Original Post Can be Found here: iseeq BLOG
A recruitment case study with Rollbar
As a recruitment agency, we (iseeq) can confidently say that we value the partners our candidates love the most – lucky for us, Rollbar is one of those clients in our current portfolio. Since establishing our partnership with them we successfully placed several outstanding individuals into their teams. What makes Rollbar so attractive for our candidates during the selection process and beyond that? What could other tech companies learn from them? We Interviewed Zita Lőrinczi, the company’s Business & People Operations Manager and we have answers!
A mission that candidates are eager to contribute to
Visions, missions, and values are not just must-haves or buzzwords to use at company presentations. Used wisely, they are key elements of the company’s everyday life and the building blocks of the culture. Occasionally they might even come in handy when it comes to attracting talent.
Rollbar’s mission is to help developers build software quickly and painlessly. Needless to say, this statement is pretty attractive to their target audience in the job market. We would recommend every company that stays true to its core statements like vision, mission, or values to communicate those from the early stages of the recruitment process for like-minded candidates to be more engaged.
Well-thought-out positions with clear requirements
Gaining hundreds of applicants for an open position is all fun and games until companies find out that their witty texts are not just attractive to potential candidates, but also to people that won’t fit their expectations. Instead of creating long hours of unnecessary work for their in-house hiring team, Rollbar found the perfect solution to attract the specific people they are looking for. For example, if they know that their perfect matches are senior engineers who work with big data systems, they clearly communicate this requirement in their job posts too. This way self-selection filters out the individuals that won’t fit the role even before applying to it.
If a company is using recruitment partners in their hiring process, they should choose an agency that understands the market and the background of the candidates, only reaching out to truly relevant professionals and prescreening the interested ones effectively. Clear communication with the agency and beneficial feedback on the candidates can help improve their processes and effectiveness even further.
Challenging jobs that offer real opportunities for professional growth
The times when someone starts their career with an employer and retires from them are long gone. Nowadays people are not afraid to jump ship if they get bored or feel like they are not growing professionally in a job.
In this market, employers need to offer more than competitive packages to keep their best talents. This is something that Rollbar does exceptionally well. They offer their employees opportunities for a “learning by doing” style of professional growth which is in our experience often a priority for job seekers in the tech industry. Rollbar’s engineers get to work with interesting and challenging problems and developers who are looking for their next challenge find the problem domain attractive and appreciate the learning opportunities that it comes with. Working with data, machine learning, and being able to create or enhance complex systems is very appealing to many engineers. Following this example, we encourage every company to find its very own selling point when it comes to technologies or professional challenges and highlight it in job postings. If the company is unsure about these selling points, asking employees why they love to work there is always a great start.
Teambuilding events that truly build teams instead of just taking up free time
As a recruitment agency, at IseeQ we often hear candidates’ opinions on certain company culture and job post elements and one of the main misunderstandings between future employees and companies is the importance of quality team building.
Too many employers are still stuck in the era where table soccer and occasional pizza parties seemed to solve every frustration of an employee and built perfect team cohesion (fun fact: it never worked that way). In fact, employees hate to be forced to spend their after-work free time with not-even-fun must-dos even if those involve pizza. Finally, more and more organizations are realizing that they have to try harder to be attractive in the job market.
Rollbar has figured out great ways to keep their employees happy and engaged, so let’s walk through some of these:
Lunch & Learn sessions:
Rollbar invented an event where colleagues share their knowledge with each other. It’s a great way to build a community while facilitating peer-to-peer learning, and it gives unique soft skill development opportunities for the employees that share the knowledge!
Team Building events on off-sites
When a company has different sites, the opportunity to visit these as a teambuilding event is almost an always easy win! This year Rollbar’s Budapest team visited their colleagues in Barcelona!
More prominent team-building events instead of just ad-hoc events
Holding bigger, previously announced events once in a while instead of a million ad-hoc ones are easier on the team members and their families. This way attendants know how to plan the events in advance and have something to look forward to instead of just feeling constantly busy because of “yet another company event”.
Events based on interests:
Planning teambuilding events around genuine interests that colleagues have is not much harder than just flooding the calendar with random snack days, yet the payoff when it comes to community building is significantly higher! Rollbar has book club sessions but gives the opportunity to their employees to play games during their monthly social hours too. This way everyone can find their cup of tea and like-minded individuals can connect inside the office.
Recruitment partners that understand the company and can properly present it to candidates
Working with outside suppliers can be useful even if the company has a world-class in-house team. “A recruitment agency can extend our search by reaching people we couldn’t on our own.” – summarized Zita.
However, when a company decides to work with a recruitment agency, it lets another organization shape its employer brand and image in the eyes of potential candidates. This obviously means choosing the right recruitment agency is a great responsibility but many companies fail to notice that proper onboarding of the chosen agency is just as important.
Choosing the right recruitment agency
To achieve outstanding growth in recruitment output, companies should look for agencies (and obviously in-house recruiters too) that are willing to put in the extra effort to learn about the roles and company culture.
This way instead of blindly calling numbers from databases, leaving bad impressions on candidates, the recruiters can truly focus on quality and headhunting.
We think Rollbar’s approach to finding a great agency summarizes all the criteria and attributions that companies should look for in possible partners:
“When recruiting for an open position, one has to deeply understand the role, the product, and the company culture to find the best fit. Recruitment agencies that go beyond the job description to really know the needs of the company do a lot better than ones that operate with generic roles.
The best agencies value quality over quantity. They understand that carefully vetting candidates before sending them our way helps our colleagues manage their time better, and generally produces better results faster.”
Rollbar decided to work with IseeQ as their recruitment partner and we managed to achieve several successful hires together from product managers to full-stack engineers. Our headhunters take pride in having deep knowledge of the domains and market trends while using networking-based sourcing methods to find the best candidates.
We also use a special dual-tracking recruitment model, when we work in cycles that consist of frequent consulting with Rollbar’s team and adjusting the dream candidate’s profile / our search to their feedback. Providing the highest quality service instead of CV dropping is our main philosophy, and we would highly recommend hiring an agency or in-house professional with the same mindset, since receiving truly personal and fitting opportunities will make the potential candidates feel more special and heard, which contributes to them having a better opinion on the company.
Proper onboarding of the recruitment partners
However as mentioned before, finding a recruitment partner is not enough. Onboarding the agency recruiters and ensuring they get all the information and feedback needed during the process is the key to success.
Rollbar ensured that IseeQ’s recruiters have all the necessary knowledge on the product, positions, and company culture so that they can identify and approach the candidates that truly fit the client’s needs both professionally and culturally. Site visits, frequent calls, detailed job descriptions, and frequent updates about open positions are great ways to deepen the agency recruiters’ understanding of the client’s needs.
From our personal experience transparency and feedback candidates and processes can also make sure that the delivery will be steady and smooth.
Key Takeaways
In today’s competitive talent marketplace, making your company attractive to potential candidates is a must. In this case study, we covered how one of our favorite partners, Rollbar, achieves a great employer brand during the recruitment process. Even though there is no universal recipe when it comes to recruiting; their approach proves that a great mission, professionally challenging positions, clear communication about the role and its requirements, team building events built on actual interests, and last but not least choosing your recruitment partners wisely can build your way to success and excellent hires.
Original Post Can be Found here: iseeq BLOG
