How we shorten our hiring cycle by weeks

It’s no secret that this hiring market is brutal. While we’re all working double time to recruit and hire great talent no matter our job title, the ones bearing the brunt of it are recruiters—particularly technical recruiters. Luckily, we can help shorten your hiring cycle to get your team growing fast. 

Technical talent is hard to find, rarely actively looking for jobs, and skeptical of recruitment efforts. On top of that, companies often subject developers to lengthy interviews and code challenges that not only extend the process (and your workload as a recruiter), but also create undue friction for the candidate, who will likely find something else in the meantime. 

Over the last six months I’ve spoken with so many recruiters who are completely under water with open roles to fill. Their workload has doubled (or tripled in some cases), but their bandwidth hasn’t. 

I’ve been there. While I’m not technically a recruiter, I do lead a lot of our internal hiring here, and I know how the workload for hiring just one new employee compounds as you get deeper in the hiring cycle. It’s gotten to the point where I push off even posting a job because I know that simple post will cost me days in candidate vetting and interviews. 

For technical hires, though, we’ve figured out how to shorten your hiring cycle. Roles that otherwise take me over a month to fill can be hired and onboarded in less than two weeks using this process: 

We skip straight to interviews with the top three candidates—no perfect job post, applicant filtering, or screening required.

I know this sounds too good to be true, and it kind of is, since currently this solution only exists for our technical hires. Using Gun.io (yes, our own platform) just like our users do has saved us weeks of time for each technical hire we’ve made over the last six months. 

The product takes the place of a whole team of recruiters: 

• When we need to hire a developer, we submit the specs on the app, and senior developers at Gun.io make a compelling job post. 
• We don’t have to do anything until the top candidates have been identified and vetted by that team of senior developers. No screening calls, no resume reviews, nothing. 
• We schedule interviews right on the Gun.io platform, no back-and-forth emailing required. 

For one role, the whole process takes about an hour of my time. That’s one hour total, from writing my job specs to interviewing the best candidates. 

For a recruiter, this is a game-changer. You can serve more open roles in a fraction of the time, and be totally confident that the talent you’re identifying has been developer-vetted. 

We make a hiring decision after one interview and no code test, and start new hires as contractors when it makes sense to do so.

Listen, I’m not here to say there’s no place for code tests, pair programming, or LeetCode in technical hiring. I will say that the developers you probably want to hire will balk at these challenges, and at least for our technical roles, they aren’t an indicator of how well a candidate would fit the role. 

This one is a hot take, though: requiring hours upon hours (or days (!) in some companies) of interviews is performative and counterproductive. Interviews are a great way to tell how good a candidate is at interviewing. My guess, though, is that “interviewing” won’t be a key skill they’ll need for the job. 

Since all candidates we hire through Gun.io have been vetted by senior developers, we do just one interview with each candidate to be sure they can grok the role, are bought in to the company, and will work well with the team. Then, we typically start with a short contract (three months or so) so we can work together and be sure it’s a fit on all sides. With this process, candidates can put points on the board early, and we run virtually zero risk of mis-hire (or sunk costs on hours of interviewing). It’s the easiest way to shorten your hiring cycle and get the best candidate in the position quickly.

If you want to see how Gun.io can supplement your recruiting efforts, you can start a job post for free.