Thin Air Labs

Thin Air Labs

by | Mar 20, 2023

Case Study - Thin Air Labs

# of Months

# of Hires

Cost per Hire

Total Savings

 

Overview

Thin Air Labs is a prominent venture capital firm and growth studio based in Calgary, Alberta, that is dedicated to creating meaningful value for humanity by supporting early-stage startups in their global expansion. Beyond providing financial resources, Thin Air Labs offers comprehensive assistance in critical areas such as talent acquisition, product development, design, and product discovery.

Thanks to the extensive relationship between Managing Director James Lochrie and GuruLink, the latter was engaged to assist in building the foundational team for Thin Air Labs. GuruLink was instrumental in recruiting skilled professionals to fill key roles such as Software Engineers, Funding Catalysts, and Product Managers, among others.

 

Challenges & Requirements

  • Recruiting for a nascent organization in an unexplored market
  • Creating interview and HR processes to optimize candidate selection with maximum efficiency
  • Implementation of ATS
  • Building a team of diverse and educated talent

 

Solution

At the inception of the project, Thin Air Labs engaged GuruLink to provide a fractional recruitment specialist for 20 hours per week, who was responsible for sourcing, contacting, interviewing, and closing potential candidates for various roles. Additionally, GuruLink was tasked with developing an effective interview process and crafting marketing materials to facilitate entry into a new market. During the implementation of the Applicant Tracking System, the team opted to utilize the Lever platform. Furthermore, GuruLink helped establish crucial HR processes for the company.

Over a span of 11 months, GuruLink played a pivotal role in securing 11 highly qualified professionals for Thin Air Labs, including Funding Catalysts, a Lead Software Engineer, Software Engineers, and a Director of Product, among others. Through its proven recruitment strategies, GuruLink maintained an outstanding 85% closing rate, demonstrating exceptional talent acquisition prowess.

 

Results

  • Successfully filled 11 roles over an 11-month time span
  • Cost per hire: $8,676
  • Total Savings: $277,212
  • Created and streamlined an internal interview process that Thin Air Labs continues to use
  • Developed targeted candidate outreach and follow-up campaign templates

 

“I was very impressed by GuruLink.

Gavin and Paige were able to find opportunities that aligned with my personal interests for companies that are at the forefront of new technologies and industries. The process was very quick and guidance was given every step of the way. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a job.”

– Jeremy/Candidate

“Having applied to many jobs individually

and feeling like I was getting lost in a pile of resumes, GuruLink did the legwork of presenting my skills and experience to the employer for me and helped get me the IT job that I’ve always wanted. They have educated me on the company, prepared me for who I’d be interviewing with, what questions might be asked. They gave me the confidence I needed to go in and rock the interviews, and now the job. In a booming IT job market that can be hard to find valuable and interesting work, GuruLink found the job that’s right for me, at the salary that I wanted.”

– Dany/Candidate

“I would like to say thank you

Julia and Jibran for the great opportunity that they gave me. As a newcomer to Canada, I wasn’t expecting to get the same job that I have before in my home country. I am unfamiliar with the recruiting process here, and I always hear that we need ‘Canadian Experience’ even if it means taking a job not related to your previous occupation or education. But with the guidance and help of awesome recruiters like Julia and Jibran, I was able to get a job well suited to my qualifications and more than expected compensation. I am very grateful to both of them, and I hope that they can help more newcomers like me to have a great job in Canada and start a new chapter in their lives.”

– Marc/Candidate

Dapper Labs

Dapper Labs

by | Nov 20, 2022

Case Study - Dapper Labs

# of Months

# of Hires

Cost per Hire

Total Savings

 

Overview

Dapper Labs is a Vancouver-based unicorn that is behind CryptoKitties, NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, UFC Strike and the Flow blockchain. Dapper Labs created the Flow blockchain to help bring NFTs and new forms of digital engagement to fans around the world by paving the way to a more open and inclusive digital world that starts with games and entertainment.

Founded in 2018, Dapper Labs has raised over $600M+ and some of its investors include the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Google Ventures, Kevin Durant, Michael Jordan and many others. Dapper Labs was named one of 50 world’s most innovative companies and the #1 gaming company of 2022 by Fast Company.

