Giving Away Our Secrets: How Hirewell Hires Well

We spend all this time talking on talent insights and all the different shows about how people should hire, giving free advice to everyone, including our competitors- none of which follow it after two years.

But then we actually do it publicly and you can see, and now we’re actually going to show you how well it works. So if you want to tune in, check out all of our content, you’ll find out what we recommend people to do in terms of going with their hiring processes. But we eat our own dog food. This is the stuff we do ourselves.

It’s been a cool year. So Maggie why don’t you reintroduce yourself for people who, because you joined us fairly recently but you have a really integral role here at Hirewell. Hi, I’m Maggie. I am the internal recruiter here at Hirewell. I joined like literally it’s like two months on the dot that I’ve been here.

So two months ago I joined on board and here we are, talking about new hires. So anybody who interviews with Hirewell, Meggie also known as Maggie is your point person in case you missed that video. Some metrics here. What’s the breakdown? How many people have we had start- at the beginning of the year

we were roughly 50. Is that right? Yeah. So right now we have like 75 total employees. And since the beginning of the year 2021 we have 27 new team members who started with us. Got it. We’re up 27 on the year. So just over, basically over 50% growth in the year in a market that’s hard to hire for, in a skillset that’s harder to hire for. Okay cool.

Okay. Breaking it down. Just so everyone kind of knows the types of recruiters we’re hiring for, nine of those are from our managed services group. And so our managed services group is the team that actually, is embedded with our clients. So on-demand recruiting is one of the popular ways of kind of describing that.

We added 10 people from tech, 10 tech recruiters. Two HR recruiters, two sales recruiters, two marketing recruiters, one finance and accounting recruiter. And you. Yes, the internal recruiter. Okay. So what we did was we actually did a survey of all of our employees- all the new hires because we wanted to redo our career site because I’m not happy with it.

And it kind of sucks. Like we need to redo it, but instead of like saying, “Hmm, here’s why I think people are going to like Hirewell” it’s like, why don’t we actually ask people what they liked about Hirewell why they even joined us in the first place. We didn’t get 27 responses, but that’s because we think we did the survey a few weeks ago before we had all these people hired.

So we had about 19 responses or so. Four people start this week, who are not included on that quite yet. But we’ll get their 2 cents too. Okay. So the first question was how did people originally hear about us? So we broke it down in two percentages for this. So 42% of people heard about us on LinkedIn.

Like our content, things like that. The other 42 was through referrals, like internal employees with us here. 10% direct outreach. And 1 person mentioned they applied, which I think is important because really it’s been employee referrals and being active on LinkedIn.

That’s basically how we made our year in terms of being able to hire people, which people should let sink in because if you’re trying to build out your organization for higher skillsets, like you have to 1. Build an organization people want to work for, that way they refer their friends and 2. Get your brand built.

And if you can do those two things well, everything else falls into place. For sure.

Second thing we’ve got into was we wanted to ask people what else they were looking at, just to have an idea of kind of when they were considering our company, what else were they considering?

So options were another agency, internal roles, mixture of both or nothing at all. They weren’t actually considering anybody else. What was the breakdown Meggie? Yep. So, largest percentage of that 36% we’re looking at other agencies and then next was 26% really didn’t have anything else that they were looking at right now. They were more passively looking. And then 15% we’re looking at some internal recruiting roles. 21% we’re looking at both agency and internal. So really just a mix of recruiting roles. Yeah. What’s interesting is kind of putting those together because if you added the people who are looking at both, roughly 36% of the people total were looking at internal roles. So that’s the one thing I was kind of impress upon people is that we don’t just hire- Hirewell’s not just for agency recruiters, but because of that embedded function we have, the on demand practice and the managed service to practice

like a lot of people who work here are really internal recruiters. So something to always keeping mind because that’s not the norm at most agencies, but I think it’s something that’s really kind of helped us kind of stand apart from our competitors. Both when we’re in market talking to companies but also from a talent perspective. A lot of people who thought they’d never work for an agency end up working here because they realize there’s cool opportunities to kind of continue doing internal work while always working on cool projects.

Totally.

All right now is when we got like the fun stuff is when we started getting into more open-ended answers. And so just drawing correlations, it looks like there were three primary things that attracted people to work here. So why don’t you give us like a quick overview there? Yep. For sure. Culture and people were the big thing.

And then our content creation, you know being able to be part of like a creative team was another big part of it. And then tenure and growth kind of in two different ways we’re also one of the main things people touched on. So one, just the fact that a lot of people within the organization have been promoted into their roles.

And then also just the ability to take kind of unique paths to growth. A lot of people have unique ways they got into their current positions here at Hirewell. So if I’m going to summarize that up, the three things because they’re all interconnected- 1. you have to make a culture where people don’t suck.

So just hire good people and more good people want to join you. 2. you retain people by giving people growth opportunities. But that also attracts people. So we have a lot of people like myself, I’ve been here 16 years now because I’m basically in my fourth different job at Hirewell. But that’s very much the norm with people doing different stuff.

And then 3. just got to talk about it, you know? Build a cool culture, give people growth opportunities, be intentional about your growth, but then communicate with the outside world what you’re doing and it’ll make it easy to hire. The next one actually I thought was hysterical. We didn’t really get any good out of this.

We just asked a question like who impressed you the most? I think you just wanted the tea. Yeah, I wanted some tea to see like what people had to say, if there’s any dirt being talked and I don’t know. What was your take here? I mean, it really did depend- so we just asked who kind of impressed, you influenced you into joining our team during the interview process. And it really depended on just who people were interviewing with, what team. So just management in general, had a really good impression on people. And then I think the part that you think is so funny is. Yeah. Go ahead. Someone mentioned “Matt is not intimidating.”

I don’t know why I found that so hysterically funny, because of course he’s not intimidating. But yeah, that was specifically called out as a reason why someone would want to join us is because Matt Masucci is not an intimidating force, so good job.

And the last thing, the last question we got. So, we want to know why people accepted. What was it about the organization that made people actually want to come here, join the organization? So what do we got there? Yeah, a few different things here. So culture was the main thing again, the people. You’ll hear that a lot here.

Remote flexibility and just like a good commission structure and comp structure. Again, kind of touching on the Matt part of that. People had a leadership, I guess presence that they were comfortable with. And then career growth is another big thing. And then just someone put it very, just lack of negatives.

They just really kind of liked everything they saw in the process. All right. So we gained a lot of detail on this and we’re going to take- I don’t know what the time frame is here. I hate to over promise, under deliver but we are going to be updating our career site to talk about specifically things from the team, why they wanted to join us as the reasons why people should want to join us, as opposed to me just making shit up.

So, that’ll be the next chapter and kind of redoing this. But anyone out there, if you want to know what worked, it’s basically build a cool culture, give growth opportunities, then talk about it. And if you can do that because you know, your brand will get out there, your employer brand, as we’d like to say, worst term in the world.

But also just in terms of your employees are going to refer more people and then it’s just kind of, it’s just going to happen. So then you have to have someone great like Meggie, driving the charge, putting it all together- thank you – getting the hiring done. You’re welcome.