[l3amm]

As a start-up CEO in the hiring-efficiency space, I get to see a lot of company's hiring process in gory detail. Anyone who's been around new start-ups (and old guys, see: Google) has seen a great candidate withdraw from a req due to long response time. In a larger organization these inefficiencies can be handled by adding more schedulers, sourcers, recruiters, but in a small start-up you need a top-down commitment to speedy processing of candidates.

As a company gets larger (~series A) there comes a sudden crunch wherein you need 10 developers, yesterday. At that moment, if you haven't laid down the ground work for a successful recruiting/hiring strategy you can experience a very lossy hiring process. You'll miss out on great opportunities to companies who have spent the time, money and effort to make their process efficient.

To the articles recommendations, I would add the following:

- For top tier talent, recruiting is more like sales: you need to sell your company to the recruit, not vice versa.

- For each requisition do the following: decide what the relevant skills/requirements for the position, decide who on the interview team will assess each of those skills, train your interviewers to spend 1/2 their time selling the company and why they love working there and 1/2 their time grilling the applicant on their focus area. This forces you to think critically about what you're looking for (forces understanding of the org chart) and gives each person agency in the process (I'm in charge of sussing out algorithmic ability).

- Corollary to the above: train your interviewers. Make sure they know what they're looking for both culturally and technically, and make sure they have the ability to assess those properties (or lack thereof). Interviewers are your company's brand emissaries (and the source of many candidates) if they can't communicate well the recruits will come away with a bad experience.

- Track things: I think of recruiting like sales. If a VC asked you how your sales was going you wouldn't say something like "OK", you'd have numbers, metrics, graphs, funnels, pipelines, etc etc. Though this can feel a bit overkill in the beginning, getting in the habit of monitoring your candidate pipeline is extremely important as you scale. Small inefficiencies become enshrined as 'best practice' and as you scale they can turn into huge holes for your organization. This is exactly the type of problem we're trying to mitigate/measure by bringing the traditional applicant tracking system into the inbox at www.foundryhiring.com.

[bostonvaulter2]

This looks really interesting. But I do have a few questions about things that are not apparent from your pricing page[1]: * Does this integrate with google apps or just gmail? * I think you should offer a plan in-between ingot and enterprise with around 20 open positions.

[1] http://www.foundryhiring.com/home/pricing

[l3amm]

It integrates with Google Apps, specifically: Google Calendar, Google SSO, Google Contacts, and Gmail. The widget listed is currently for Google Chrome and inside the Gmail frame.

Thanks for the feedback on pricing. We are going to add a tier below enterprise and compete in the JobVite territory. In the mean time we offer 30 day free trial on all plans and a 75% off coupon for early beta users: HN75PCT.

[bostonvaulter2]

A 30 day free trial on the enterprise plan? That seems odd.

[scottmagdalein]

This is a super-helpful comment, no doubt because you're in the hiring business. Are people seeing a solid gain in efficiency with foundry or is the benefit elsewhere? Also, I've never seen foundry until now. When did you launch?

[l3amm]

Thanks for your interest, we haven't officially launched, but we have a number of early beta customers. We'll be doing an official launch in the next month.

Our initial beta customers have been working really close with me and the rest of the team to shape the product. So, the benefits have been around automating parts of the process that are annoying and manual right now. An example: most of our customers have one centralized person (out of 10-40 in the company) that does all the scheduling, sourcing, coordinating with recruiters. We looked at her process (done in google docs) and tried to automate as much as possible. The result: you can now schedule interviews directly from our gmail widget, select a person from your org, a candidate, and a time and we book the meeting on the respective calendar, notify the interviewer about the interview, send them the resume/coverletter and evaluation form and then bug them every 24 hours after the interview to ensure the feedback is logged. The estimate was that by simplifying this process to 3-4 clicks we save her ~ 20 hours of annoying work per week.

The tool has been built around simplifying work flows like this. We're still hashing out all of them, but our central thesis is: 99% of recruiting time is done through the inbox so why doesn't your ATS/CRM live there with you. Over the next couple weeks we're moving the functionality from the web app into the gmail inbox, when that is done we'll officially launch.

Honestly, I think the main benefits of Foundry are as follows:

- We've studied workflows across dozens of companies from Palantir to Facebook to small companies and built the tool around optimizing workflow and collecting data.

- When you come to us we have an out of the box process that works well (we'll show you data) that is somewhat customizeable to your particular company's process. So you start with a good base and the tool reinforces good behavior. This is the part of the tool we're building on the most: how to convey/reinforce best practices in the hiring process.

- Everything is in your inbox: no context switching/learning a new system.

- In the early stage I work closely with all our customers and as we learn new best practices/tips we pass those on to you.

- Lastly, I honestly think that using something like Foundry forces you to think critically about your process (as opposed to winging it), by giving you a framework you end up with a process that works more efficiently.

Our hope is that once we get more data around hiring we can push that knowledge out to everyone, so that company's stop losing hires due to the problems listed above. If you have any questions about your process or want some friendly advice about what you're doing well/poorly I'd be happy to chat, email in my signature.