Tempo CEO Moawia Eldeeb: Homeless to $220M for in-home fitness
Silicon Valley lore is replete with remarkable startup origin stories, but Moawia Eldeeb’s personal journey to founding Tempo stands out.
After working shifts as a middle schooler at a Queens pizza shop to support his family, Moawia’s home burnt down and his family was homeless. During his time living in a Red Cross shelter, Moawia developed a passion for fitness working out at a free gym while finishing his final two grades of high school in a single year. He then put himself through college – a computer science degree at Columbia – by becoming a physical trainer. There Moawia met fellow computer science student Josh Augustine, and after graduating, the two decided to found Tempo with the mission of making personal training and fitness more accessible.
Tempo’s screen and weights are familiar and durable
56 million Americans have a gym membership, and the vast majority aren’t reaching their goals. Even in the best of times, gyms have an incredibly low membership utilization rate. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as even reasonably physically active people find it hard to drag themselves out of bed and commute to an intimidating gym experience, suffering in front of strangers. To keep motivated, many gym-goers enlist the help of physical trainers, but the service can often cost $100 an hour or more, making it inaccessible to the mass market.
Six years later, our seed investment Tempo is now announcing a $220M Series C round to scale their rapidly-growing in-home fitness studio, bringing greater convenience and a membership fee a tenth of the cost of a personal trainer. Born out of Moawia’s direct experience as a trainer himself, Tempo provides the personalization, equipment, and community to unlock the biggest segment of this gym market – weight and high intensity (HIIT) training. Peloton became a $30B behemoth by bringing cycling workout classes to the home, a 10x smaller segment.
Tempo co-founder and CEO Moawia Eldeeb
Unlike other in-home workout products, Tempo uses real weights that are tracked by these 3D sensors – a much more familiar workout experience for most gym-goers versus using cable machines, or working out without any equipment at all in the case of app-based streaming services. Tempo also uniquely features 3D infrared sensors that create an 80,000-point model of your body and hones in on 25 key pivot points, enabling elite trainers to remotely track your form, count reps, and provide personalized feedback to fix mistakes. The product further combines this with heart rate data and speed of reps to make suggestions on weights and exercises. In addition, Tempo has a much smaller footprint than other products, and doesn’t require manual installation into walls. That’s often a deal-breaker for on-the-go Gen Zers and millennials that move frequently.
COVID has undoubtedly accelerated the movement to in-home fitness as gyms closures gave fitness buffs no other options. But we’ve had a long-time thesis at SignalFire in the power of AI + human in the loop to transform inefficient industries through a full-stack model. Tempo enables trainers to deliver real-time feedback in a more precise way, compress the cost of personalized training 10x, and bring the full experience of a gym into the home without any sacrifices in the exercises you can do through a seamlessly-integrated hardware/software and computer vision bundle.
Tempo uses machine vision to track an 80,000-point model of your body to automatically give feedback on posture and movement
Tempo’s company history is a case of startup mirroring life. Other competitors have raised tens of millions before shipping their consumer hardware, historically one of the most capital-intensive products to bring to market. Moawia and team spent 5 years after raising their initial $1.85M seed round co-led by SignalFire and Khosla Ventures to develop an even more compelling in-home fitness experience.
Over that time, Moawia and team explored a number of different approaches partnering with gyms and OEMs/distributors around the world, iterating out of a garage while paying themselves the equivalent of minimum wage, even as the cost of living exploded in Silicon Valley. This second chapter of remarkable resilience allowed Moawia and team to collect the world’s largest dataset of annotated workouts (1M sessions) to train the machine learning models now powering Tempo’s technology.
Why go to the gym when Tempo brings the gym to you?
In the ultimate example of startup mirroring life, Moawia has continued to do more with less. It’s been a privilege to support the growth of Tempo since the first round, recruiting early leadership team members and continuously collaborating with Moawia on the buildout of Tempo’s evolving organization. We couldn’t be any prouder to be part of the journey, and can’t wait for the next phase of the business as it continues to reimagine and democratize physical fitness.
Ro’s patient revolution: $500M for health, not insurance
“When we started, people called us a boner company. They said that to be pejorative, to diminish our efforts. I didn’t find that to be an insult. Addressing erectile dysfunction wasn’t the sole purpose of the company, but we see the moments it unlocks between people. It’s intimacy and love,” says Ro co-founder and CEO Z Reitano. “Take away all the bullsh*t, and what matters is people living a happy, healthy, fulfilled life.”
With today’s $500 million Series D at a $5 billion valuation, the jokes should be replaced with a different kind of name-calling that describes Ro as a unicorn (quintacorn?) charging towards an IPO. The telehealth primary care company now offers diagnosis, prescriptions, medication delivery, and ongoing care. But Reitano, who SignalFire has backed since Ro’s Series A, wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. One thing you’ll notice that’s missing from his quote about what matters in healthcare: Insurance.
That’s because Ro doesn’t accept it. “It’s clearly not working. Hasn’t been working for 70 years,” Reitano says of health insurance. “The idea of giving insurers more power and control is preposterous. It’s not that capitalism doesn’t work in healthcare. It’s that we’re incentivizing the wrong stakeholders. Insurers aren’t incentivized to reduce the cost because employers pay.” And sadly, we all pay in the form of lower-quality care at higher prices.
$500M for patient-centric healthcare
That’s why Ro is building a new patient-centric healthcare system where it’s the people in need who control where the money goes. “We should have to fight for the right to take care of patients,” Reitano insists.
Here’s a quick history lesson about how things got so broken. America froze wages during World War 2 to prevent inflation, so employers started offering better health insurance to attract talent. Then the IRS made employer-provided health insurance tax-exempt, making it the cheapest way to get it, so most Americans did. Then the government fixed health insurance company margins so they had to spend 80 to 85% of the money from premiums on providing care. That sounded good, but it means that one of the only ways for health insurance companies to grow cumulative profits is to…raise costs.
The result is runaway insurance premiums and worker contributions. Premiums are up 54% just from 2010 to 2020. Medical expenses cause 66.5% of individual bankruptcies in the US. “An MRI costs the same as in 1984 when it came out. That’s bananas! That thing should be running 24 hours a day. It costs $27 in Norway. There should be a Chipotle of MRIs!” Reitano says. We could clearly be doing better. He notes that Singapore pays for 50% of citizens’ healthcare but it only costs 4% of GDP, not 18% like in the US. Meanwhile, 66.5% of individual bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical expenses.
Reitano’s own family was once in hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt, in part due to treatment for his heart condition, which had erectile dysfunction as a side effect of his medication. “I was actually one of the luckier ones,” he tells me, simply because none of his immediate family members had died. They lived through heart attacks, neurological disorders, and multiple bouts with cancer. Z says the only reason they survived was that his Dad was a doctor and could help them navigate the complexities of getting great care despite the dysfunctional insurance system. What gave me agency was having a world-leading expert by my side. That shouldn’t be a requirement for what we see as a fundamental right.”
