Really Innovative Approach to High Quality Applicant Flow - Findly

I had the true pleasure to meet John Kelly, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) from Findly to learn more about what him and also what Findly is doing for the industry. 

About John:

It is always a pleasure to meet folks that are truly excited about the industry, the profession and the amount of innovation that is occurring. John has a long background in the Software as a Service (was one of the early Oracle folks!). He since then as built and sold a couple of companies and now is bringing his talents to Findly. 

Part of the fun of innovations, is often it is some of the “smaller” companies that can take a new twist on a mature product area - and Findly is doing this is the Talent Acquisition process. They are a Private Equity backed company with over 130 employees, and over 1,000 clients (not bad). They go from Assessments to the ATS portion. Here is the awesome news - they are profitiable and Cash Flow positive! Always fantastic news to see an innovation and profits!

So what do they do differently - work to really qualify the pipeline! 

I think they have latched on to Three Ideas that are really key and pretty innovative to increasing the quality of the pipeline!

1. Employee Referral can be to a Department or Job Family
2. Candidate Approval for Referral
3. CRM Approach and Assessments

Employee Referral Approach:

One the current challenges in the Referral systems today is often the way they work is an employee can forward a job posting to a friend for them to apply against. But once the friend applies - due to OFCCP rules - they have to go through the same process (e.g. meet minimum requirements, etc.). So you may have a sales engineer apply to a sales support role - and not make minimums - and then the recruiter has to decline them - and make the extra effort to add them to a sticky note, and remember them the next time. But by this point, the referral process is not a fun experience for the friend or the employee. 

So Findly came up with this cool idea to allow folks to be referred to a Department and/or Job Family. This then allows a recruiter to look at the candidate and suggest the right jobs for them. Pretty cool innovation!

Candidate Approval for the Referral

This seemed like a pretty simple idea, but I can see it reaping really good rewards in terms of determining whether someone is Passive or Active. The employee sends the the referral and it goes the friend - and the friend has to accept and approve the referral.  This small nuance helps weed out the well intending employees who are trying to recommend all of their friends, who may not be interested. 

Using a CRM approach and Assessments to Pre-Qualify. 

The other vein that seems to proliferate Findly’s approach is a built in understanding that for a lot of companies - the applicant pool is also part of the customer pool. So there is a need and desire to treat all applicants (whether hired or not) at the same level you would treat customers. So Findly has some amazing tools to allow you to interact with all of these folks and maintain records on the interactions, and learn how to maximize the relationship. Here is a great example, one very large retailer had over 900,000 people apply for 30,000 seasonal jobs and they did two things:

1. Those people received a $10 coupon to come to the store as a thank you for going through the process. This generate a tremendous amount of Revenue for the firm.
2. They then sent articles and assessments to help this large audience learn more about the products so the next seasonal hiring wave - they would be more educated and more likely to be hired... (not to mention probably buy the better items!)

Overall:

Right now - most companies are dealing with waves, waves of applications - so what a cool way to start focusing on customer friendly ways to increase the quality of the talent pool.