This is the intriguing challenge that George Zikos, Senior Director of Workable’s Technical Operations team (TechOps), confronted.

With his team’s KPI targets plateauing and expectations remaining high, George embarked on a journey of introspection and process optimization. Let’s see how George and the team uncovered and addressed hidden challenges to not only boost their performance but also to ensure that this well-performing team remained engaged and motivated.

The problems

There were many issues that George and his team recognized, which needed to be resolved:

1. KPIs have plateaued

TechOps is a well established team that has been performing well. Their KPI targets had steadily improved over the years but had recently plateaued. Targets were still being hit which masked a hidden challenge: they were no longer improving.

2. The impediment of overlapping metrics

One issue was the blurred accountability caused by sharing a Jira board with other teams. It made isolating TechOp’s specific impact difficult, particularly for metrics like ‘average resolution days,’ which also involved other teams like Support.

3. Increasing expectations

With a tenure of 2.5 to four years for the team and six years for George himself, expectations of continued performance improvement were high, even factoring in a recent reduction in team size when a departing employee wasn’t replaced.

4. The need for challenging work

With experience comes the risk of stagnation and complacency, especially when the goals at hand are no longer as challenging as before. A highly skilled team needs motivating work to remain engaged.

The goals

Goals are crucial for success – you can’t build solutions without knowing what you’re aiming to do in the end. George’s goals were as follows:

1. Improve performance

Identify processes which can be optimized to improve the team’s performance against its top level KPIs.

2. Motivate the team

Change the team’s perspective, have them focus on something new and challenging to reinvigorate and motivate them.

The method

With clarity around the problems, George was able to get to work on building solutions. These included:

1. Unearth hidden inefficiencies through process audit

George took a detailed look at his team’s work, analyzing hundreds of Jira cards, reading all the comments and tracking the flow of tickets from one team to another.

This very manual, laborious work to understand the work of his team and the processes involved was the key to unlocking improvements in performance.

His deep dive unveiled a hidden inefficiency: frequent back-and-forths between his team and others were causing delays in ticket resolutions.

2. Identifying new, more granular metrics

To quantify this inefficiency, George identified two new metrics that seemed apt: “Tickets Resolved on First Response” (TRFR) and “Median Time to Acknowledge” (MTA) that a ticket was being worked on.

“Having identified where there was an area for improvement, I supplemented my own thoughts with some online research, reading many articles on the metrics other Ops and DevOps teams use to drive performance,” George explains.

3. Tracking the new metrics

George collaborated with IT to set up additional reporting in Jira to track these new metrics, creating a new benchmarking system.

He adds: “Without this reporting, I wouldn’t be able to see that the changes we made were really valuable at all. Jira didn’t have what I needed out of the box so having IT to help was essential.”

4. Bringing the team onboard

George shared these two new metrics with the team, which interestingly resulted in a quick rise in TRFR performance, from 58% to 62%. George put this increase in TRFR performance down to the team simply being aware of this metric, saying;

“We’ve been a team for a while now,” says George. “The team understands that when a metric is being tracked it has some importance, even though I said it was not the priority right now. Knowing that, I believe they ‘self-adjusted’ to optimize it and we saw results straight away.”

MTA did not see an immediate improvement in this way, so more work would be required to make an impact.

5. Setting goals based on new insights

George set a new target of 4 hours for MTA, down from the 5-hour median which was observed during the benchmarking period.

Four hours was chosen as it aligned to how the team splits their day half between Ops tickets and the other half on Labb tickets.
TRFR, despite its improving trend, was only set to be monitored for the rest of 2023 with a goal of maintaining the current level until the 2024 scorecards.

6. Implementation and results

To aid the team in meeting the new MTA target, George knew he would need to focus the team on certain cards instead of simply expecting the team to magically improve speed everywhere.

To that end, George implemented a Zapier automation to send Slack notifications only for new High-Priority and Approvals tickets, excluding the less time-sensitive tickets. This avoided creating too much notification noise for the team but meant the most important tickets could be addressed as quickly as possible. Previously, the team would have to check Jira periodically for any new tickets.

This brought impressive improvements in MTA, dropping from 5 hours to 3.62 hours, with June even hitting an impressive 2.93 hours.

Outcome

TechOps have not only seen improvements in the new metrics but have validated that improving those metrics drives improvements in top level metrics.

Those top level KPIs, which had previously plateaued and seemed impossible to move, improved by 5% in H1 2023.
What makes that improvement even more impressive is how it was accomplished by a smaller team (6 down from 7).

Lessons learned and future goals

George puts it very simply: “Never settle, there is always room for improvement.”

TechOp’s journey underlines the power of detailed analysis and continuous monitoring, even when performance seems satisfactory. The key lesson here is the value of curiosity and persistence; even when performance is good, less apparent problems can still be unearthed and addressed to drive significant improvements.