Ro co-founder Z Reitano and his dad Dr. Michael Reitano
Those experiences led Reitano to build Ro to destigmatize conditions like his and help other families beat the odds. That’s why Ro doesn’t accept insurance. “It exacerbates a system that reduces and limits the agency of patients over time, and I can’t abide by that. I think the insurance companies will drive themselves into oblivion because they’re endlessly greedy, increasing premiums and deductibles. When you remove the administrative burn of insurance and all the stakeholders who need to make money in the process, you can dramatically reduce the cost to patients,” Reitano explains. “People talk about how we’re limited by not accepting insurance, but we are unleashed and unlocked to offer 10X better service!”
That doesn’t make Ro expensive. It sells generic versions of the 500 most common medications for just $5 per month each from its own pharmacy. A virtual doctor’s visit is $15, which is cheaper than most co-pays. For $20 to $40 per month, it offers diagnosis, prescription, and delivery of brand name treatments for men’s and women’s health, hair loss, smoking cessation, dermatology, weight loss, and more. Plus, Ro’s Health Guide site is challenging WebMD with self-serve medical info that’s actually approved by doctors. “We start by building what patients need and then use technology to reduce the friction. It’s the only way we do more with less,” Reitano explains.
Now Ro has the funding to bring its care offline and into the home in-person. The $500 million Series D co-led by our friends at General Catalyst, First Mark, and TQ Ventures is joined by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Baupost, Glen Tullman of Livongo, Box Group, Torch, and us at SignalFire. It’s been a pleasure to equip Reitano and his team with our Beacon recruiting technology, competitive intelligence, sales lead intros, and in-house experts.
“Simply put, they’re not like other VCs,” Reitano wrote to another startup considering SignalFire. “They’re engineers and operators — they’ve built it before. The other thing I love, and this is more personal, is that they are a new VC fund, which means they can’t sit behind a brand name…they have to wake up every single day and work their tail off for their port cos. I first met [SignalFire’s seed fund MD] Wayne Hu on a holiday when no other VC would carve out time. [Venture partner] Tony Huie has been on the phone with me at 2 am helping me work through a strategy question. Their data science team helped our Head of Data solve a complex attribution problem . . . Every VC says they are value-add, but most don’t have to prove it. I’m not kidding when I say SignalFire will always be there.”
COVID vaccines delivered
Ro’s years of building a national telemedicine practice, pharmacy network, in-home care platform culminated this month in one of its most important launches to date: Ro’s COVID-19 Vaccine Drive. Ro is now Ubering healthcare professionals to the homes of the elderly and homebound to administer vaccines to those who’d have trouble traveling to a traditional vaccination site.
The launch comes in response to how difficult it’s been to book vaccine appointments through confusing government websites with unpredictable availability — especially for the less digitally literate. “Everyone felt the system was complicated. It felt rigged. They felt powerless. We’re not sure why our government can’t operate at the same efficiency as Amazon,” Reitano explains. Luckily, Ro acquired in-home healthcare API maker WorkPath in 2020 and had already facilitated 100,000 housecalls. “Because of our unique capability, I think we have a responsibility to help.”
So in December, Ro co-founder Saman Rahmanian got to work partnering with the NY Department Of Health and leading an “all on-hands on deck, 18 hour days for 4 weeks” sprint, Reitano explains. “People don’t talk enough about choosing certain co-founders — why you need shared vision, shared values, shared work ethic. One attribute I’d add is that you’re constantly amazed by what they can will into existence. Saman willed this into existence.”
Here’s how it works. An eligible patient or their guardian can go to https://www.covidvaccinedrive.com and sign up for an appointment. Rather than scrambling for open slots, Ro just puts you in the queue for the next available date and time window. Just like calling an Uber, you’ll get an ETA and visualization of your vaccinated healthcare professional heading to your home. They walk you through the standard protocol, collect any necessary info, administer your dose, and wait 15 minutes to check for adverse reactions. Uber has donated 10,000 rides to the cause, and any leftover doses will go to local fire departments and frontline workers.
Reitano believes this convenience and quality of care would become standard if more of the healthcare system empowered patients to purchase their care directly. If employers or the government just gave patients the cash for routine service and saved insurance for catastrophes, “within 60 days, you’d see cucumber water in the waiting rooms. Hospitals would show prices and readmission rates. They’d compare quality of care versus the hospital down the street. In a world where you had $2 to $3 trillion every year at the discretion of patients, [care would] decrease in price, increase in quality, and increase in satisfaction.”
SignalFire’s “Convenient Health” thesis
We see patient-centric healthcare and finance as the fifth pillar of SignalFire’s “convenient health” investment thesis. We’re seeking startups offering:
Democratized, destigmatized, more affordable access to care via telehealth
Continuous, automatic, personalized data collection via wearables and smartphones
Consumerization of the user experience and a reduction of reliance on pure will power
Human doctors and experts in the loop, augmented with AI and automation to optimize quality of care
Patient-centric control of billing to incentivize providers to improve their services
This thesis is why we’ve been long-time believers in Ro. It’s also led SignalFire to invest in telehealth startups like Form Health for weight loss, Bicycle Health for opioid dependency, Apostrophe for skincare, and OrthoFX for teeth alignment. We’ve also backed startups that make staying fit at home less work, like Down Dog for yoga and Tempo for weight lifting. We’re also supporting convenience in genetic testing with Color, surgeon training with Osso VR, and at-home clinical trials with Hawthorne Effect. If you’re building something to advance this vision for patient-centric healthcare, SignalFire would love to hear from you.
“It’s paternalistic saying patients can’t make the right decisions. Similar to the Winston Churchill quote, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’, a patient might be the worst person to make their health care decisions except for everyone else.”
“We’ve been beat up and punched in the face for decades, and the only thing that the healthcare industry listens to is who controls the money,” Reitano concludes. “We’re eating the edges of primary care. Others will eat the edges of insurance. I want to devote my life to this patient revolution.”
Best practices for attracting top talent to your startup and how to define the 10 elements of your employer brand, including your mission, culture, and benefits
Having a strong employer brand can reduce your cost per hire by 50% while scoring you 50% more applicants, according to LinkedIn’s research. Yet most startup waste jump right into hiring before thinking deeply about what makes them an appealing place to work. It’s counterintuitive, but moving too fast can waste time and money. In this first chapter of SignalFire‘s Startup Recruiting Guide, we’ll teach you how to craft your policies and messaging to convince people you’re rocketship opportunity with an inviting company culture.
That all starts with building an “employer brand” – which is defined as how your company is perceived as a place to work, both by your employees and the outside world. Think of it in contrast to your consumer brand, which is how people perceive your product or service.
Your employer brand can be summarized by these 10 elements:
Company story
Mission
Values
Company culture
Work environment
Team
Product
Challenges
Compensation and benefits
Recruiting
Developing a great employer brand allows startups to spend less time soliciting job candidates and instead attract inbound interest from top talent.
This post will walk you through codifying your employer brand into a concise “employee value proposition” that you’ll communicate through candidate interviews, a shareable recruiting dossier we’ll teach you to make below, and your website’s careers page that we’ll cover in-depth in the Startup Recruiting Guide’s next chapter. In future posts, we’ll break down how to source job candidates, run structured interviews, make offers, onboard new hires, and more. Subscribe here for access to the rest of the Startup Recruiting guide plus more startup tips, market maps, and industry trends.
