and then move them quickly through the application funnel, from sourcing to hiring. The goal is to onboard a potential candidate as fast as possible.
In this endeavor, we decided to automate our recruitment processes so that the overall time to screen, interview and to release an offer is relatively faster.
Background
Interested candidates apply on our website through careers page. We have a referral program for our associates so it also resulted in wider interest. We also receive direct applications through email on careers@kiprosh.com and through consultancy firms. So typically we receive ~90 profiles daily, that we have to manually review and shortlist for our criteria. Our HR team had to go through these many profiles to consolidate list of candidates. This was a time intensive process and required huge collaboration.
Because of the overwhelming number of profiles received daily, our average response time to candidates was high. The process was becoming very cumbersome as we were maintaining an internal database to track candidates' progress through entire interview process. It was challenging to manage the evergrowing data for search and filtering purpose.
New Process
We embarked on a two-day journey of planning, coding, automating and refining our process. This finally resulted in a huge efficiency improvement in our hiring process. Here is what all we did to improve and automate our hiring process:
We love Airtable and use it in our organization extensively for managing various company-specific data like our monthly expenses, associate database, others etc. Hence, we decided to expand Airtable usage to manage in our recruitment process too.
Step 1 was to move our openings to Airtable & link them to our careers page via their airtable-ruby gem. This way editing contents of our openings wouldn't require changes in codebase & anyone from our HR team can make the edits on the fly.
Step 2 We created an Airtable form to apply online & linked it on the career page.
Step 3 Next, we created a Trello board having dedicated card for each applicant. Here is a screenshot of our Trello process.
Step 4 We then connected Airtable and Trello through Zapier (refer flow diagram below) to automatically create Trello cards for each job application that comes through our Careers page on Kiprosh website. This automation step between Airtable and Trello via Zapier saves a ton of our time along with completely eliminating emails.
Step 5 We then needed more hands to be able to screen candidates more effectively. Hence we formed a recruitment panel consisting of seniors, lead engineers, HRs and founders. This recruitment panel began daily reviewinig applicants on Trello board & provided early valuable feedback to move forward. We were able to schedule interview rounds much faster & efficiently.
Future Improvements
We've plans to automate this further, especially for applications sent to us via email or through our consultancy firms, referrals etc. Moreover, we want to extend it to filtering engine so that only those cards are created in Recruitment Trello board that matches our criteria.
Interesting Facts
- We also received few interesting profiles from USA (Utah & Minneapolis), Argentina, Ukraine and other places.
- Our recruitment panel contributes a few minutes to a couple of hours at max every week to review profiles and/or conduct interview rounds. Shout out for our Interview Panel & Hiring Team - we cannot achieve our hiring goals without their contribution and team work.
- While working with airtable-ruby gem, we found documentation missing for a method so we sent them a PR. Airtable team immediately accepted our suggestion