Moving Forward by Focusing Inward

Toward awesome work for all teams

For a the past six months, Ben Coupland, Recruitment Business Partner at Piksel — a video software, services, and solutions provider that helps brands from Volkswagen to AT&T capture and capitalize on audiences — has been managing the sea change from the company's recruitment agency dependence to a more cost-efficient, internal recruitment process.

For a decade-old company with 650 employees in 11 offices from San Diego to Spain, the logistical and paradigm shift challenges facing Coupland were daunting; successfully moving Piksel from a stalled, detached hiring process to a fast-paced, candidate-centric team effort wouldn't happen without the right building blocks, starting right now.

To build and maintain that process, Coupland relies on experience, cooperation … and Breezy.

Less Spend, Better Results

Here's how recruiting used to work at Piksel, with a little variance: "We've got a vacancy, let's give it to six or seven recruitment agencies, see what CVs come back." Weeks would pass, then CVs would come in, then what one might call the HR folks would choose a winner and the deal was done … all for a tidy, approximate $8k per hire.

Were the hires bad? No, of course not - the Piksel team's work around the world speaks for itself.

But were the hires efficient, or cost-effective? Again: No, of course not. Hiring a conservative 5 vacancies a month, at $8k each, over the course of a year … well, let's say bringing Coupland's brand of affable efficiency on board was a stroke of financial brilliance.

He turbo-charged Piksel's search for recruiting software they could bring in-house, one they could trust to start achieving their objectives as easily as possible. From a simple, one-on-one demo (“When I saw the ease of a Kanban-style layout – that really tugged at my heartstrings”), to the transparent, flexible pricing (“You're not making that huge commitment for a really big clunky piece of software that you know you're going to be stuck with for the next 50 years”), Breezy was a pretty clear choice.

Prioritizing teamwork for the candidates' benefit

With a career built on great interactions and stellar relationships with candidates, Coupland knew that one of the core strengths of a new internal process would be constant, quality interaction with candidates. He couldn't quite say Piksel was accomplishing that with an external agency process.

To avoid the communication breakdown letdown – when a great candidate would come in, and Piksel's team would discover s/he'd taken a new job weeks before hearing back from Piksel – Coupland and his team take full advantage of Breezy's in-app team chats: “Now, when those CVs drop into the system, hiring managers can spot them right away – and if they don't, we can sort of flag it up and say, 'Look here at this - what are your thoughts on this one?'”

Since Piksel's move from a linear process to team-based approach (complete with hiring team hierarchies, multiple levels of conversation, and simple Stage Actions), they've seen feedback on new candidates drop to as little as 24 hours.

No more missing those amazing new candidates. No more disgruntled applicants. Just smooth, automation-assisted teamwork from start to finish

How to get the people you want on your team

In some ways, Coupland's measuring Piksel's recruiting success outside of the metrics while he manages the change from agency recruiting to an internal process. Here's what's telling him that Piksel's moving to more modern, streamlined recruitment:

A fully mobile, fully realized careers site that lives up to their state-of-the-art brand.

Hiring managers creating their own Questionnaires to automatically gather more context on candidates at a certain stage.

Teammates joining hiring conversations independent of the HR team.

It's this move away from recruiting as a silo'ed process toward an engaging, all-hands-on-deck effort that's got him excited. As he likes to tell his teams:

“We don't own recruitment. We help with recruitment. You're going to have these people in your teams.” It's the simplest thing, but, “everyone becoming proactive and involved in these conversations and decisions … that's the only way you get in the people you really want.”