We talked a bit about what we learned making our first remote hire, but one thing we didn’t talk much about was how we developed our recruiting process. We had a couple of small stumbles along the way, but considering our lack of experience with the recruiting process.
Without further ado: here’s how we built our process.
First things first: we needed to know who we were looking for. We started off by developing Job Missions, which we learned about from this book. The idea behind them is to write out all the tasks that you need from someone and what you hope they would do for the business. From there, it’s much easier to work from that document and develop Job Descriptions. Thankfully, our founder Tyler had spent a fair amount of time developing both job missions and job descriptions for roles we would need filled down the line. This is an absolutely crucial first step, and it’s better to have JDs developed BEFORE you need them if at all possible. Writing up multiple job descriptions and job missions helped him understand what we were truly looking for in our next hire; he wrote up a JD for a junior & senior account manager and working through the process brought into focus the need for a more senior presence on the team. Having those ready to go was just one less hurdle we had to overcome when it was time to start our search in earnest.
After we made sure the JD was ready, we had a meeting about what we were looking for in more general terms. The JD is a great formal document, but most are so long and detailed that it would be easy for two people working with the same JD to take away two different skills as being the most important for the job. This conversation was mostly to clear up which parts were “nice to haves” verses parts that were absolutely essential to the job.
Next, we formulated a plan on where to look for candidates. Here’s how each of the mediums we used played out:
Our Own Networks:
We reached out to people we knew in the industry to see if anyone we knew (or they knew) were interested in the position. The person we hired actually was a personal contact of mine, so this worked out beautifully.
Hireclub:
Hireclub was a great resource for us when performing our search. Both Tyler and I have been long time members of the community, so we put up a job description on their website and shared it on the community’s Facebook Page. 6 good candidates reached out to us over the course of 7 days.
Indeed:
We put the listing up on Indeed and it was like opening up a fire hydrant. We got 100 applicants in 24 hours and I had to take the listing down. Unfortunately the quality from Indeed overall was moderate. Out of the 100 maybe 10 were good enough for a phone screen.
Angel List:
Without paying to boost the post, no one applied to our job posting via Angel List. I actually forgot that we had it listed there and did not receive any candidates over the course of several months. I’ve heard Angel List is great for some people (even some in our industry), but it didn’t work for us.
The main reason we chose those platforms was that they’re the most remote work friendly! Linkedin still doesn’t really support remote job postings (if you look for remote work you get a lot of results for a town in Remote, Oregon). Craigslist is too localized too. There were a few other remote oriented job boards, but their traffic was either low or their costs were too high. Focusing on the 3 platforms we did gave us the kind of control we wanted over the process without getting too overwhelming.