Dapper Labs engaged GuruLink to help with their extremely fast-paced growth and recruitment needs that spanned multiple areas. At the time that GuruLink was engaged, Dapper Labs had only 1 recruiter and 1 coordinator working across over 50+ openings, many with multiple hires.

 

Challenges & Requirements

  • Massive volume of hiring across a variety of different roles
  • The recruitment process required optimization and improvement
  • Needed recommendations on new sourcing tools and process
  • Lack of ability to measure key metrics in order to effectively manage the recruitment team and understand key pipeline metrics and velocity
  • Internal communication was breaking down and the process and decision-making were ad hoc
  • The company lacked internal knowledge of recruitment tools, and process automation, and was under-utilizing their existing tools
  • Inconsistent, ad hoc, and lengthy internal recruitment/interview processes between departments
  • The internal recruitment team was significantly under-resourced

 

Solution

As an ongoing project, Dapper Labs has needed a variety of different resources as the company and recruitment team has grown. During this time, GuruLink has provided a Recruitment Manager, both senior and intermediate recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators to help facilitate the capacity across the team as more internal resources were brought in.

Given the overall volume of hiring and aggressive growth plans, we worked with Dapper Labs in a Hybrid RPO capacity and as such in addition to providing on-demand resources also provided contingency search services for many of their roles.

At the onset of the project we started with 2 fractional resources and eventually ramped up to 7 full-time resources including a Recruitment Manager, 2 full-time Recruiters, 2 full-time Sourcers, and 2 Recruitment Coordinators. As the project progressed we also played a key role in scaling out the internal TA function and eventually helped to grow the internal team to a team of 12.

In addition to helping optimize the hiring process, creating outbound collateral, creating a metrics-driven recruitment culture, and helping scale out the internal TA function we also helped bring in new tools such as Gem and TalentWall and integrated these into the processes for both sourcing and recruitment.

The RPO team through GuruLink worked on a wide range of requisitions at various levels on the Creative, Engineering, Product, Marketing, Customer Support, and Design teams. The roles spanned from junior level all the way to executive and C-level.

During our time with Dapper Labs (which is still ongoing as of Aug. 2022) the company has grown from 129 people to over 500 people.

 

Results

  • 24-month project duration
  • Over 150 successful hires
  • Cost-per-hire under $12,000
  • Built out the majority of the internal Talent Acquisition team (10+ internal individuals)
  • Offer Acceptance ratio of 94%
  • Recommended and helped implement Gem for top-of-funnel sourcing and outreach management and metrics
  • Total savings vs contingency of $1,746,714 (or $20,077 per hire), equating to a 6.99% of the candidates’ average 1st-year salary

 

“I was very impressed by GuruLink.

Gavin and Paige were able to find opportunities that aligned with my personal interests for companies that are at the forefront of new technologies and industries. The process was very quick and guidance was given every step of the way. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a job.”

– Jeremy/Candidate

“Having applied to many jobs individually

and feeling like I was getting lost in a pile of resumes, GuruLink did the legwork of presenting my skills and experience to the employer for me and helped get me the IT job that I’ve always wanted. They have educated me on the company, prepared me for who I’d be interviewing with, what questions might be asked. They gave me the confidence I needed to go in and rock the interviews, and now the job. In a booming IT job market that can be hard to find valuable and interesting work, GuruLink found the job that’s right for me, at the salary that I wanted.”

– Dany/Candidate

“I would like to say thank you

Julia and Jibran for the great opportunity that they gave me. As a newcomer to Canada, I wasn’t expecting to get the same job that I have before in my home country. I am unfamiliar with the recruiting process here, and I always hear that we need ‘Canadian Experience’ even if it means taking a job not related to your previous occupation or education. But with the guidance and help of awesome recruiters like Julia and Jibran, I was able to get a job well suited to my qualifications and more than expected compensation. I am very grateful to both of them, and I hope that they can help more newcomers like me to have a great job in Canada and start a new chapter in their lives.”

– Marc/Candidate

Thinkific

Thinkific

by | Nov 16, 2022

Case Study - Thinkific

# of Months

# of Hires

Cost per Hire

Total Savings

 

Overview

Thinkific is a software platform that gives anyone, anywhere the ability to easily create, market, and sell their own online courses. The team of 400+ Thinkers is building and expanding an incredible product that empowers creators around the globe while working collaboratively to learn, grow, and succeed together.