The team’s next step is to ensure the team maintains the new MTA targets, keeps TRFR consistent, while also working to improve a newly identified metric – the Velocity of Labb Stories.

The post Case study: how Workable’s TechOps optimized its processes appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

However, with so many options available to top-tier engineers and tech talent in Greece, it can be challenging to attract them to work for your company instead of a foreign one.

In this blog post, we explore some tips and strategies for attracting the best talent in the Greek software development market – particularly those that have worked at Workable.

1. Offer competitive compensation and benefits

One of the most important factors for engineers when considering a company is the compensation and benefits package. To compete with international companies, it is suggested to offer a competitive salary, health insurance, paid time off and bonuses.

It is also recommended to consider offering perks like flexible working hours, remote work options, and opportunities for professional development.

At Workable, we have consistently offered salaries that exceed the market average to maintain competitiveness. During and after the COVID era, we recognized the impending changes in the engineering market. Consequently, we implemented a strategic plan to elevate our compensation schemes to 20-30% above the Greek market average.

This proactive approach aided us in retaining our software engineers, enhancing their productivity, and attracting superior talent.

When engineers are happy with their compensation, they will promote their organization throughout their own communities.

2. Foster a positive company culture

Creating a positive company culture is the key in attracting and keeping the best talent for a long time. This is especially true in the close-knit software development community of Greece where news, good or bad, spreads quickly.

We take pride in the positive reviews we get about how we hire people. We don’t just look for expertise in certain programming languages or tools. Instead, we search for skilled developers who have a solid foundation and a good understanding of the best practices in the industry.

Our engineering team has put together a detailed training program. This includes online learning and hands-on experience to fully prepare our new team members in their first few months.

When it comes to hiring tech talent in Greece, we look for potential. We feel proud when we see our employees advance in their careers and earn pay raises due to their hard work and dedication. This success comes from bringing on board individuals with potential and talent.

We organize our teams in a way that encourages employees to stretch their professional limits.

3. Provide a challenging and stimulating work environment

Engineers seek stimulating and challenging projects. Attracting top talent requires an environment that encourages creativity and innovation. This means providing access to advanced technologies and tools, allowing engineers to experiment and take risks, and cultivating a collaborative and team-oriented culture.

At Workable, we appreciate that the best candidates are adaptable engineers eager to learn. We don’t concentrate solely on the specific technologies an engineer knows, but rather on strong computer science fundamentals and best practices. We achieve this by providing challenging technical assignments that potential candidates can excel in.

Small hackathons, like those we’ve hosted in the past, can also help us uncover talented individuals. Lastly, we maintain a the Workable Tech Blog where we share the latest technical updates at Workable with the community, to attract talent.

4. Emphasize the impact of the work

At Workable, our engineers deliver valuable tools to recruiters, with client feedback on new features uplifting our team. We hold all-hands meetings quarterly to update everyone on company goals, progress, and our product roadmap. In these meetings, we also highlight our engineering teams’ achievements and future projects.

Product managers announce newly developed features on our Slack channel across the company, acknowledging the efforts of the involved team members. This practice brings a sense of achievement and recognizes hard work.

This way, everyone at Workable stays updated and collaborates towards shared success.

5. Emphasize the benefits of working locally

Working for a local company can offer many benefits that working for an international company cannot. For example, for tech talent in Greece, working for a local company can offer a better work-life balance, as engineers will not have to deal with time zone differences or long commutes.

However, offering the option of a hybrid working model can also be a huge advantage, as it allows for more flexibility and a greater work-life balance. At Workable, we offer both options to our employees, with offices in Boston, Athens, and London, and a flexible remote work policy.

When working on premises we provide our employees with perks like parking, fresh food, snacks, and a variety of drinks daily, and we also have various games like tabletop board games, foosball, programs with vendors for mental and physical well being and to make their day more fun at the office and bring them closer together as teams.

Additionally, we organize an annual company retreat as part of our employee engagement initiative, fostering a sense of unity and camaraderie among team members.

Related: The power of a corporate retreat: 5 reasons why you should do it

Moreover, we acknowledge the contributions of our remote employees and understand the importance of face-to-face meetings for certain business needs. To facilitate this, Workable covers the travel expenses for our remote employees when they are required to visit the office. We believe in supporting our team members regardless of their location, and ensuring they have all the resources they need to be successful in their roles.

6. Offer opportunities for career advancement

Engineers want to work for companies that offer opportunities for career advancement. This includes things like training and development programs, mentorship opportunities, and opportunities to take on leadership roles.

By providing engineers with opportunities to learn and grow, you can keep them engaged and motivated to stay with your company for the long term. In Workable, our development plan gives engineers the opportunity to grow as an individual contributor or as a lead of a team.

This means training in new tech skills, training in soft skills, salary raises and other compensation benefits.