Stripe‘s careers page lets its founders explain the startup’s mission, values, and more
So why should you care about employer branding now? It’s hard to stand out on salary or perks alone, but employer brand is where you can differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace. You’ll know you’re improving your employer brand when cost per hire drops as your inbound applicant volume, staff retention, and profitability grows. Early and executive hires set the tone for talent, and greatly influence who else will want to work with you. That’s why it’s never too early to start. So let’s get to it.
Subscribe for future chapters of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide on building a careers page and sourcing job candidates
Defining your employer brand
What exactly is employer brand? It’s the “market perception” or the qualities of your company that you share with the public. It’s the personality and voice that defines your company. It exists as a loose set of ideas outlining characteristics like:
Company story: Your origin and journey. How did you come up with the idea for the product? Did you experience the pain point yourself? How did you launch, and what traction have you seen since? What important milestones have you hit? Make it an inspiring story that talent will want to play a part in.
Mission: What you’re trying to improve about the world. What’s broken without you? Whose lives get better directly because of your product, and what downstream benefits will you generate for society at large? Success isn’t enough. You need to have an impact that employees are proud to tell everyone about.
Values – The steadfast ideals and ethics that guide your actions. How do you approach collaboration, transparency, self-expression, reliability, customer focus, iteration, social responsibility, speed, and resilience? What do you prioritize? Your values can attract, motivate, and retain employees and customers who align with your beliefs
Company culture – Your flexible norms and policies for applying your values to work/life balance, shared rituals, hierarchy, inclusion, trust, autonomy, and volunteering. How quickly do people respond to emails after-hours? Does the team socialize together after work or go their separate ways? Are you managed closely or allowed to determine your own solutions?
Work environment – Your headquarters, offices, and approach to remote work as well as your policies on open vs closed floor plans, company meals, office events, pets at work, and employee transportation. Do you mostly work in the same space or distributed around the world? How many days a week will local employees come to the office after the pandemic? Is everyone chatting or wearing headphones?
Team – The talent that candidates are eager to work beside including leadership and their peers. Is the organization relatively flat or quite hierarchical? Is headcount growing 20% or 100% per year? Who can employees turn to if they have a problem?
Product – The purpose and potential of what you’re building. Why are employees proud to make this for the world? How does it solve customers’ problems?
Challenges – Opportunities for learning, contribution, and advancement. What will employees get to brag about on their resume after working here? What new skills will the get to pick up? Are their chances to lead new projects?
Compensation and benefits – Compensation, as well as your health, time-off, and retirement perks. Do you offer the legal minimum or industry-leading parental leave? Do you have a fixed amount of vacation days or unlimited as long as you get your work done?
Recruiting – Your marketing, recruitment style, hiring process, and candidate experience. Do you highlight your business momentum or company vibe? Do you make decisions quickly or deliberate and keep looking for candidates? Is interviewing grueling but efficient or fun but time-consuming?
It’s not just about marketing yourself to prospects and candidates — it’s also about living up to those values with your existing employees, alumni, consumers, and customers. These groups are not as separate as they might appear at first glance: prospects and candidates can soon become employees, current employees can be ambassadors to those prospects and candidates (or they may leave the company and join the ranks of your alumni), and at any stage they can influence or become your customers and consumers.
Now let’s discuss how to refine your employer branding document into a pitch for why people should want to work for you, which will also help you design your careers page.
Creating your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a concise paragraph that communicates what makes your company a great place to work and what you can offer employees that’s unique. The EVP should consist of a few sentences that describe what your company does and what you stand for.
To get a sense of the hierarchy, you start with your employer brand which is a broad concept document with lots of information about your company’s identity. You structure that into answers to key questions about your company and job openings in your Recruiting Dossier. You highlight the most salient, evocative, and differentiated points from your employer brand and dossier in your EVP paragraph. Then you use the EVP as an outline of the top talking points for your careers page, with different sections supported by details from your employer branding document and dossier.
You’ll likely want to base your EVP on some surveys and focus groups with your current employees. That will help you understand why they find your company an appealing place to work and what benefits (beyond compensation and total rewards) they get out of working there. All your research can inform your employer branding doc, while the most commonly cited and memorable highlights make it into your EVP.
Here are a few key survey questions for your employees to help you determine your EVP:
Who are we as a company?
What do we do?
Why does it matter?
Why do people work here?
What do people like or dislike about working here?
Why do people leave?
This exercise can have a real impact on your business, as point-of-sale startup Clover Network found. They had a largely unknown brand and were trying to catch up to Square’s transaction volume. Their head of recruiting John Vormbaum led an EVP exercise that helped them better define their appeal to job candidates while simultaneously screening out those who were a poor fit. Clover was able to massively increase its rate of hiring, adding 135 engineers in 2017 without sacrificing quality at a cost per hire of just $7,000. The product improved, sales grew, and soon Clover was neck-and-neck with Square.
To achieve this same success, you need full buy-in from leadership and employees plus a mandate to change whatever necessary about your underlying culture and the brand it produces.
As we’ll cover in the following sections, there are tons of activities you can do to build your employer brand, and it can be easy to get overwhelmed. That’s why it’s helpful to have a clear and concise EVP that you can always come back to. If you’d like more perspectives on the topic, check out SignalFire’s EVP template, this SHRM post on perfecting your EVP, and TalentLyft’s video and visual EVP walkthrough.
Distill your identity into a “Recruiting Dossier”
The next step is to turn your EVP into an external-facing “recruiting dossier” about why people would want to work for you that you can share with potential hires. This includes what sets you apart from the competition and what you are building, both on a team and company-wide scale.
In addition to defining the role and the ideal candidate, this dossier is your opportunity to highlight interesting details (only share what is public information) about your products/services, technical challenges, big ideas, team, culture, and anything that would attract talent to your organization. We were introduced to the dossier concept by recruiting firm Riviera Partners’ founders Ali Behnam and Michael Morrell, and it’s something we recommend for companies of any size.
The dossier can be used customized for different roles and departments. These can really come in handy when you know you’ll be hiring a lot for one specific team like Sales or Engineering. You’ll save yourself time in initial calls by addressing frequently asked questions in the dossier, and it’s always helpful to have materials you can link to or share with prospects. To get a feel for what yours should look like, this is an example of OneSignal’s (outdated but illustrative) 2018 recruiting dossier.
For more help with dossiers, here’s our full template (excerpt previewed below) to help you get started: The SignalFire Recruiting Dossier Template complete with two recruiting dossier examples from OneSignal created by their recruiting team’s George Deglin.
How SignalFire can help
Don’t want to handle this all by yourself? Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks most of the top tech talent in the Western world and can generate reports on the best and most hireable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is headed by former Facebook Talent leader Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to make sure you score your ideal hires. We made over 1000 job candidate intros to our portfolio companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor.
