Case Study - Wave Financial

Overview

Having just raised $5 million dollar series A and a $12 million Series B rounds in short succession Wave was one of the most well-funded and highest-profile startups in Canada. 

At the time they were about 20 people and had been working with a couple of contingency agencies and had no internal recruiting function.  They needed to scale rapidly and for obvious reasons, the status quo was not the answer. 

Wave engaged GuruLink on a contingency basis initially, and we quickly placed several key development resources.  They were considering adding an internal resource to help with this scaling entrusted GuruLink to put together a plan to help them scale their hiring for key functions across the company, both technical and non-technical.

Solution

GuruLink worked closely with the Wave executive team to create a 12 month hiring plan and heatmap.  From here we ranked the various planned hires as High, Medium and Low difficulty and from here projected out which positions Wave could and should conceivably be able to hire directly.  We then modelled out a few different scenarios for a cost comparison, which included the “As-is” model, a model with hiring a direct internal resource and using agencies to supplement and a couple different custom GuruLink solutions.

Wave opted for a Guru Onsite model, whereby we had one of our team integrated into Wave and onsite at Wave’s offices 2-3 days per week, and one of the Co-Founders there 1 day per week for key meetings, strategy and roadmap check-ins.  The onsite resource managed all inbound (both from postings and referrals), created job descriptions, implemented systems, worked with the team to optimize processes, conducted telephone and in-person interviews, co-ordinated the entire process, negotiated and prepared offers and even helped with onboarding new hires.  The GuruLink core team would also help supplement the candidate pipeline for the positions that were scored as high difficulty, as well as those there were scored as medium difficulty after leveraging organic for these for 2-4 weeks depending on urgency.  All low difficulty positions were filled organically, and several of the medium difficulty.

The projected cost per hire in this model was just over $6,300 per hire, which is a cost per hire well below what most companies are able to do internally and as you can see below we dramatically outperformed that projection.

Results

GuruLink helped Wave to scale from around 25 people to almost 100, making every single hire along the way.  The hires spanned Technology, Accounting, Sales and Operations. 

The cost per hire across all of these hires worked out to $4,073.  If only 1/3 of these hires had been made on a typical contingency basis this represents a savings of over $200,000.

Additionally, during this process GuruLink requested and was granted an opportunity to invest in Wave as we truly believe that this helps to realign incentives and gives us skin in the game.  Wave eventually exited in June 2019 for $537 million, one of the top 5 largest non-IPO tech exits in the last 5-10 years in Canada.  Ultimately, a great outcome for all!

Testimonial

“Drew and GuruLink became a very important partner of Wave during a significant growth period. Their personalized approach provided a customized solution that allowed us to scale our company very effectively.

Strong communication created a great working relationship that led to great results and the consistently high level of integrity at every stage made the experience of working with Drew very comfortable and effective. His desire to ensure he was meeting our needs was at the forefront of the service he provided and was the primary reason that we were very satisfied with the overall results we got from the partnership.”

— James Lochrie, Co-Founder