The Greek software development market is highly competitive, and it can be a challenge to attract top talent in Greece to your company. You can get around that by offering competitive compensation and benefits, providing a challenging and stimulating work environment, emphasizing the impact of the work, and fostering a positive company culture.

Add to that the benefits of working locally or remotely and opportunities for career advancement, and you can convince talented engineers to work for your company and help it grow and thrive.

Want to learn about attracting top tech talent in Boston or London? We’ve got those covered as well:

• Wooing top tech talent: Recruiting in the Boston tech scene
• Tech recruitment in London: Luring and sourcing top tech talent

The post Attracting top tech talent in Greece: an approach to success appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

While it’s important to cultivate a positive environment, we believe that prioritizing employee satisfaction is a more effective way to support our team and drive success.

Let’s explore why we emphasize employee satisfaction over happiness and how this approach benefits both our employees and our company as a whole.

Defining employee happiness and employee satisfaction

Before diving into our approach, let’s clarify the difference between employee happiness and employee satisfaction.

Happiness is a transient emotion that can be influenced by numerous factors, both personal and professional.

Employee satisfaction, on the other hand, refers to the overall contentment an employee feels in their role and the workplace environment.

Why we strive for employee satisfaction over happiness

At Workable, we believe that aiming for employee satisfaction yields more sustainable and meaningful results for employees and the business. Here’s why:

1. Satisfaction is a holistic approach

Employee satisfaction encompasses various aspects of the work experience, such as compensation, work-life balance, career development, and company culture. By focusing on satisfaction, we address the multiple factors that contribute to an employee’s sense of fulfillment, rather than simply aiming for momentary happiness.

2. Satisfaction fosters commitment

When employees are satisfied with their job and workplace, they are more likely to stay committed to the company and its goals. This, in turn, can lead to lower turnover rates, higher engagement, and a more productive and cohesive team.

3. Satisfaction drives performance

Satisfied employees are more motivated to excel in their roles, as they feel valued and supported by their employer. This, in turn, can lead to higher levels of productivity, innovation, and overall performance.

Satisfaction supports employee well-being: By focusing on the factors that contribute to satisfaction, we’re also supporting our employees’ overall well-being. This can translate into a healthier work environment, where employees feel more motivated, less stressed, and better equipped to tackle challenges.

Effective strategies for enhancing employee satisfaction

Let’s dive into a variety of actionable strategies that companies can adopt to elevate employee satisfaction and create a thriving workplace environment

1. Offer competitive compensation and benefits

Two-thirds of US workers and more than half of UK workers say salary is a top priority. Ensure that your company provides competitive and fair compensation packages, along with comprehensive benefits that cater to employees’ physical, mental, and financial well-being. Regularly review and adjust these offerings to keep pace with industry standards and employee needs.

2. Provide opportunities for growth and development

The opportunity to learn is a huge motivator for workers – especially in tech. Invest in your employees by offering training, professional development, and career advancement opportunities. Encourage employees to broaden their skill sets and support them in pursuing their career goals within the organization.

3. Cultivate a flexible and supportive work environment

Our recent survey finds that 58% of US-based and 57% of UK-based workers put a huge value on flexible work.Promote a healthy work-life balance by offering flexible work arrangements, such as remote work or flexible hours, if possible. Additionally, create policies that support employees’ needs.

4. Encourage open communication and feedback

Foster a culture of open communication where employees feel comfortable sharing their opinions, providing feedback, and participating in decision-making processes. This can be achieved through regular check-ins, town hall meetings, or anonymous feedback channels. Actively listen to employees’ concerns and suggestions and demonstrate a willingness to address them.

5. Implement recognition and rewards programs

Acknowledge and reward the hard work and achievements of your employees through various recognition programs and initiatives. This can include employee-of-the-month awards, bonuses, team celebrations & events, long service awards or personalized tokens of appreciation. Recognizing and celebrating successes can help boost morale and motivate employees to continue performing at their best.

By adopting these suggested strategies, companies can work towards fostering a more satisfied workforce, which in turn can lead to increased commitment, higher engagement, and better overall performance.

Focusing on employee satisfaction not only benefits individual employees but also contributes to the growth and success of the organization as a whole.

The post Why employee satisfaction matters more than happiness appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Our goal with the Workable settings pages was to examine and improve them in terms of information architecture. It is a fact that the settings pages had grown vastly over the last few years as more and more features were added to the product and they introduced more settings respectively. Good information architecture helps users understand where they are, what they’ve found, what’s related, and what to expect.

Testing the current structure

First things first: research! We ran a tree test on the current settings pages to understand which areas were in need of improvement. Most participants easily found basic settings such as where to change their profile photo or manage their email templates. However, most participants had difficulty finding where they would complete tasks such as: “You want to enable the Talent Pool option so candidates can send applications to your account mailbox” and “You want to change the brand color of your career pages”.