SignalFire’s Director of talent operations & development Crystal Guerrero
For first-time founders and serial entrepreneurs seeking a refresher, we start by offering a program based on my (Crystal Guererro) decade of experience leading talent operations for startups. We partner with founding teams to help them establish a world-class recruitment process. We refer to this as a “recruiting engine” — systems implementation, brand building, role definition, recruitment process, sourcing, interview training, and compensation benchmarking to enable teams to identify, attract, engage, close, and onboard top talent quickly and effectively.
This Startup Recruiting Guide is part of our Recruitment Process Optimization program where I work in tandem with our founders and talent teams to devise a comprehensive recruiting strategy, advise on systems development, and aid in recruiting execution via our various individual contributor talent pipelines as well as Beacon Talent. To support this program, the Talent Academy Playbook outlines the nuts and bolts of implementing a well-oiled recruitment machine which is a compilation of best practices and learning from my recruiting career. This should help guide your thinking as it relates to building your talent engine.
Subscribe for future chapters of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide on building a careers page and sourcing job candidates
Employer branding tactics
Now that we’ve covered the essentials of what your employer brand is and how to match it to job candidates, let’s look at some of the tactics you can apply to your employer brand to recruiting.
Understanding your candidate audience
At its core, employer branding and careers pages are a type of marketing, which means that they rely on understanding your audience. If you don’t know who you’re trying to attract, how will you determine if your efforts are successful? First, you have to build out an ideal candidate persona.
Take the characteristics of your company culture and employee value proposition, and build a vision of someone who’d align with and appreciate them while fulfilling your open roles’ needs. Your candidate persona should include:
Work experience, education, and skills
Personality, principles, and goals
Work style and preferred environment
Where they’re reachable with marketing during hobbies, socializing, and job research
What selling points from your EVP and messaging will resonate
Take some time to define which characteristics of your company map most closely to your ideal candidate persona. Are you targeting engineers who value autonomy, junior employees seeking a career path, would-be parents excited by generous paid leave, or product managers who want to build a well-known product?
The best employer branding doesn’t just attract the right people to you — it also convinces some people that your company isn’t the best place for them, and that’s a good thing! It’s much better to hire people who have bought into your company culture so you can avoid the expense and frustration of losing people who are a poor fit.
By understanding some key information about your ideal candidates (where they live, which websites and apps they use, and what they value in a job and employer), you can be much more targeted and effective in creating all your employer branding materials across your site, ads, and communication to employees so they talk up your highlights. For more tips for becoming a recruitment magnet, check out The Right Resource & SignalFire’s Talent Branding 101 guide.
Personalized recruitment messaging
There is one branding tactic that costs essentially nothing while also yielding the highest ROI. When it comes to recruiting, there is no better strategy than: 1) knowing your ideal candidate persona and identifying the type of prospect who would find the role most intriguing and 2) creating a personalized message to engage them with your company. People want to feel seen by your company, not like just another generic seat-filler.
Your goal is to create a message that shifts the focus from being about your company’s needs to instead demonstrating your interest in the candidate and addressing their potential needs. If you do this well, not only will you engage more candidates, but you will also show passive candidates that your company is knowledgeable, thoughtful, considerate, and intentional in your approach to recruiting.
Personalized messaging can be segmented by the candidates you’re targeting or the medium through which you’re reaching them. You could mention you know they attended a company-related event, have a particular type of work experience, or have a mutual connection in your networks. If you have the time and staff to do custom 1-to-1 recruitment messaging, mentioning something specific the candidate has accomplished or mentioned on their social media can significantly improve conversion rates, though don’t go so far that it gets creepy. When contacting people directly, ensure your subject line or first sentence feels personalized or mention their name. Stripping out industry jargon that makes it sound like you’re just pasting in corporate talking points can also help.
When reaching out to a candidate, you should always think about how to speak to their needs. How is your opportunity a logical progression in their career? Whether you’re offering greater responsibilities, a larger team to manage, a bigger budget, or the opportunity to build their personal brand through more innovative work, it’s important to spend time crafting your pitch. Similarly, you’ll want to highlight why you’re reaching out to them specifically. What is it about their profile or background that sparked your interest?
Why does personalization matter? A prospect that receives a thoughtful and personalized message is much more likely to respond and be willing to hear about the opportunity, whether the timing is right or not. Responses are important because even if the person isn’t the right fit right now, your conversation can still lead to referrals and introductions to their friends and colleagues.
Employer branding vendors
There are a number of employer branding vendors that are worth investigating, including Glassdoor, LinkedIn, The Muse, and Job Portraits. These vendors offer various services to help you create employer branding content and advertise your job openings. It can be easy to dismiss them when you see the price tag but don’t do that. When you consider what you’d pay in agency fees to fill a single role, you’ll often get a better return on investment from an employer branding vendor, and you can get a lot of mileage out of the assets they create for you by sharing them on your website and through your social channels on an ongoing basis.
Social media
In order to widen the scope of your employer brand, you can create content to share on social media. The most common social media platforms that are used for employer branding include LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Depending on the platform, you can opt to share videos, photos, links, or short or long-form text, and each platform gives you the option of reaching people “organically” (in other words, without paying), or through various types of paid advertising options if you want to expand your reach.
Look for ways to promote and celebrate the interesting things people at your company are doing — encourage them to share photos, videos, and status updates about work milestones, side projects, or company culture. Keep in mind that these types of posts don’t need to be too polished or professional — try to keep it real and give genuine insights into what it’s like to work at your company. We also recommend keeping a curated list of recent media/articles to share via email once a month (or around any big press releases or events). Send the link along with some recommended text that’s already formatted for social media so employees can easily copy and paste it to share via their preferred social media platforms.
Recess designs funny backdrops and inserts its product for visually appealing social media
Lyft highlights its presence at San Francisco’s Pride Parade to communicate its values through social media
If you don’t have a dedicated social media manager, or they’re struggling to create enough content, consider asking each employee to create one post per month of informative or entertaining content about your product or brand. Then your marketing or comms team can review and schedule them to post consistently so you’re always making use of your company and employees’ reach.
Blogging
Like social media, blogging allows you to share your message with a wider circle and can be a hugely valuable part of your employer branding strategy. You can also link to blog content from your social media platforms, helping to fill out your marketing calendar so you have plenty of things to post about.
If you already have a company blog, consider whether you want to publish employer branding posts there, or on a separate team- or recruiting-specific blog. Posts can include interviews with employees or guest articles written by people from various departments, photos and videos from company events, and anything else you think would be interesting and appealing to prospective candidates. If you don’t have a company blog set up, you may want to share blog posts on a third-party platform like Medium or LinkedIn that come with built-in distribution. Check out Flexport’s Engineering blog on Medium for an example of how to approach this.
Flexport uses a dedicated engineering blog to attract technical talent
Targeted ads
Targeted ads can help you market your employee value proposition to new audiences and people who have already visited your website, social media profiles, etc. Paying for targeted ads can be useful when you want to create multiple touchpoints for candidates and generate a sense of buzz about working at your company. However, they are typically too expensive for early-stage startups. Unless you’re filling multiple roles with the same title, have exhausted other outreach strategies like referrals, and desperately need to fill a position now, you’re better off relying on recruiters and your own labor to spread your employer branding. We’ll cover more cost-efficient ways to source job candidates in an upcoming chapter of the Startup Recruiting Guide, so subscribe here.
