Going Beyond “Applicant Tracking”: 6 Reminders That Hiring is Human

From the beginning, Lever has been on a mission to transform the way companies hire, with teamwork and true candidate relationships at the center. Today, it’s humbling and inspiring that Lever has 1,000 customers – 1,000 incredible companies – supporting that philosophy.

Hiring, after all, is so much more than rigid processes and “applicant tracking.” It’s an unpredictable and exhilarating journey in which the right candidates find the right teams.

And so, I don’t think there’s a better way to celebrate helping 1,000 customers build their own teams, than to commemorate the hiring stories of the Leveroos who helped us reach this milestone.

I’d share every employee’s story if I could, because there’s a fundamentally human story to tell and something to learn from each of them. I chose the following six, because to me, they’re perfect reminders of how crazy, random, exciting, even beautifully serendipitous hiring can be.

The one we tricked into working with us
Andreas Braendhaugen, Product Designer

We gave Andreas such a soft sell, he was basically working for Lever before he realized what had happened.

Andreas was a friend of mine from Stanford d.school. He was open to new opportunities, and I was feeling the pain of working on design alone, so the founders and I hatched a plan to get Andreas on board.

First, we got his attention by asking him to swing by Lever after his normal, full-time job to get his input on design mocks. That eventually turned into a regular 7 p.m. to midnight routine. Even then, we weren’t ready to make the hard sell, so we offered to let him come on board as an official employee with the understanding he might find another opportunity. He accepted our offer, and I’m very happy to say he never did start that job search.

What I learned with Andreas, and continue to learn time and time again, is that there’s no hiring playbook. We were willing to deviate from a traditional process for the right person and gave Andreas time to reach his own conclusions about the upside of coming on board.

Since joining…

There’s a piece of Andreas in every one of our design decisions. His presence has been huge in keeping us true to the voice of our users and building things to last, with a constant and utmost focus on integrity of design that manifests in this wonderful simplicity. Every new hire who walks through our doors learns about our product philosophy, and so much of it comes from Andreas.

The one who moved into my laundry room
Rachael Stedman, Software Engineer

Rachael was sourced by Nate, our CTO, who found her through his college network. She had just returned from a long trip in Australia and signed a new lease in Boston, so she definitely wasn’t looking to move across the country. And yet, she found herself packing up her entire life just a few weeks later.

When I got Rachael on the phone, I remember having this refreshingly real and energizing conversation. She told me about the startup scene in Melbourne, an art gallery she thought I might appreciate and her search for a company whose vision really resonated with her. We invited her out to San Francisco for a week to work on a component of an open source project – no strings attached.

The week went by without a hitch, and it’s crazy the way this worked out, but we happened to have our first-ever company offsite that weekend in Austin, TX. At the end of the week, on Friday, Rachael flew back to Boston, but we had all been trying to convince her to come, and by the time she touched down, she was finally game. So that same day, just a few hours later, she got right back on a plane to Austin.

By that point, I had sent Rachael an offer letter that we were all waiting with bated breath for her to sign. She’s an early riser, so without telling any of us first, Rachael quietly signed her electronic letter while we were all still asleep. Let’s just say I woke up to an exciting email notification that morning. We couldn’t wait for Rachael to start, and neither could she, so she moved to San Francisco (to my laundry/guest room for a few months, to be exact) one whirlwind week later.

Since joining…

Rachael is the longest-tenured engineer at Lever, and in many ways, she's become the standard bearer for our engineering culture – how we project manage, work cross functionally and communicate out to the rest of the team. Above and beyond engineering, Rachael started our first D&I (diversity and inclusion) taskforce back in 2014, when we were only 10 employees. She’s been a huge, formative driver behind our culture and deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, and I know we wouldn’t be the same company without her.

The one who founded our sales team
Aalok Patel, Account Executive

Late 2013, we had a lot of trepidation about how we were supposed to hire our first salesperson (or really any salesperson). We were just a group of engineers and designers – nobody knew a thing about sales and none of us had even interviewed a salesperson before. All we knew was that Lever was about to change in this massive and exciting way.

We found Aalok by sourcing him, and at first he actually turned us down. Lucky for us, Aalok’s brother happened to be the CEO of a company that used Lever. I don’t know what his brother said about us, but I’m grateful for whatever it was because it convinced Aalok to at least hear us out.

When Aalok came in, he made an instant impression. He understood product, he understood the tech industry. He was exactly the smart, scrappy, heroic early-stage salesperson we had in our minds but didn’t quite know how to find. It was clear to me within two or three minutes that Aalok was our guy, so I pretty much stopped interviewing him and said, “Let’s talk about how to get the others bought in.” Without missing a beat, Aalok replied, “Great, because I would really love to ask a few questions about Derby,” (Lever’s underlying, real-time technology built by our CTO, Nate). No surprise, his curiosity and technical aptitude made him a shoo-in with the rest of the team, as well.

