How can tech recruiters ensure sky-high joining ratios?

This secret weapon might help…

Gone are the days when companies put up their job vacancies once a year and wait for a queue of talent to choose from. With businesses increasing their tech and digital budgets and a boom of startups all over the world, tech talent really does have plenty to choose from. While this is great for talent all over to find jobs they’re truly interested in; it becomes a headache for recruiters to continuously interview and have candidates drop out from various stages of the hiring funnel.

Working with thousands of companies and lakhs of candidates has taught us a bit about improving joining ratios and reducing unpleasant surprises. We learned that finding the right fit goes both ways. While companies are looking for skill and culture matches, candidates tend to look for an enabling environment, career growth, and numerous other factors. For recruiters looking to hire for dozens of roles at a time, the conventional resume screening and four rounds of interviewing can become inefficient and ineffective, if not limiting.

The problem here seems to be the lack of resources and time startups have. Hiring non-traditionally needs customized strategies, experiments, and a willingness to build the requirement process around the candidates. At Cutshort, we’ve tried our hands at a bunch of hiring methods to find one unique way to proceed — Open Houses.

Sneak peek into a Cutshort Open House

Open Houses at Cutshort basically involve our technology and product team meeting a bunch of exciting candidates over a candid group conversation. This usually happens in an hour-long Zoom call where the agenda is to showcase the company, our technology, the big problem statements that we are going after, and so on.

During this meeting, the candidates are encouraged to ask questions, and we give honest answers — be it around tech, decision-making, company structures, or anything else. This allows both the recruiters and the candidates to have a deeper engagement than just formulaic questions during an interview.

At the same time, we showcase our key clients, key wins as well as plans for expansion. It’s usually during the product demo stage when most candidates get excited and have tons of questions to ask about the problem statements and some even offer creative solutions that we haven’t thought of yet. We close the presentation with a pitch on why candidates should join us and then take questions. In the end, candidates are given the assignment to finish and those who finish it well are evaluated and called for further rounds of interviewing.

Now, Open Houses might not directly fill up your vacancies. But they can help create a hiring process that lessens the load recruiters carry and brings interested folks to your community.

Wondering what Open Houses can do to your company? Check this out —

Expand the talent pool without burdening your team

The problem with hiring is that it’s an elimination-driven process. Most recruiters want to wade their way through 100s of applications for that one person who is going to be the best fit. However, elimination through various stages of interviewing adds resource constraints and burden the schedule of the recruiting team.

Instead, Open Houses provide recruiters the chance to not just batch-evaluate candidates but also gives a chance to candidates whose first appearance aren’t exactly accept-or-reject worthy. Open Houses can provide a forum where the candidate can shine through the noise of their ideas, and on the other hand, recruiters can feel more comfortable progressing a candidate to the next stage without second-guessing themselves.

Ultimately, while only 5 or 10 people can be interviewed in a conventional process, the Open House process can help increase this pool to 15–20 good people who can either be interviewed immediately or kept in the pipeline for later openings.

Soft cues and insights that you might miss otherwise

The bigger advantage of having an Open House is that it brings forth the real level of interest among potential hires for your company and provides important insights into the real-world demeanor.

At the same time, this gives interested candidates an insider perspective on the organization and gives companies the chance to see if candidates are aligning with their culture, purpose, and work ethic.

For candidates, professional growth, culture alignment, and fair policies take the cake when it comes to considering a company. Your Open House could be a platform to communicate and position these and can help you convert interested candidates to full-time employees.

Exhibit Culture beyond the marketing pitch

Cultural alignment is becoming increasingly necessary to get the candidates on board. While most companies succeed in fast-tracking interviews and pushing offer letters, they often forget that candidates come for the position, but stay for the culture.

An Open House enables the exposition of the company’s core culture, values, and work style early into the process and shows candidates the potential of working in this space. This can help get the right candidates more interested and invested while also weeding out the maligned ones from the hiring funnel.

Spreading the word

How can your company hire the “right” talent if nobody knows what you’re hiring or what your hiring is like?

With startups across industries searching for ways to attract and convert the right tech talent, it doesn’t take much to get blurred out in the crowd. Open Houses which promise a quality understanding of the company and the role, are likely to create a buzz in the tech circles. Not only does this attract interested techies to your company, but it builds a personal connection and word-of-mouth, which they can pass on in communities and among their peers as they go.

This boosts your company’s reach into candidate pools and builds pipelines of potential candidates who will think of you when they are looking for a job — so you don’t have to be constantly sourcing inorganically.

Builds more robust funnels

Suppose your company is looking to hire talent for certain roles in four phases over the next two quarters. Having open door recruitment with regular Open Houses can help identify the best candidates who can be nurtured and pursued as and when the positions open or they become available.

Likewise, it gives candidates the chance to interact with your top performers, learn the tech stacks you work with, and prepare for your formal interview process. If factors like travel and moving are involved, it helps candidates plan ahead for those things too.

Extend reach with real-time feedback loops

If this one wasn’t obvious already — it’s easier for recruiters to tap into interested people and their network for an Open House.

Personally getting to know probable employees opens doors to a whole lot of things — from understanding common expectations to expected pay scales to the kind of policies that will retain talent. This can help provide companies with fast feedback loops that can help them correct and optimize their hiring funnels.

Being able to speak with interested candidates and grabbing their attention will not just make you stand out among a crowd of companies but also improve the candidates’ overall investment in the process.

All in all, hiring isn’t a linear process anymore. If you want to find the right people, don’t be afraid to go the extra mile — both in terms of improving your hiring process and work culture.

After all, the only way “right” people will build your organization with you is when they think of it as their mission too. Hiring based on resumes work, but it’s inefficient; instead, hire people who you’d love to spend 8–10 hours a day with and have them as partners in a common ambitious goal.

Finding your tribe is important and Open Houses could be the central square where disparate worlds of your company and candidates meet and merge into a shared purpose.