Show off your team! They are your best marketing collateral
One in four candidates views other employee profiles immediately after finding out about a job opportunity. Encourage your team to keep their online profiles up to date, and offer resources like quick email reminders, video tutorials, or in-person workshops to help accomplish this. Your employees can also build their personal brands (while contributing to your employer brand) by presenting on panels or writing guest posts in their area of expertise. Feature them on your blog and social media. If job candidates see you invest in your team’s long-term career success and highlight their accomplishments, you could become the next place they’re hoping to work.
Flock Freight highlights employees’ experiences working at the company on its blog
In an upcoming Startup Recruiting Guide chapter, we’ll show you how to build your employer brand into a careers page that can attract top talent. Subscribe here for more of SignalFire’s how-to guides & essays on startups trends.
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to ensure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact this article’s author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero: [email protected]
Startup employee value proposition template
Why should someone want to work for you? Because you offer much more than just a salary.
An Employee Value Proposition is a concise statement outlining what you offer employees that makes you a uniquely great place to work. Your EVP is the core of your employer branding efforts that will help you determine your key talking points for recruiting. It also serves as a tool for self-reflection. It can reveal shortcomings in your mission, values, company culture, benefits, and work environment. This template from our early-stage venture fund SignalFirewill walk you through writing up your own EVP.
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This template from our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero is part of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide chapter on building your employer brand and careers page. To get the next chapters, including one dedicated to job descriptions, sign up here
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EVP Plan
Purpose: This Employee Value Proposition (EVP) explains why [Company Name] is a great place for its employees to work and advance their careers.
Goal: Determine key messages that our employer brand should convey to create distinction, build awareness, and attract top talent. Distill them into points you can use throughout your employer branding, including your recruiting dossier, careers page, and job descriptions.
Result: What does your completed EVP look like? A one- or two-paragraph description of your company identity and a set of bullet points about the five pillars of culture, compensation, work environment, benefits, and career advancement.
Process: By surveying our team, we can better understand the strengths we should communicate and the weaknesses we should improve upon.
EVP Research
Questions for our executives and employees:
Who are we as a company?
What do we create or offer?
Why does it matter?
Who does it matter to?
Why do people want to be hired and keep working here?
What can we do to make the lives of our customers, communities, colleagues, and shareholders better long-term?
How will the world improve if we succeed?
How can we align these goals and practices with growing our business?
How would you describe our work hours, after-hours communication, and work environment?
Does the team participate in any traditions, rituals, or offsite events?
What is the most vivid aspect of the advantages of working for [Company name]?
How can we convince the best talents to join us?
What do people like about working here?
How does the company support your personal and professional growth?
What about our leadership does or doesn’t give you confidence?
What do people dislike or think we could improve about working here?
Why do people depart the company, and what do they do next?
What would you tell someone about our company if they had never heard of us?
Question for top-performing employees:
Describe a specific moment you were proud to work at [Company name].
Describe the most recent time [Company name] empowered you to achieve a goal.
Why did you decide to join [Company name]?
Which words best describe the culture or work environment at [Company name?]
What traits make for a successful employee at [Company name]?
What excites you about working at [Company name] each day?
What’s your prediction about the future success of [Company name] and why?
Question topics:
To dig deeper into specific areas, ask for opinions about these particular policies and processes:
Compensation: Overall satisfaction, industry benchmarks, promotions and raises, bonuses
Speak with the following groups will help you refine your answers:
Executive leadership
Colleague focus groups
Employee resource groups
Human resources team
External communications teams including sales, marketing, comms, and social media
EVP Template
EVP outline
With the research fresh in your mind, outline your company identity within these five pillars of an employee value proposition:
Company culture – What are your values around team spirit, ethics, inclusion, and socializing?
Compensation – How much do you pay for what work/life balance compared to your industry?
Work environment – How you describe your office or remote work atmosphere and autonomy level?
Benefits – What compensation and perks do you offer beyond wages?
Career advancement – How do you help teammates grow professionally?
EVP outline example
Here’s what your sets of bullet points on the five pillars of your EVP might look like:
Culture: Win as a team. Measure & iterate. A breadth of voices.
Compensation: Strong base pay. Bonuses for supporting the team. Carry to align with portfolio.
Career: Path to partnership. A fast-rising fund brand. Launch your own initiatives.
Benefits: Industry-leading parental leave. Unlimited vacation. Educational team events.
Work environment: Work-from-home until it’s safe. A bustling engineer-style office. Work autonomously, improve collectively.
Writing Your EVP Statement
The 4 elements of an EVP statement: Now refine these outlines into carefully worded messaging. Write out each of the following points into a sentence or two to create your paragraph-long EVP:
Positioning statement: Conveys the overarching concept of who we are, what we value in colleagues, and why people should join our team.
Pillars: Top themes from the surveys and interviews about what makes [Company name] unique and appealing. What you’ll communicate is 75% reality, 25% aspirational.
Messaging outline: Highlight the most salient features of each pillar that make you unique.
Call to action: An anchor or theme within the messaging that unites the core points of your employer brand into a memorable incentive to join [Company name].
Hypothetical EVP:
We’re Transmission Capital, a late-stage venture fund offering growth capital to tomorrow’s greatest companies. Our culture matches the sales-minded companies we fund — constantly seeking a better way to connect and collaborate. Transmission Capital is seeking tomorrow’s best VC talent with a diverse range of perspectives. We offer industry-leading parental leave and career mentorship. If you want a seat at the table of a new style of venture fund, you belong at Transmission Capital.
Now you can apply your version messaging across your recruiting efforts so you’re always on-brand.
If you’d like to learn more about our fund and talent program, you can contact the author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero, here: [email protected]
About SignaFire’s Talent Program
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to make sure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our portfolio companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero here: [email protected]
Startup recruiting dossier template & examples
How do you convince people to work for you? By sending them a recruiting dossier — a document highlighting quick facts about your company as well as your purpose, perks, press, and open positions that you can send to job candidates. It’s like an employer brochure packed with reasons why you’re a great place to work.
Here we’ll walk you through each step of building your own recruiting dossier.
Two- to four-sentence explanation of the customer problem and how you solve it
One-sentence about how this impacts the world
Traction:
Ex. Revenue [if public]…
Ex. Daily users…
Ex. Engagement stats…
Ex. Major partnerships…
Ex. Awards or inclusion in Best Of lists…
Ex. Backing from top-tier venture capital firms
Ex. Hires from top companies and competitors
Reasons To Be Excited:
Two-sentence description of the major technology, design, and business challenges you’re facing that would create opportunities for accomplishment and career advancement for employees.
Three-sentence explanation of your progress in solving these technologies to demonstrate your momentum, milestones on the horizon, and your plan to address the remaining challenges where new hires could contribute.