As seen in the pie tree below, participants were looking to enable the talent pool option in almost all areas of settings (they navigated to the blue and red circles). Just 10% found the right answer right away, 24% found it eventually and 66% did not find it at all (they nominated the orange circles). It took 36 seconds on average to complete this task, compared to just 10 seconds that it took them to complete some of the easier tasks.

We also ran a card sorting activity to see into what categories participants would group the settings content. The dendrogram below shows that participants created roughly eight groups of items with 70% agreement. There was no strong consensus for some cards like Interview locations, Access token and Talent pool visibility. The latter is an interesting finding because it shows that participants not only could not find this easily, based on the tree test discussed above, but also are not sure what group to place it in either, according to the card sorting test.

Designing the new experience

Equipped with the results discussed above and insights about what areas need improvement, we hit the drawing board. We ran a physical card sorting workshop with four Product Designers and myself, a UX Researcher. Our card sorting activity, however, had a fun twist: instead of using cards with content labels, we used cards with UI images. As seen in the photo below, we printed screenshots of each section of the settings and cut them up into individual cards. 

The reason we introduced the UI, which is normally not a focus for information architecture, is that we only had the “development budget” to move and rename sections without making any more changes to the system. In other words it was a given factor that we had to work with so we wanted it to be prominent for our decision making regarding the structure and order of the pages. 

The new grouping looked fresh and exciting, even though it was not easy to let go of the existing structure that was carved into everyone’s brain until now. We had to consider changes that were planned to come to the product soon, as well as differences in the settings pages that depend on the feature availability per customer. In a nutshell:

• Top-level groups were introduced to shape and deepen the structure: Recruiting, Company and Personal settings 
• A new dedicated page called Career Page was introduced, since these settings were previously under Company Profile
• A new page called Privacy was introduced, which gathered previously scattered privacy settings
• The Recruiting Preferences section became obsolete since all items have been moved to more appropriate sections
• Personal user settings that apply globally across the different Workable tools (ATS, Referrals, Bridge) have been placed into a new page called Your profile outside of the Workable settings 

Validating the new design

We were pretty excited with the new top-level groups (Recruiting, Company and Personal) and got positive feedback from our teammates and management team about the new design. We prepared mockups and a prototype to preview the experience in Figma, as seen below. 

As a final sanity check we ran another tree test with the new structure. To our disappointment but also expectation the new structure did not perform flawlessly. Most participants easily found basic settings such as where to change their company logo or manage their custom recruiting pipeline, but some advanced settings are so unique that there is no obvious group to place them in.

For example, a lot of participants had difficulty finding where they would complete tasks like: “Allow candidates to only see the 1st level of the departments structure in your job postings (e.g. Product instead of QA testing)” and “Change your time zone so you can accurately schedule events”.

Nevertheless, testing the new structure helped us identify potential problem areas and allowed us to make final improvements before launch. For example, users seemed to confuse the two pages in the Personal Group, Your Settings and Your Profile. We realized that these labels might seem a bit generic and interchangeable so we renamed Your settings to Your preferences, to be more specific.

We believe that the new settings pages will improve our customers’ experience by helping them easily find what they are looking for, discover options and manage powerful settings. Our goal is to make things easier now and in the future, as new features and more options are introduced in Workable.

Korina Loumidi is Workable’s Principal UX Researcher. She was part of the team that revamped Workable’s settings.

The post The art & science of organizing and labeling Workable settings appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Second, this guides us through iterations and improvements that can eliminate problems and frustration for the end user. Finally, this can actually decrease the risk of failure and improve profitability for the company, with reduced costs of customer support and happy customers who will spread a good word about our product to the world.

The Video Interviews feature first kicked off about a year ago, with our team gathering for a Design Sprint. The purpose of this week-long structured workshop is to map out and understand the problem, ideate, and agree on a target. We actually ran two separate design sprints:

• First, we did one focusing on the candidate’s experience (receiving a request to complete a video interview, recording answers and submitting the assignment).
• Once an MVP for the candidate experience was ready for implementation we did another, focusing on the recruiter and hiring manager’s experience (setting up a video interview for a job, sending a request to candidates and then viewing and evaluating the candidate submissions).

Defining personas and finding people to talk to

Leading up to the Design Sprint, we identified people who could share valuable insights with us on the topic at hand, which was oneway video interviews for recruiting purposes.

For the candidate persona we reached out to recently hired Workable employees who had experience with video interviews for their current role, or a previous one.

For the recruiter persona we reached out to select customers who had expressed interest in this feature to their account managers, as well as our amazing in-house recruiting team (who always contribute to our research and usability testing).

Understanding and empathizing with the end user

Hearing first hand from video interview applicants was an eye-opener, especially about how stressful this experience can be for them. Anything from a hardware issue to a distraction in their surroundings could cost them a good submission and jeopardize their progress in the interview process, which is critical for active job seekers.