Founded in 2012; Thinkific has grown and raised $22 million which lead to a successful IPO in 2021. Thinkific presently has a 4.9 star rating on Glassdoor and was voted the #2 Best Workplace in 2021.

Thinkific initially engaged Gurulink to help support Top of Funnel (TOF) sourcing. They were experiencing massive growth in evergreen roles and needed a regular list of prospective candidates to reach out to.

 

Challenges & Requirements

  • Volume of Hiring
  • Team was under-staffed based on the volume of requirements
  • General talent shortage
  • High-quality top of funnel and candidate outreach

 

Solution

At the onset of the project Thinkific engaged GuruLink to provide 1 fractional Sourcing Specialist at 20 hours per week to support top-of-funnel sourcing for senior engineering roles as well as initial candidate screenings and ongoing candidate relationship management.

Within 3 months of engagement, the scope of the project was increased to one full-time Sourcing Specialist at 40 hours per week driving top of funnel across a variety of roles and ultimately continued on for a total of 16 months.

We quickly gained a reputation for providing a high quality, high volume top-of-funnel and were typically assigned some of the most challenging roles.

Some of the roles that we filled while on this project were:

  • Vice President of Engineering
  • Vice President of Operations
  • Director of Payments
  • Director of Information Security
  • Product Manager x 2
  • Senior/Engineering Manager (multiple hires)
  • Senior Engineer Lead (multiple hires)
  • Software Engineers (multiple hires)
  • EA to the CEO
  • Technical Architect
  • Data Reliability Engineer
  • PR Manager
  • Finance Operations Lead
  • Risk Analyst
  • Manager of Demand Generation
  • CRM Lifecycle Manager

While supporting some of the most challenging hires we also managed to maintain the highest offer acceptance ratio on the TA team.

 

Results

  • Successfully filled 23 roles in 16 months, several of which were Director level or above
  • Cost-per-hire of $9,713
  • Streamlined internal interview process reducing the average number of interviews to hire from 5+ to 3 and reduced total interview processing time by 10-14 business days on average per role
  • Developed targeted candidate outreach and follow-up campaign templates
  • Developed training materials and templates for future recruitment and department hires
  • Maintained the highest offer acceptance ratio on the TA team

 

Testimonial

“”

Rylan Iredale

“I was very impressed by GuruLink.

Gavin and Paige were able to find opportunities that aligned with my personal interests for companies that are at the forefront of new technologies and industries. The process was very quick and guidance was given every step of the way. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a job.”

– Jeremy/Candidate

“Having applied to many jobs individually

and feeling like I was getting lost in a pile of resumes, GuruLink did the legwork of presenting my skills and experience to the employer for me and helped get me the IT job that I’ve always wanted. They have educated me on the company, prepared me for who I’d be interviewing with, what questions might be asked. They gave me the confidence I needed to go in and rock the interviews, and now the job. In a booming IT job market that can be hard to find valuable and interesting work, GuruLink found the job that’s right for me, at the salary that I wanted.”

– Dany/Candidate

“I would like to say thank you

Julia and Jibran for the great opportunity that they gave me. As a newcomer to Canada, I wasn’t expecting to get the same job that I have before in my home country. I am unfamiliar with the recruiting process here, and I always hear that we need ‘Canadian Experience’ even if it means taking a job not related to your previous occupation or education. But with the guidance and help of awesome recruiters like Julia and Jibran, I was able to get a job well suited to my qualifications and more than expected compensation. I am very grateful to both of them, and I hope that they can help more newcomers like me to have a great job in Canada and start a new chapter in their lives.”

– Marc/Candidate

Drop Loyalty

Drop Loyalty

by | Nov 16, 2022

Case Study - Drop Loyalty

# of Months

# of Hires

Cost per Hire

Total Savings

 

Overview

Drop is a rewards platform on a mission to inspire people to live their optimal lives by empowering them financially.

Powered by machine learning, Drop matches their 7+ Million consumers with over 500+ partner brands to satisfy two main goals: to earn points from their purchases and redeem them for instant rewards.

Headquartered in Toronto, with an office in New York, Drop is backed by world-class investors including NEA, HOF, Royal Bank of Canada, Sierra Ventures, and White Star Capital with current capital raised between $56.2M and $71M.