What Differentiates Us From Our Competition:
A few bullet points on why you’re going to be the winner in your space and why that makes you the best place to work
Company Culture:
A few bullet points on your values such as autonomy, collaboration, work/life balance, diversity, work environment, and career path
Perks:
Ex. We’ve got you covered with the basics. We cover _% of insurance premiums for employee & _% for dependents, offer generous parental leave, flexible vacation time, and commuter benefits.
Ex. Quarterly outings, frequent team building, and group fitness challenges (cycling club, running club, book group)
Photo:
Photo illustrating your great company culture or perks
Pinterest features fun activities it hosts at its offices to show off its company culture
Executive Team:
“Name [linked to LinkedIn profile] – Title” for each co-founder and/or C-suite member
Press Links:
Headlines, publication names, and links to your best press coverage
Optional screenshot of featured article
Careers Page Link /Job Openings List:
Job titles with short descriptions for your open roles, each linked to a job opening on your careers page, or to anchor text/bookmark for that job opening in your dossier with more info on responsibilities and qualifications
Ex. Backend engineer – Architect, build, and maintain server-side web apps
Ex. Business development manager – Lead sales strategy for biz dev reps while handling top customers
Visual Design
Once you have all or most of these elements, it’s time to format them into an appealing document.
Typically, recruiting dossiers are around two pages long. You’ll want to include your logo and screenshots or illustrations of your products. You might also add visualizations of your traction, logos of your customers or software stack, and photos showing off your company culture. Be sure to include an email address where candidates can get in touch, and links to your site or careers page.
Recruiting dossier examples: OneSignal
Now that you know what goes into a recruiting dossier, let’s take a look at this example from SignalFire portfolio company OneSignal, which makes push notification infrastructure.
You can see how OneSignal lays out what it does, quick facts about its traction, testimonials from customers, press clippings, what makes its business exciting, and why you’d want to join its engineering team. This dossier from 2020 takes a more visual, product-focused approach. It’d be perfect for sending over in an initial email exchange with a potential hire.
You can contrast that with OneSignal’s 2018 recruiting dossier, which they graciously let us use despite knowing it’s out of date.
Here the startup takes a more text-focused approach, outlining the company, funding, executive team, and blog posts while diving deeper into its engineering challenges and tech stack. By highlight exactly what its staff gets to build and how they work, this dossier appeals to ambitious programmers who want career growth opportunities.
If you’d like to learn more about our fund and talent program, you can contact the author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero, here: [email protected]
About SignaFire’s Talent Program
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to make sure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our portfolio companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero here: [email protected]
SignalFire leads $60M for MainStreet to get tax credits for businesses
The ability to extend your runway has been hiding in plain sight.
And it’s no one’s fault. Company building has been a maze for individuals and businesses for years. But in a time of crisis, that maze becomes even more paralyzing and disorienting. Do you turn left? When do you speed up? When do you slow down? Questions beget questions, but what if those questions turned into answers? What if there was a map? What if that map held the key to an endless stream of capital — a straight path to that destination…a main street.
MainStreet CEO Doug Ludlow
Funnily enough, the ability to extend one’s runway is a solved problem. It was solved roughly 40 years ago. In 1981, the Economic Recovery Tax Act introduced research and development tax credits, a non-dilutive form of capital to help catalyze innovation. However, that was 1981 and with time, this great product has gone neglected. It’s in desperate need of a resurfacing, but no one has stepped in to give it the attention and time it needs. In 2020, we got those people and their names are Doug Ludlow and Dan Lindquist. Doug and Dan, along with their team, are building MainStreet, the ultimate advocate for startups and small businesses.
To start, MainStreet taps into those billions of dollars allocated to small businesses and reroutes them right to a company’s bank account. MainStreet automates the process for companies to effortlessly discover, apply for, and receive these allocated dollars — dollars that are commonly stowed away in the form of government stimulus funds, hiring incentives, and tax credits. In other words, Doug and his team work as a company’s advocate to ensure that they surface and give you all of the money that is already set aside for them. Let’s take it a step further…MainStreet gives you free money.
MainStreet is designing the front-end and back-end portal for a company to work with its local and federal government. The government says it has your back, but when information is buried, following through on that promise becomes increasingly difficult. With just a few clicks, MainStreet connects to your payroll provider, ingests your company’s information, and magically discovers all of the government dollars that are readily available to you. As opposed to waiting for that cash to hit your account months later, MainStreet gets it to you faster, and monthly, so that you can use that cash to support your business immediately. And MainStreet doesn’t do this just once. The software works 24/7 to constantly surface and discover new credits. You can read more about how it works in this deep dive on MainStreet from Not Boring, which notes the startup is exceeding the revenue growth pace of the top cloud companies.
Your company is dynamic and evolving, and therefore the credits that you are eligible for are as well. On average, the company is finding more than fifty thousand dollars for each company that applies and over time, we fully anticipate that number to grow. To keep incentives fully aligned, MainStreet does not make any money until you do.
After just a few meetings, we knew we wanted to be involved in this journey. Since meeting Doug, we knew that this man was on a mission to support small businesses however he can. From starting several companies before to then working with small businesses inside Google’s SMB ads team, he has experienced the challenges of growing new and small businesses first hand. That said, the passion does not stop with Doug. Every member of the MainStreet team deeply cares about supporting small business with many having started their own.
This is just the beginning for the company. With huge plans in mind for 2021, MainStreet has been leveraging the team at SignalFire to help with product development, PR & communications, recruiting, and strategy planning. We could not be more excited to be leading MainStreet’s $60M Series A with the goal of assisting them to help every entrepreneur push the world forward.
Vocational schools & CourseKey unlock the American Dream
The traditional 4-year college degree is crumbling as the default gateway to the American dream. Increasingly, students are opting for alternatives such as trade and vocational programs that teach tangible skills and unlock high-paying jobs in a fraction of the time and without crippling debt. The average trade school tuition typically takes half the time and costs a quarter of the price. And the average salary of a graduate is strikingly similar, within a few thousand dollars. It’s no surprise that these vocational programs have surged in popularity for both high school graduates and workers who are re-skilling, especially during periods of high unemployment and economic uncertainty.
And yet vocational schools and their administrators, instructors, and students suffer from a lack of purpose-built software. Student Information Systems and Learning Management Systems are optimized for traditional K-12 schools and university workflow, but vocational schools are stuck relying on pen and paper or trying to shoe-horn in solutions that aren’t built for them.
CourseKey co-founder and CEO Luke Sophinos
That’s why we got so excited when we met CourseKey and its CEO Luke Sophinos. CourseKey is reimagining a completely new education operating system specifically built for experiential, hands-on learning models, which continues to evolve with hybrid/distance learning. Luke and his team are perfectly positioned to help vocational schools vastly improve engagement, retention, and unlock economic mobility for a disadvantaged student population to become welders, nurses, and pilots – mission-critical jobs that form the backbone of the US economy. CourseKey is a fantastic business with a fantastic real-world impact.