At the same time we learned that candidates think highly of companies that use this type of “high tech and modern” method in their hiring process. These and other candidate insights guided us in designing a helpful and pleasant experience for them.

Recruiters talked to us about how bias can be a challenge for their hiring team while evaluating candidates. This is a challenge that video interviews could potentially augment if the evaluator focuses on the visual appearance of the person or the environment the video submission is recorded in.

At the same time they were very excited to get their hands on this tool that can help them screen candidates better and faster from an early pipeline stage.

Validating and testing our ideas

Equipped with a deep understanding about who we are designing for, what they need and want, the team got straight to work and designed the key parts of the candidate and recruiter experience respectively. We created working prototypes and invited a handful of Workable employees to test them out. This helped us validate the direction we had chosen and helped us identify some issues at an early stage, before spending effort on development.

Finding volunteers to test the candidate experience was easy, since we targeted any person who could potentially be asked to submit a video interview for a job application. to test the hiring manager experience, we targeted any manager who would potentially screen a candidate for their team with a video interview, even if they had never done this before.

Testing the product in the real world

As the development of the feature was reaching completion we engaged our own recruiting team and six key customers in an Early Adopter Program. We gathered their input as they used video interviews to screen and evaluate candidates over the course of a few weeks. Even though we had incorporated user input at multiple points since the beginning of the project and were confident in what we had built, there was still more for us to learn from its performance in real world circumstances.

We did not get much feedback from candidates besides some minor technical issues that were quickly fixed. This could mean that we indeed did a great job and delivered something that works perfectly, or perhaps that candidates were not willing to share their feedback during their application process with a company (and I don’t blame them).

Recruiters, however, shared great feedback with us, most of which has already been added to our roadmap. One of their key concerns was about creating a “good” video interview, in which they ask candidates enough questions to get the information they are looking for, but also does not require too much time to complete, which could lead to them dropping out and not completing the video interview.

Keep listening, keep learning, keep improving

Upon the completion of the Early Adopter Program video interviews became available to all Workable customers. You might have thought that our work was done, but it wasn’t! The world and people evolve and change and so should our product. We will keep monitoring the traffic and usage analytics of the feature to track performance and identify issues. We will also keep listening to all incoming feedback from our customers through different channels, such as customer support and the account management team, in order to react to it.

Salad & Go, for example, shared some great feedback on how they’ve been able to use video interviews to conduct remote hiring:

We will keep asking questions in order to understand what our users need and improve our product for them. This is essential to the quality and success of Video Interviews – and this is important to us as well.

Anything from a casual conversation where you ask a friend for their opinion on something, all the way to a formally structured research or test activity can help you learn something you did not know before. And this is the essence of user-centered design, so start talking to your users today!

The post Video Interviews: Designing for and with end users in mind appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

If you’re a recruiter, rapid scaling may be a creative challenge for you – nevertheless, it’s still a challenge. But, if you’re a hiring manager and need to grow your team fast while maintaining your regular workload at the same time, the burden can be heavier.

Whether you’re a small startup on a growth track or a company taking on a large project, this scenario can be all too familiar. Scaling a sales team (or any team) is like a race: you need to attract, find and evaluate candidates fast, without sacrificing on quality.

We sat down with Georgios and Athina to learn about their own experiences in doing so, and they walked us through how they managed to turn what seemed like an impossible task into a successful recruiting process.

Plan before you act

When you’re scaling a sales team fast, the key, according to Athina, is to have an intake meeting at the beginning of the hiring process. In their case, the two hiring managers, the recruiter and the HR manager, sat down together to discuss:

• Qualification criteria: What’s the profile of our ideal candidate?
• Hiring process: How will we evaluate candidates?
• Roles within the team: Who’s responsible for each of the hiring stages?

Athina notes that this simple, yet important, process ensures that everyone is on the same page and saves a ton of needless back-and-forth communication later in the process.

“Of course, we have catch-ups in between hiring stages to make sure everything goes as planned,” she clarified. “But it’s never about ‘Hey, did you see that application?’ or ‘How did your interview with that candidate go?’ If we all know our roles and responsibilities, we don’t have to spend time sending emails to each other, asking for interview feedback or scheduling meetings.”

Georgios emphasized the importance of planning the hiring process as early as possible: “For us, this was translated into an impressive conversion rate:”

We hired one person for every 20 applicants.

“Think about it; if you don’t discuss what kind of skills you’re looking for and if you don’t craft a job ad that reflects these exact requirements, you’ll get candidates who don’t fit in your role. And then you’ll have to screen their resumes, realize they don’t qualify and reject them. You can save all this time with a carefully planned hiring strategy.”