The responsibilities for Drop’s recruitment were tasked to the Chief of Staff but due to substantial company growth, this task became too much for one person to tackle on their own. GuruLink was engaged for a 3-month renewable contract at 20 hrs/week to help address the backlog of internal applicants for engineering.

One month into the engagement between Drop and GuruLink, the Chief of Staff for Drop left for another opportunity. GuruLink was then given the responsibility of managing all recruitment-related tasks for Drop on an interim basis. GuruLink was contracted for 40 hrs/week, and eventually that increased to 80 hrs/week (2 resources) in order to handle all internal recruitment operations for the company. The engagement was extended multiple times and wound up running for a total of 10 months.

Challenges & Requirements

  • Drop was losing top professionals to other companies at a rate of 1-4 employees per month (including 4 Directors and Managers responsible for staffing in their departments)
  • Backlog of internal applicants (approximately 250-500 applicants per role for 10-15 positions at the start of the engagement
  • Company requirement for current projects to Hire 3-5 employees every month for 2021
  • The company lacked internal knowledge of recruitment tools, process automation and use of ATS (Lever)
  • Convoluted and lengthy internal recruitment/interview processes between departments
  • No internal recruitment team

 

Solution

  • First 30 days address the backlog issue of past applications to Drop for 10-15 positions
  • 30-60 days for internal review of all hiring teams and hiring process for Engineering, Marketing, Design and Sales teams
  • During the 30-60 day review period also update Drop’s ATS feature use, leverage automation, and improve accessibility & scalability
  • Created process/framework for revisiting top candidates and previous finalists
  • Developed a new process for managing team-wide sourcing efforts eliminating double data entry
  • Develop and implement new internal recruitment processes and interview processes
  • Education of the current hiring processes and market value for professionals to Hiring Manager and Founders through weekly and monthly meetings
  • Develop onboarding content and processes for the future recruitment team

 

Results

  • 31 out of 65 hires staffed by RPO directly, with ⅓ of these being Managers or Director level, 3 Agency hires through GuruLink at reduced placement rates for Engineering
  • Streamlined internal interview process reducing the average number of interviews to hire from 5+ to 3+ and reduced total interview processing time by 10-14 business days on average per role
  • Increased speed and efficiency of the ATS to reduce response rate by applicants by 3-5 business days
  • Created internal templates and ATS automation for scheduling, tracking interview processes and candidate pipelines
  • Developed targeted candidate outreach and follow up campaign templates
  • Developed training templates for future recruitment and department hires
  • Drop is now 125+ employee company and set up for continued future growth
  • They have an internal recruitment team that is set up for continued success with established hiring practices and process
  • An updated and responsive ATS system for optimized scheduling and pipeline management
“I was very impressed by GuruLink.

Gavin and Paige were able to find opportunities that aligned with my personal interests for companies that are at the forefront of new technologies and industries. The process was very quick and guidance was given every step of the way. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a job.”

– Jeremy/Candidate

“Having applied to many jobs individually

and feeling like I was getting lost in a pile of resumes, GuruLink did the legwork of presenting my skills and experience to the employer for me and helped get me the IT job that I’ve always wanted. They have educated me on the company, prepared me for who I’d be interviewing with, what questions might be asked. They gave me the confidence I needed to go in and rock the interviews, and now the job. In a booming IT job market that can be hard to find valuable and interesting work, GuruLink found the job that’s right for me, at the salary that I wanted.”

– Dany/Candidate

“I would like to say thank you

Julia and Jibran for the great opportunity that they gave me. As a newcomer to Canada, I wasn’t expecting to get the same job that I have before in my home country. I am unfamiliar with the recruiting process here, and I always hear that we need ‘Canadian Experience’ even if it means taking a job not related to your previous occupation or education. But with the guidance and help of awesome recruiters like Julia and Jibran, I was able to get a job well suited to my qualifications and more than expected compensation. I am very grateful to both of them, and I hope that they can help more newcomers like me to have a great job in Canada and start a new chapter in their lives.”

