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

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

Overview

Founded in 2013; ZenHub is the number one project management software platform built to support distributed workforces. Businesses trust ZenHub to help them support development at scale for remote teams because ZenHub offers the most powerful project management technology available for remote teams, integrated with both Slack and GitHub, ZenHub is a one-stop-shop for all of your project management needs. ZenHub powers teams for over 4,000 firms across the world, supporting organizations ranging from industry leaders like Amazon to local start-ups.

Having recently announced a $4.7 USD million seed funding; ZenHub was on a hyper-growth trajectory (current pace is 50% YOY growth) with no signs of slowing down. Due to this rapid growth, ZenHub engaged GuruLink to help with the identification and activation of quality candidates for their talent acquisition team.

To help support ZenHub, 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 had complete ownership over the entire hiring process at ZenHub as the sole recruitment resource for their organization.

Challenges & Requirements

• The company was in growth mode and didn’t have a dedicated talent team
• The recruitment process required optimization and improvement
• Needed recommendations for tools and processes for internal use
• A dedicated recruiter was required to help facilitate the growth that ZenHub was looking for

Solution

Gurulink’s main objective was to identify top talent for ZenHub for all business units across ZenHub’s organization. GuruLink’s RPO solution provided ZenHub with 40+ hours of flexible- on-demand full-cycle recruitment services to engage candidates.

Over the 12 months that GuruLink partnered with ZenHub we concentrated on and filled roles including but not limited to:

1. Vice President of Marketing
2. Senior Product Manager
3. Customer Success Manager
4. Head of Community
5. Account Executive
6. Software Engineers
7. DevOps/SRE

Results

Over the 12 months of GuruLink’s partnership with ZenHub, 36 offers were presented with 31 being accepted for an overall acceptance rate of 86%.

The cost per hire over the 12 months came in at $6,451 representing a total savings of over $730,000 (or $23,549 per hire) in agency fees and lower than most companies are able to do it internally.