Expand your candidate sources

So, how are we going to find these candidates? That was one of the main concerns across the team. It’s easy if you want to hire one person and you don’t have a tight deadline, because you can rely on a ‘post and pray’ method. But that’s rarely the case for most hiring teams. Never mind a scenario where you need to find – and hire – more than 10 people in a single month.

That’s when you realize that you also need to look in different places for your candidates. “Job boards are the number one place you go to hire,” Georgios said, “but that’s not enough when you’re scaling fast.”

We find about half of the candidates we need through job boards. This means that the rest of them are using different channels for their job search.

The following graph shows how the team used a mix of sources to find qualified candidates:

_Notes:

_{1. Job boards include both popular job sites (e.g. Indeed and Glassdoor) and applications from other websites, such as Google}

_{2. Sourcing includes Facebook campaigns, job fair recruitment and reaching out to passive candidates}

_{3. Employer branding includes applications through Workable’s careers page}

_{4. Referrals include candidate recommendations from current employees}

From word of mouth…

“We tried out employee referrals. We’ve always encouraged our colleagues to recommend good candidates,” Athina explained, “but, this time, we organized it a bit better. We used Workable’s Referrals platform to make it easy for everyone to refer someone they know. They don’t have to do much: a link to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile is all it takes. And then we’ll do the rest.”

Referrals give you exposure to new, untapped talent, according to Georgios. Candidates who come via referrals are often people who might have not been actively searching for a new job through job boards or people who wouldn’t consider a career in sales unless they knew someone who already works in the company.

We wouldn’t find these [referred] candidates otherwise.

Employees refer good candidates because they want to work alongside smart, competent people. But sometimes you need to give them an extra incentive. That’s why Workable’s sales team decided to add a cash bonus for successful referrals that motivates employees to look into their network and find people who’d fit in the team.

Athina gave an example of how a referral bonus can result in a pool of great candidates: “Some employees now refer three or four people, because they know they’ll win too if some of them get hired. This means that they may have shared the job ad with 10 people in total. That’s the benefit of this digital version of word of mouth. Even if these people are not interested now, they learn about our company and job opportunities and might apply in the future.”

“Or, if we take it one step further,” Georgios added, “one employee shares the job ad with 10 people, each of those 10 people knows 10 more and so on. Somewhere among all those people, is our next hire. Even if they’re not a direct referral, it’s our referral initiative that got them to our doorstep.”

… to social media dominance

Social networks bring you closer to numerous potential candidates, particularly those who don’t visit job boards or those that you can’t physically meet at a careers fair if they’re currently in a different location. Facebook and LinkedIn are places where you can find them.

But the power of social media – the large number of people who are online every day – can also be a disadvantage for hiring teams. How will you make sure you’re not casting a wide net? How will your job ad stand out?

“We can’t approach social media just like job boards – i.e. share our job ad and hope that interested candidates will see it,” Georgios said. “We need to be more strategic. So what we do is target candidates who have relevant skills and display our job ad only to them.”

Athina added that widescale social media posts are incredibly helpful for hiring large-scale teams in such a tight schedule.

“This is a time-saver,” she said. “Both for us, the hiring team, because we reach out to people we know they have the skills we’re looking for, and for candidates, too, because they can apply with one click.

“And this makes the entire process move faster. When candidates can apply in just a few minutes and without leaving the “space” where they are (call me Facebook), this means that we get their applications sooner and we don’t lose those great candidates to competitors.”

Get your team together

You can’t hire on your own. That’s a fact. But you can’t hire at this speed even with a team, unless all members are synced together. “Synced” doesn’t necessarily mean meeting every day or every other day. In fact, in Georgios and Athina’s case, it was quite the opposite:

“We didn’t talk unless we had something to say,” Athina admitted. “This doesn’t mean we didn’t know what’s going on in the hiring process; on the contrary, at any given time, we had access to the candidate database, we could see the hiring stages with all the relevant information such as how many candidates were in each stage, if we’ve been in touch with them, etc. This way, I could get the information I needed at the time I needed it, without having to reach out to Georgios who might have been at a meeting or out of office.”

Georgios also noted the importance of having visibility and keeping everything in one place: “For example, if I see that Athina has scheduled five interviews on Monday, I know that if I log into Workable on Tuesday, I’ll find feedback on how these interviews went and I’ll instantly decide on next steps. When your time to hire is limited, you want to save time anywhere you can.”

Don’t give up quality over quantity

Often, there’s an easy way to do things: you could post a job ad to the most popular site, schedule interviews with the ones who meet the bare minimum requirements and hire the best of them – or at least the ones who’ll accept your offer. There you go, you’ve hit your hiring target. No sweat, right?

Georgios disagrees. The ‘easy way’ isn’t always the right way, and he made that clear. “We don’t want to just fill positions. We want to hire the best; those who’ll like the job and be good at it, will help us reach our business goals and stay with us in the long run.”