Since joining…

When we brought Aalok on board, it was truly transformative for Lever. It was insane how little we knew about sales. Today, Aalok is still crushing it. Not only was he was the first salesperson to reach one million in annual revenue, but he’s become a vital repository of information about the ATS landscape and a true coach and mentor to the dozens of people that are walking in his footsteps.

The one who blew us away as a college senior
Josh Ackerman, Product Manager

Josh was the first person we hired after Aalok, and his hiring process was equally as scary and unknown, but for a different reason: Josh was a new grad. He was this young, emerging person and we had the potential to ruin his career. That’s perhaps a touch dramatic, but I believe a person’s first job out of school irrevocably shapes their working outlook. The stakes had massively gone up.

Our apprehensions aside, we went ahead with the interview process and sped through it in one day. Randal, our Chief Product Officer, was the last person to interview Josh. Randal always wears a poker face when he interviews, and he did Josh’s Career Trajectory, this intense two-hour session where we go through a person’s academic and work history to get a deep understanding of that person’s motivations. Josh probably had no idea which way Randal was leaning, but the first words out of Randal’s mouth during the huddle were, “We’ve got to hire this guy.” So 15 minutes after Josh had left the office, he got this totally non-suave phone call from Nate saying, “Hey…can you come back?” We had an offer to extend.

Since joining…

More than any other single individual, Josh’s growth trajectory – from customer success, to being the foundational member of our product ops team and now product management – has made me realize that we, Lever, really have built something that gives people genuinely career-defining opportunities. I still can’t believe sometimes that we aren’t just a ragtag group of engineers tricking people into working for us* (*see Andreas), but a place where people can launch their careers.

The one who politely nudged us how to interview better...during her interview
Jen Kim, Chief of Staff

Jen was our first traditional applicant hire, the first employee to join without any prior connections to the company, and let me tell you, she was the boss. She had been a recruiter in the past and I remember her nudging all of us, ever so politely during her interview, about how we could interview her better and even suggested questions we might want to ask to learn more about her past experience. A lot of people in her shoes would have gone through the process passively, but what I love about Jen is that I don’t think she has it in her to keep quiet about problems (and solutions) she sees.

Jen didn’t come from a tech background, which is a big question mark when you’re a tech startup with headcount in the single digits, but her problem-solving DNA made her such a great fit for Lever. She was interested in design thinking, curious and came in with a built-in empathy for our users that ended up being instrumental not only in our product development, but how we came to develop our own philosophy around talent development.

Since joining…

Jen started in customer success, and then took on an additional role as recruiter, growing us to 50 employees. She designed Ramp Camp (what we call our onboarding), introduced Colors (a working styles assessment and huge part of Lever culture today), and constantly applies what she knows about developing talent to help our customers. I can’t think of anyone who has worked in as many roles, or contributed to our company in as many capacities as Jen.

The one who almost got away
Leela Srinivasan, Chief Marketing Officer

We had a few late-stage candidates for CMO in our pipeline when I got introduced to Leela, and the timing was this close to not working out. She couldn’t meet until weeks out, and we had to keep moving forward with the existing candidates. But all along, I had this feeling that meeting Leela would end up throwing everything off.

When we finally met for an early-morning coffee, Leela blew me away. I had never expected to find someone with founder-level passion for the problem we were solving and people we were helping. She came back to Lever that very evening, to breakfast the next morning and to the office every day after that for a week – talking to us and our customers, while developing an understanding for our product, approach and vision. She had so much to contribute to the discussion, her “interviews” essentially became working sessions with the founders.

We spent seven months looking for a marketing leader, but from meeting Leela to signed offer letter was only 12 whirlwind days. It was an interesting situation, but we were game to show Leela our souls and go through a good process in a short amount of time. Happily, she was too.

Since joining…

Since Leela’s joined, I continue to be in awe of her. She leads with such authentic passion, empathy and soul. She’s an incredible optimist and accomplished strategist, and any time I come to her with a crazy goal, her first instinct is to take it and run with it. She’s been a remarkable contributor to culture to far beyond just the Marketing team, and it’s moving Lever in the right direction having another woman leader at the very top. When you have all of that, you can do incredible things.

Conclusion

Every candidate has a unique situation and set of needs, and you simply can't force people into a linear "apply, interview, hire" recruitment process. So my challenge for all of you talent seekers out there, is to keep this in mind the next time you find a candidate you’re passionate about. With enough flexibility, creativity and patience, and a recruiting process that’s ultimately about people getting to know people, you’ll get the right talent on your team.