– Marc/Candidate

AlleyCorp Nord

AlleyCorp Nord

by | Oct 6, 2022

Case Study - AlleyCorp Nord

# of Months

# of Hires

Cost per Hire

Total Savings

 

Overview

Founded in 2020, AlleyCorp Nord is part of AlleyCorp, a $2B VC firm and incubator headquartered in New York City. They’ve helped some big names like MongoDB, Meetup and Zola. They expanded into Montreal in 2020 to take advantage of the pool of technical talent. Their primary goal is to work with early-stage startups by providing the funding and technical resources they need to get the first iterations of their products and platform off the ground.

AlleyCorp Nord currently works with 6-7 different startup companies and is constantly adding new ones to its portfolio. They span many different industries including healthcare, fin-tech, AI and Machine Learning, and even food video recipes.

During 2021, they saw unprecedented growth in the tech startup sector and engaged GuruLink to help with the identification and activation of quality candidates for their technical team. These included Engineering Managers, Staff Developers, Full-stack Developers, Product Designers, DevOps professionals, etc.

GuruLink started working with ACN in 2020 when the team was just the CTO and was able to build credibility through a high volume of quality placements. To help support ACN in their growth, Gurulink provided a full-time RPO Recruitment Consultant who focused on building and improving current processes as well as sourcing, hiring, and closing a variety of candidates across multiple skills and needs. We worked in tandem with ACNs hiring team to create efficiencies across the entire hiring process and acted as the sole recruitment resource for their organization for the majority of the RPO.

 

Challenges & Requirements

Due to the limited size of AlleyCorp’s team and the responsibilities on the plate of the CTO, it was very difficult for them to make time to recruit top-level professionals. They also had a number of outstanding candidates in their ATS and needed help refining their hiring process.

Given AlleyCorp’s unique model, there was also a challenge of organizing and finding candidates in their ATS when new startups came on board.

 

Solution

GuruLink’s main objective was to identify top-level talent to work for the early-stage startups under the ACN umbrella. GuruLink’s RPO solution provided ACN with 20-40+ hours of flexible, on-demand, full-cycle recruitment services to engage candidates.

GuruLink sourced and recruited roles primarily for polyglot developers at all levels, Engineering Managers, DevOps and Product Designers.

We also cleaned up and actioned over 700 candidate profiles, submitted 133 scorecards used to provide feedback post-interview and scheduled 195 interviews for us or ACNs team members to complete.

GuruLink created a way for ACN’s team to organize and find candidates more easily using a system of tags and pools in Greenhouse. This created efficiencies in the sourcing process for candidates they already knew they liked.

In addition, we trained their HR professional who was a new hire during the RPO. This was done through formal training and over Slack, amounting to around 8 hours in total.

Results

Over the 5 months of GuruLink’s RPO with ACN, 14 offers were presented with 11 being accepted during the RPO and two being accepted after the final date of the RPO, for an overall acceptance rate of 93%.

The cost per hire over the 12 months came in at VALUE representing a total savings of over VALUE (or VALUE per hire) in agency fees and lower than most companies are able to do it internally.

“I was very impressed by GuruLink.

Gavin and Paige were able to find opportunities that aligned with my personal interests for companies that are at the forefront of new technologies and industries. The process was very quick and guidance was given every step of the way. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a job.”

– Jeremy/Candidate

“Having applied to many jobs individually

and feeling like I was getting lost in a pile of resumes, GuruLink did the legwork of presenting my skills and experience to the employer for me and helped get me the IT job that I’ve always wanted. They have educated me on the company, prepared me for who I’d be interviewing with, what questions might be asked. They gave me the confidence I needed to go in and rock the interviews, and now the job. In a booming IT job market that can be hard to find valuable and interesting work, GuruLink found the job that’s right for me, at the salary that I wanted.”

– Dany/Candidate

“I would like to say thank you

Julia and Jibran for the great opportunity that they gave me. As a newcomer to Canada, I wasn’t expecting to get the same job that I have before in my home country. I am unfamiliar with the recruiting process here, and I always hear that we need ‘Canadian Experience’ even if it means taking a job not related to your previous occupation or education. But with the guidance and help of awesome recruiters like Julia and Jibran, I was able to get a job well suited to my qualifications and more than expected compensation. I am very grateful to both of them, and I hope that they can help more newcomers like me to have a great job in Canada and start a new chapter in their lives.”

– Marc/Candidate

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