If you don’t evaluate candidates properly, you’ll soon find yourself having to start the hiring process all over again – particularly as candidates come to realize that you weren’t a good fit for them either. So, how do you thoroughly evaluate candidates when you’re short on time? And it gets even more challenging, considering you’re scaling a sales team, where you don’t necessarily pick candidates based on typical requirements and traditional career paths.

“It’s important to use the right assessment methods,” Athina said. “Each step of the hiring process should teach you something new about the candidate, something that’ll be definitive about their ability to do the job. You need to dig deeper into candidates’ skills and professional interests if you want to make sure you hire people based on job-related criteria and not on personal biases.”

But that’s the tricky part, according to Georgios, who explained how you can be objective when you evaluate candidates, and fast at the same time.

“We’ve found one-way video interviews very effective in our case: candidates present themselves and answer a few basic questions that’ll help us identify dealbreakers. We can review those videos in our own time which gives us the freedom to organize our schedule as we want. For in-person interviews, we share our calendar with candidates and they book a convenient time for themselves, so we don’t have to do this manually or send back-and-forth emails for every interview.”

Not only is it a major convenience for the hiring team, having such a smooth and speedy process also boosts the candidate experience, as Athina explained:

“We know that candidates are turned off when they don’t hear back from you promptly or if you seem disorganized,” Athina said. “But, it’s a lot to take when you’re hiring at this scale. It’s not uncommon to forget to send an email or to show to an interview unprepared when you have back-to-back meetings. That’s why we rely a lot on bulk emails, templates and automated notifications.”

Without automation tools, we’d need one person in the team to exclusively contact candidates.

With those handy tools, Georgios and Athina were able to more efficiently move candidates through each stage of the recruitment pipeline without wasting any valuable time on manual tasks – a more impressive feat considering they had to fill 14 positions in a short time from a total pool of 362 job applicants:

Athina added that having an ATS to keep everything in one place was a huge asset to the process: “We have access to all candidate information (resume, assignment, contact details, communication history) at any time.”

Build for the future

Finally, Georgios mentioned that quality hiring means knowing what works for your team and what doesn’t.

“We wouldn’t know, for example, that employee referrals are among our most effective recruitment strategies, unless we measured how many candidates come from each source. We keep track of all important recruiting KPIs and use this historical data for future high-volume hiring rounds.”

“The next time we scaled up our sales team, we managed to hire 15 new team members again in one month, but it felt much smoother, because we knew exactly how to do that,” Athina concurred. “And now, that we’re looking for our new Business Development Representatives, I’m confident I’ll be onboarding my new colleagues very soon.”

The good thing about scaling a sales team at such a rapid pace is that you learn to identify patterns in candidates, you understand which assessments are effective, and which are not, and on top of it all, you build your employer brand. No matter the challenges (e.g. vacation time, tight deadlines, etc.), you know where and how to look for your next hires. With smart planning and with the right tools in place, you have what it takes to grow your teams effectively. And, particularly in competitive and volatile markets, high-volume hiring is something you probably need to get used to.

The post Inside Workable: Scaling a sales team successfully appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Chris Sebastiao and Fraser Murphy have been Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) for just over a year now and recently became team captains, while Athina Pitta – who joined Workable in 2017 also as an SDR – is currently managing the broader SDR team in Athens.

As they walked me through their new offices, they answered my questions about their daily work experience at a company recently named as one of the Best Workplaces in Greece.

Business development isn’t just about selling stuff to people

So, what is it exactly that you do in tech sales?

“I’d say it’s more Business Development, rather than actual sales,” Chris says. “We reach out to companies that could get value from our software, pique their interest and try to build relationships with them.”

“As I like to say,” Athina adds, “our team is the voice of Workable abroad.” The ultimate goal is to build brand awareness and to find good fits – companies that will use and benefit from Workable. “And this requires – and grows – your business sense.”

“Your job is to pique interest but, in the meantime, you learn lots of things.” Chris describes what he really likes about working in tech sales: “Before I hop on a call, I do my homework. I visit the company’s website and try to understand how their teams are structured, how they hire (or for what roles they hire) and what their current challenges might be. By researching many websites and careers pages on a daily basis, I can confidently say that I’ve now learned a lot about different industries and their pain points.”

And knowing a company, Chris notes, means having a strong understanding of that company’s needs and how Workable can fit into that.

“I know our product better, too,” says Chris, “so I can understand whether our software is a good solution for each company I’m talking to. And if it is, I can recommend solutions that apply specifically to them – it’s never generic selling; instead, I use a consulting approach and offer targeted advice. That’s why every call I make or every email that I send is different from the previous and the next one.”

“What I love about this job,” Fraser says, “is the discussions that I have. I get to the psychology of the people I talk to, I build up trust and, ultimately, I help them. That feeling that you actually help someone hire better is so rewarding. Especially in cases where they were negative at first but you managed to handle their objections and they ended up saying something like ‘Oh, this could actually be helpful!’”