Many of these jobs have life or death consequences, whether in healthcare, construction, or transportation. They need proper training. For good reason, vocational schools are highly regulated. Student loan dollars for trade schools can get cut if their administrators aren’t in compliance with various reporting requirements, such as student time and attendance. These metrics are tougher to track with on-site training program than at traditional 4-year higher ed institutions. Compliance hurdles can choke capacity and growth for many trade schools under the specter of audits from the state or federal governments, especially as remote learning adds ambiguity to the process. At the Department of Education level, schools can lose access to federal funding that is necessary for their survival. Not only does CourseKey improve trade school business KPIs, it serves as insurance against this existential risk.
In parallel, students also benefit directly from CourseKey’s software, which dramatically reduces the friction of menial but critical tasks, such as tracking completion of certification pre-requisites and timesheets. CourseKey connects multiple stakeholders, bridges information silos, and creatively applies technology like passive auditory watermarks. That means teachers and registrars no longer need to chase down students for physical timesheets, and students can rest assured they have perfect visibility into how they’re tracking towards graduation.
We at SignalFire are thrilled to lead CourseKey’s $9M Series B financing it announced today. I’ll be joining the board, alongside Builders VC, Dennis Yang, the former CEO of Udemy, and Steve Altman, the former President of Qualcomm. Says Luke Sophinos: “Having previously worked in venture capital and spent a lot of time around various funds, I’ve been incredibly impressed with SignalFire’s unique value-add. Within the first week of the relationship, our team was connected with leaders of industry to help solve looming challenges, improve processes, and recruit world-class talent. I look forward to partnering with Wayne and SignalFire to build CourseKey into an enormous and impactful business” As CourseKey continues inflecting their growth, they’ve leaned on SignalFire’s Beacon platform and the in-house recruiting experts to rapidly scale the team.
We’re in the early innings of the shift away from traditional universities as the default for higher education. Students are realizing the full range of options that may be a better fit for them in unlocking better-paying, more fulfilling careers without getting trapped in debt. We couldn’t be more excited to be part of this journey as CourseKey powers this growing pathway to the American Dream.
SignalFire funds Commsor’s community management operating system
Building community for an enterprise company requires more than hosting a few meetups and mailing out swag. The consumer world realized that when you foster a passionate fanbase, it’s easier to create brand awareness, organic word-of-mouth growth, and consumer loyalty. Community is a moat! As technology gets commoditized, b2b and b2c companies are realizing that by staying in closer touch with and interconnecting their community, they gain defensibility as customers help spread the word, increase usage, and stick with the product. Digitally native Millennials and Gen Zs are becoming a large percentage of the corporate world. They deserve tools for building community with customers that are as convenient as the apps they use in their consumer lives.
That’s why we got so excited when we met Commsor and its CEO Mac Reddin at the beginning of 2020. His vision is to build Commsor into the operating system for all things community and enable the consumerization of enterprise go-to-market strategies. Commsor goes beyond just building software by living and breathing community with their Community Club for community professionals, education programs for community builders and executives, and extensive resource library for the entire industry.
We are thrilled to have been a part of their journey since pre-seed, and to be participating in today’s $16M Series A financing led by our friends at Felicis Ventures and Seven Seven Six.
It’s now clear that community is the future and an absolutely critical piece of powering customer networks, scaling businesses, and building brands in ways that traditional marketing or advertising channels can’t. Community powers customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and expansion when done correctly, but the problem is that building community is hard. It’s a function that is often wildly understaffed within a company, derided as merely an intern-level position, and fragmented among many channels, including Slack, Meetup, Github, Mailchimp, Discourse, Twitter, and more. That means you’re wrangling spreadsheets, operating off incomplete data, and ultimately not taking a data-driven approach to your community.
Commsor’s platform becomes the command center for community management, pulling in data from all sources and giving professionals the ability to see all community data in a single pane of glass, slice and dice data to run targeted campaigns, and measure ROI on various initiatives. Just as functions like marketing, sales, and customer support have become increasingly data-driven and more important functions in b2b organizations, community will follow suit. Commsor provides a new set of tools for community teams to effectively manage their work. Its software suite will facilitate a shift in other teams’ workflows and KPIs in support of community, just as marketing KPIs are often in support of sales.
As Commsor sprints ahead, they’ve been able to leverage SignalFire’s Beacon platform and the in-house recruiting experts to rapidly scale the team bring in some phenomenal talent such as their new Head of Product. “SignalFire has quite literally been a game changing partner for us” tweeted Reddin. “The entire team are some of the kindest, down to earth, and most helpful people I know”. With the next phase of the business, our Lantern programs will help Commsor spread their thought leadership among industry leaders and bring potential customers around the table.
In the coming years, we believe that winning companies will take a community-first approach, and Commsor is well-positioned to provide all the core infrastructure and services needed to do that successfully. The team’s passion for community and laser-focused vision on educating the market through initiatives like C School — the first-ever career-change program for aspiring community managers — and the Community-Led Declaration that they’ve developed and co-signed with dozens of leading founders will usher in a friendlier age of enterprise marketing.
Freight-pooling from Flock Freight is the future of shipping
What if you could take 9 million cars off the road, speed up deliveries to ecommerce customers, and save small businesses money? That’s the potential of Flock Freight’s shared truckload “freight-pooling”. Rarely are technological advances so win-win-win.
That’s why we’ve been believers in Flock Freight and its founder Oren Zaslansky from its beginnings — with our talent team helping him recruit its first engineering leader and our data science team building their early routing algorithms. Oren’s empathy for merchants and vision for making freight-pooling the status quo are endlessly impressive. We’re proud to have led Flock Freight’s seed, post-seed, and Series B rounds, and are extraordinarily excited for this industry-defining company’s next chapter.
Flock Freight just announced its $113.5M Series C led by Softbank and joined by us at SignalFire as well as GLP Capital Partners, GV, and Volvo Group Venture Capital. You can read more about it in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, or FreightWaves.
While this big raise brings Flock Freight to $184 million in funding, the truly impressive numbers are in its traction:
Revenue up 4X year-over-year
Contribution margin up 11% and gross margin up 15% year-over-year
On-time delivery rate at a stellar 97.5%
An epically low 0.001% damage claim rate
Fuel emissions savings of up to 40%
So how does Flock Freight work? Well, businesses often overpay for partially-empty trailers to dump their goods at a depot before they’re picked up for final delivery. That loading and unloading leads to damaged or stolen goods, delivery delays, late fees, unpredictable ETAs, and bloated carbon footprints.
Flock Freight instead bundles goods from multiple clients into a shared truckload so businesses only pay for the space they need. The trucks are intelligently routed by Flock Freight’s AI directly to the delivery points, removing the middlemen hubs. It’s like carpooling for freight. Merchants get faster, safer, and more reliable deliveries so they can meet the standards of the Amazon Prime era. The world gets shorter ETAs, more availability for high-demand goods, and fewer greenhouse gases. And Flock Freight becomes the connective tissue of the globalized economy.
FlockFire
I Zoomed with Oren to ask about what it’s been like working with SignalFire over the past five years. His answers reinforced why I joined the fund in May after 8 years at TechCrunch: a unique obsession with solving founders’ biggest problems.
