How Routable saved 3.5 million

About

A Seattle-based fintech company offers a payment solution for companies, allowing them to seamlessly transfer funds worldwide and significantly reducing the time it takes companies to approve and make payments at a lower cost.

After receiving $46 million in a Series B round of funding in May 2021, the fintech company had to hire and rapidly scale its workforce. At that time, there were 37 people working for the firm.

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The challenge

The fintech hiring process was messy, slow, and inefficient. There were 7 stages to the hiring process, which took nearly 2 months. The company largely relied on referrals, contingency staffing firms, and offshore development shops to fill critical roles. This process turned out to be a costly endeavor, and the quality of the hires was all over the place. To top it all off, this is happening amid competition for talent among senior, staff, and principal levels of software engineers, designers, and product managers. Throughout the engagement process, most candidates received multiple offers from other companies.

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Project Execution

The fintech firm engaged and contracted with the Assembleworks team. We immediately laid the groundwork to scale the company's workforce across all verticals. However, roles that were harder to fill, like software engineers, product designers, and product managers, were given extra attention. It was understood that these candidates were likely going to be passive candidates and the overall emphasis should be a fantastic candidate experience.  

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• Mentored and coached the hiring team on interviewing best practices. Implemented the "STAR" interview technique to jumpstart conversations in interviews.
• Streamlined the recruitment process from seven stages to only 3, including 1 technical skills assessment.
• Implemented a scheduling tracker allowing recruiters to schedule candidates for various interviews without consulting or coordinating the hiring teams' schedules.
• Supporting and encouraging engagement between hiring managers and recruiters. Implementing weekly syncs and the sharing of candidate profiles before messaging.
• Implemented DEI initiatives and candidate engagement strategies.
• Brought in recruitment tools including LinkedIn Recruiter, Zoom info, and Crunchbase brought in to help uncover people with niche skill sets.
• Implemented recruitment OKRs of message response rate to conversation rate.
• Introduced a "Recruiting Assistance Program" to augment the employee referral program. Actively recruited candidates in niche skill sets that are social media influencers.
• Developed engaging candidate attraction content posted to social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitter.
• Established formal interview training for anyone participating in the hiring process.
• Migrated the company's ATS from Workable to Greenhouse. While Workable had some very nice features, Greenhouse offered significantly better features for candidate experience.
• Global recruitment was instituted, including North America, Latin America, and Europe countries.
• We shortened the time to hire from 2 mos to 5-10 days.

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Project Results

Impact to business

1. $3.5 million in cost savings were realized.  
2. The fintech company saw its size grow by 4x in only 2 quarters. In real numbers, that's 37 employees in June of 2021 to 160 employees in Dec 2021. The vast majority of new employees worked in EPD.
3. In the same period, the percentage of DEI workers jumped from 4% to 42%.
4. 4 principals, 15 staff/ lead software engineers, 8 staff and principal product designers, and 7 product managers were hired. An outstanding result considering the intensity of the competition.
5. Employer branding which was virtually nonexistent prior to resulted in the company being voted “One of the best places to work” and recently “Y Combinator Top Companys”.

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