“And you never know where these discussions will take you,” Chris agrees. I’m talking with CEOs, HR managers and recruiters from different places around the world and they’ll often have something interesting to share. Because every company has its own unique challenges. So, we’ll discuss how our software can help, but we’ll also talk about things like how office politics affect hiring or how employer branding is key to attracting good employees.”

No sales background? No problem

At that point, I couldn’t help but ask them; what do you need to work in tech sales? Is there a specific career path to follow?

“Well, I used to be an interior designer and I’m currently getting an MSc degree in Digital Marketing, so I guess you wouldn’t call that a traditional career path, right?” Chris smiles. “I’m always curious, I love to learn. And I like to transfer my knowledge to others. So, about a year and a half ago, I knew I wanted to step back a little bit and learn new things before I move forward with my career. That’s when I joined Workable’s sales team.”

The versatility of the team was a good fit for Chris’ own versatile background.

“The good thing about it is that it was – and still is – a new team, so it’s a learning experience for everyone,” says Chris. “We celebrate our wins and we share our failures, so that we can learn from each other. But we also come across with new challenges – and it’s up to us to figure out how we’ll tackle them. This is when your personality can really shine.“

Fraser’s journey to Workable originates from a small town in Scotland, where he lived most of his life, and includes a PhD in Biotechnology, several academic papers, a relocation to Greece and… (almost!) police troubles right outside the Workable offices.

“I have always been interested in combining science with business,” Fraser says. “But I was lacking experience in the business sector so I knew I had to do something about it. And tech sales in a multinational environment sounded perfect. So, now that I think about it, I can’t believe I almost missed my first day at work! As I love cycling, I decided to come to the office by bike. But I didn’t realize the effect of the Athens heat on my clothes until it was too late.”

Fraser laughs, showing his positive, can-do attitude right from the start.

“Luckily, I had an extra T-shirt with me but I didn’t want to change in the office, so I started looking around the building in the hope of finding a private spot. And I thought I found it, until two police officers stopped by, gave me a weird look, said something in Greek that I couldn’t understand and, finally, left me to get changed. Five minutes later I was covered head to toe in clean clothes and deodorant and ready to start my first day!”

For Athina, the transition to this role was not an afterthought. Being a business owner herself (Athina founded Glossopolis, an e-learning platform that helps travelers learn Greek and get discounts at local businesses), she knew that she wanted to be into tech sales. And she knew the importance of business development at a software company. So, she applied at Workable for the role of Sales Development Representative when this was a new department.

But how did she grow from being the first person of the 45-strong team she became the manager of in less than two years?

“It has to do with your mentality,” Athina explains. “For example, when I first saw the job ad, I noticed that it required native-level English skills, but I’m not native. I knew, though, that I can make up for it with my hard work. So I applied anyway and haven’t regretted it! Every day, I’m around smart people; whether they come from a different country or they’ve studied or worked on a totally different field, they bring something new to the table and that’s truly inspiring.”

It’s like I’m working abroad, while I still have all the benefits of living in Greece.

Even if you’re not as determined about your next career step, as Athina was, it’s worth giving it a shot. Chris offers his own perspective on that, highlighting the crucial intangible skills one can develop in an SDR role.

“The things you’ll learn and the soft skills you’ll grow are important assets no matter what you decide to do next,” Chris says. “For example, I’ve now realized how much I’ve developed my listening skills. Some calls with potential customers last only a few minutes, so in this time, I need to pick up every detail that could be helpful and use my critical thinking to understand what’s most important.”

It’s all about the people

Now that you’ve been here for a while, what would you say is your favorite part of the day?

“It has to be whenever we get some good results, whether it’s a new team member’s first deal or when we reach the team quotas,” Athina says. “I know the amount of work that’s brought these results. So, I’m proud of the team, because, one way or another, we’ve all contributed to this success. And, of course, the celebrations after a good month or quarter aren’t bad either!”

“If I have to choose my favorite part of the day, it’s probably the moment I leave the office!” Chris jokes. “In all seriousness, I’m happy when I leave the office knowing that I’ve done a good day’s work. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy lunchtime, too. It’s like I’m taking a break in the middle of the day to meet with friends.”

For Fraser, his favorite part of the day is not literally at work, “it’s my workout before I hit the office. The fact that I have the time and the energy to go to the gym in the morning, it’s a great motivator to start the day. And then, knowing that I’ll meet so many nice people here at Workable makes me walk in with a big smile on my face. I like the job, but it’s because of the people that I love the job. Being around positive, friendly and interesting people makes the work a bit easier and nicer, too.”

Want to join our team at Workable? Visit our careers page to learn about our open roles. 

The post Behind the scenes with 3 members of Workable’s sales team appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.