Articles 3 min read

How talent.io uses hiring to maintain its product roadmap delivery

Challenges

  • Missing the right people on your tech team can hold up product delivery
  • Tech hiring often takes multiple tools and platform, decentralising processes and relevant information
  • Sourcing the right tech candidates is expensive and time-consuming

Solution

  • An easy-to-search platform and centralised hiring pipeline management system hosting qualified tech professionals who are ready to find a new job.

Overview

talent.io was made by developers, for developers and top tech companies to be the simplest way of hiring and being hired. As such we have our own R&D team, which over 5 years has grown to include a total of 19 people. It includes 14 developers, our CTO, Lead Developer, Product Manager and a data analyst. Our dev team specialises in Ruby and has moved into Reactjs on the frontend since we completed a total product redesign in November for companies using our app (alongside a brand new website).

Our ultimate goal is building a tool to enable companies to hire tech professionals in the simplest way possible, saving time and labour.

Working on efficiency for talent.io users

In general, our development projects cover improvements to three frontend applications in React and Coffeescript (the client, candidate and admin experience of talent.io‘s interface) and one backend Ruby application. We work on making hiring in the talent.io platform as simple and intuitive as possible, while allowing our users a wide range of actions to centralise their tech hiring processes. We plan our product roadmap on a year-long basis to be aligned with global initiatives of the operational teams. This translates into product revolutions and then into epics.

In 2020 focus is on efficiency.

A great enabler for efficiency is having the right people at the right time to drive forward our roadmap delivery. We’ve made the most of the platform and our familiarity with best practice in tech hiring to enable the projects we work on.

How we use tech hiring to enable our roadmap

We are sort-of talent.io‘s power-user. We hired our entire tech team on the platform, and by using it to organise a steady approach to tech hiring, we’ve been in no rush to hire although our team was growing fast.

Our top recommendations for tech hiring are:

  • Consistency: Create a steady sourcing process

The trick to sourcing is to keep it systematic. Using talent.io, a designated member of our tech team checks the new candidates on the talent.io platform every Monday morning. This can be as fast as you need it to be – we might take 20 minutes to do a careful look through all the profiles, but highlighting strong candidates can also be done in 5 minutes.‍

  • Efficiency: Use Job Positions to structure your searches and outreach

We make heavy use of the Job Position feature. Based on the roles available in our team we create one job position for each, filling out the basic information in the form (whether it’s Fullstack, the salary range, etc.). Job Positions are saved in the searches page and contain all our search criteria – for our Monday search we simply click on the Job Position to see all the candidates who meet the search criteria. We set up the outreach templates to make sure that our messages are always relevant to the Job Position and we make sure to briefly personalise these when we reach out to each candidate.‍

  • Clarity: Use Team Notes and Scheduling for clear internal and outreach communication

Whenever you are engaging with potential hires, it’s vital that everyone is up to date and clear on the hiring process. Team Notes and Interview Scheduling are helpful organisational features which allow us to move on efficiently with processes, keeping everyone informed.‍

‍We use Team Notes to leave internal notes directly on profiles, tagging team members. This keeps all the information about various processes and feedback on potential candidates centralised.

After you have reached out and the candidate has accepted you can schedule an interview. Candidates set their interview availability directly within talent.io‘s in-platform interview calendar and we use this to send interview requests for a time and location (virtual or physical) which suit both us and the candidate.‍

Having a good tech team is the most crucial part to product roadmap delivery. Our approach to tech hiring is designed so that we are not prevented from executing the long-term vision or short-term projects by not having the expertise to achieve the things we need to.

Hiring for a tech team? Reach out to your dedicated talent.io Client Executive to see how talent.io can help you streamline your tech hiring process!

talent.io quick facts

Tech Stack: Reactjs, Coffeescript, Ruby on Rails

Tech Team Size: 19

Present In: 10 European cities
Paris, Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Berlin, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Munich

User-Base: 150 000+ Tech Professionals, 5 000+ Tech Companies
incl. Tripadvisor, Transferwise, N26, Blablacar, Deezer, Axa, BNP Paribas, Daimler

The Business Transformation Network has shared this article in partnership with talent.io.

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