Well… I can share how we get often get 1000+ applicants and end up with a few incredibly talented individuals joining us.

I should note:

The companies I’m hiring for are not (yet) household names. Most of our employees had never heard our company names before applying.

We’re not offering crazy salaries — we just aim for market-rate.

And we’re not using external recruiters to help. We have some recruitment costs, but they’re relatively low.

So… how do we do it?

1. We hire remotely.

We do care about timezone, and we avoid a few countries due to the legal challenges of hiring there, but we’re not restricted to only hiring in a given city (or even country).

This massively increases the pool of talent that could meet our needs.

2. We identify the things that make us special.

It’s not the salary, our company name, or the job title.

It is:

- Our core values, where we combine a focus on impact with enjoying the journey

- The opportunity to work in a small and rapidly growing company, where you can learn loads and make a huge impact

- Being profitable, so the above benefit isn’t combined with high stress

- The opportunity to work was directly with successful entrepreneurs

- Our wider benefits package, including 40 days vacation leave, 4 months paternity/maternity leave, an annual in-person meet-up, and so on.

To the right person, these are huge!

3. We create an ad which _really_ sells this message

We do not have an ad titled “Mid-level developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”

We have an ad titled “Join our remote team and enjoy work-life balance as a Full Stack Developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”

Spot the difference? :)

You can review the rest of one of ads here: https://docs.spidergap.com/en/articles/2011605-join-our-remo...

4. We post on job boards

Our favorite for developers used to be StackOverflow. It cost £3–5k but was worth it for the quality of applicants. Sadly they’ve stopped supporting job ads now.

We also use weworkremotely.com. Posting here is cheap, and your ad will get picked up a number of other remote job boards for free.

5. We ask 3 simple questions to start the filtering process (— and we do NOT look at their resumes — at least not yet)

We want to make it easy for the right candidates to start the process, but in doing so we’re going to get a lot of junk.

So we ask 3 simple questions:

- What’s your proudest achievement, and why?

- What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?

- Which of our features do you like the most, and why?

80% of the applicants will fall at this first hurdle.

Loads will fall due to poor English, or by giving one word answers.

A surprising number will answer the 3rd question with “I haven’t looked, sorry!”

They aren’t difficult questions, so we should be looking for great answers. And some answers will stand out. So they’ll go through.

Reviewing these applicants is quick — well under a minute each on average. But it still takes time with 1000 applicants, so we do outsource some of this work to a virtual assistant.

6. We then have a sequence of steps to filter it down further.

For a developer, these would be:

- Answer 2 coding challenges (75% filtered out again — ~62 candidates left from 1000)

- 15 minute core values and communications interview (50% filtered out — 31 left)

- 30 minute dev team interview (50% filtered out — 15 left)

- 90 minute head of department interview (75% filtered out — 4 left)

- 20 hour mini-project (50% filtered out — 2 left)

Yep… after 6 stages, we've turned 1000 hopeful applicants into just 2 outstanding candidates who we offer jobs to.

Now — it’s worth noting that for other roles (sales, HR, finance, etc.), we have fewer steps (e.g. there’s no mini project as we’re can effectively test their ability in the interviews) and a much higher rate of great candidates get to the end of the process.

Hiring developers is particularly hard because we maintain a high bar for engineering talent, and fewer candidates meet our expectations for communications etc.

To manage this process, we simply have a series of forms and checklists. We’ve used Podio in the past, but expect to be using AirManual to manage the whole process for future roles :)

In both cases, you’re getting a very affordable and flexible tool — we’ve seen no need to spend $1000s on an expensive recruitment tool.

7. We offer a job to the great candidates we’re able to hire!

8. If we can’t hire everyone who makes it this far, we ask them to join our “farm team”

This concept, and many of the other ideas in our process, came from “How to Hire A-Players” by Eric Herrenkohl.

Recruitment takes a lot of time, so it’s every manager’s responsibility to build a farm team of people who we’d love to hire, and are keen to join in future.

When the next job comes up, we know exactly who to reach out to!

And… that’s it.

Hope that's useful :)