“SignalFire is the best. Exclamation point. What really caught me was just [SignalFire founder Chris Farmer’s] level of conviction” Oren beamed. “Once he made up his mind that he believed in what we were doing, it made me feel like by associating with him, my probability of success was going to be much higher.”
Before we joined the cap table, Oren recalls how Chris and our co-founder/CTO Ilya Kirnos told him “‘We’re going to show you how we can drive value. We’re going to introduce you to the guy we think is the best product and engineering leader in southern California.’ I understood enough to know it was risky and generous but cool of them to make that intro before a term sheet had been signed. That’s really the right way to do business, having confidence that we’ll just see the value”. That intro led Flock Freight to hire Lu Saenz, who remains their VP of product and engineering.
Flock Freight founder and CEO Oren Zaslansky
It surprises most people to learn that we have a half-dozen programmers and data scientists on staff. They build recruitment tech for our portfolio companies and support their engineering teams. “Yuriy [Groysman, SignalFire’s data science partner] went to work heads down for six months on writing our v2 solvers and optimization engine algorithms. Before, we could compute routing for 20 shipments in 8 hours. Yuriy took us to 150 shipments in a minute — a mind-boggling step function of increased efficiency. We have PhDs on payroll now but didn’t at the time. Yuriy and SignalFire not only saved us a lot of money, but he was part of a Nobel Prize-winning team in particle physics. We were never going to be able to recruit that kind of talent at that stage. He put us at least a year ahead of schedule.”
Rather than ask our community for favors to assist our startups, SignalFire recruited over 50 top entrepreneurs and tech leaders to become equity partners in the firm who have subsequently become over $100M of our funds’ LP base so they’re incentivized to help our portfolio. “The advisory network is extraordinary. Every venture firm says we have a super ninja rockstar network (Ugh, I’ve heard the term ‘rockstar’ used ad nauseam) but they’re not actually accessible. SignalFire introduced me to their advisor Keith Pradhan [formerly head of pricing for Salesforce and now for LinkedIn]. I’ve since connected with him a dozen times. He’s just so on point for us since pricing is viciously hard in what we do.”
When we invest, we run an all-hands onboarding session between our whole team and the startup’s founders to outline their needs and assign them to our experts. “Chris is still my guy, for sure. We talk a lot, sometimes multiple times a week. Often not about work but about life as well as building businesses and trying to change the world in our respective ways. But now it’s a SignalFire – Flock Freight relationship. It’s Mike Mangini [SignalFire’s head of talent, formerly a Facebook executive recruiter]. It’s the entire talent team [which made 1000 job candidate intros to portfolio companies last year]. It’s Yujin Chung [SignalFire’s head of market development and formerly Andreessen Horowitz’s first market development partner] and all the LPs and the advisors. It’s so many people over there making us better. And that’s why SignalFire is the best.”
“If I lived in San Francisco, I’d be in the SignalFire office every week because there are just so many talented folks around there. So many good operators, which I find to be pretty unusual in the venture world” Oren concludes. “Anyone can lead a round. It’s about taking a company from idea to exit. SignalFire has taken us from idea to where we are. We’re not at exit but maybe halfway, right?”
Flock Freight’s second act: The “Prebate”
To get the rest of the way, though, Oren is well aware that Flock Freight needs another innovation beyond the Shared Truckload model of combining Less Than Truckload shipments into freight-pools.
Bigger businesses typically hire entire trucks to do their deliveries, but get stuck paying for unused space if the recipient reduces their order. A truck fits 26 single-stacked pallets of almonds, but Safeway changes their order last minute to only want 20, so the supplier has a fifth of the truck empty. Flock Freight’s new prebate program lets customers strike a deal where if they don’t end up needing the full truck, they’ll pay a discounted rate because Flock Freight can fill the extra space with goods from someone else.
“We can go to the customer and say ‘don’t pay for a whole truck, pay for the truck space you use, and we will turn it into a shared truckload’” Oren explains. Those savings can add up if you’re shipping hundreds of truckloads per year. Suddenly Flock Freight is winning Full Truckload deals as well as Less Than Truckloads because it can combine them like its shipping competitors can’t. “If you’re spending $100 million dollars a year on truckloads, and some of them aren’t full and some of them are but you don’t know which will be which, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna give all $100 million of that to Flock Freight.”
How to make a startup hiring plan
SignalFire’s guide to headcount planning, inclusive job descriptions, compensation benchmarking, and interviewer training
Headcount is your biggest expense, so it pays to plan ahead. You wouldn’t write code withoutknowing what you’re building, or make a sales call to a random phone number. It’s the same for recruiting. Mapping out the process means when you need to fill a role or talent falls in your lap, you’ll be ready to hire, smart, and fast.This guide is designed for founders, executives, and recruiters alike to sharpen their hiring skills regardless of budget or team size. Whether you’re a one-person hiring squad, an in-house team, or are working with recruiting contractors, we’ll teach you to:
Develop a short- and long-term hiring plan
Approve new roles you need filled
Build out your hiring team
Divide and assign recruiting tasks
Write appealing job descriptions
Run consistent, unbiased interviews
Launch your recruiting process
When should you develop a recruitment plan?
It’s never too early! Founders and CEOs should ideally start thinking about recruitment plans before they even have the money to pay for the talent. That way they can budget or raise to cover their future burn rates. Many investors like SignalFire prefer pitches that include a hiring plan so they know what funding will go towards and which key roles or weaknesses remain unaddressed. But let’s say that you’re coming to this realization a little later in your company’s history, like once you’ve made your first Talent/HR hire or assigned someone else to take ownership of recruiting like your COO or VP of Finance. You’ll still need to understand the process so you can evaluate your team’s work and align your efforts.
Why focus on recruiting so early in your company’s history?
If you only have a handful of employees, you might be hesitant to spend time at this stage improving your recruiting processes and operations. But founders often spend 70% of their time on recruiting. It’s the only way to actually gain time back by having people to which they can delegate tasks. Unfortunately, the explosion in startup formation has created a talent crunch. That means you can’t just be a great place to work or compensate well. You also have to know exactly who you need, when you need them, and how to run a swift and professional recruiting process to sign them.
It’s an especially tricky challenge because every startup wants to hire amazing talent, demand has drastically surpassed supply, and when you don’t have a process in place, everything is slower and less efficient. The stakes are high at this stage: Each subsequent hire will consider your existing team’s quality and culture when deciding whether to join. Great talent wants to work with and learn from other great talent. Meanwhile, diverse talent may be apprehensive about joining a homogeneous team. Putting in the work now means you won’t be digging yourself out of a hole in the future.
That said, don’t limit yourself to only senior employees at name-brand companies. While you might feel like nabbing some VP from Google means you’ve derisked your company, they can be hard to attract without huge cash compensation, and might not fit into a scrappier culture. Instead, look for first hires who could have made great co-founders.
Step 1: The approval: What is the process to open a role
You need to institute a standard approval process that happens every time you open a role. This process should apply to all departments and positions at all levels, including full-time regular, part-time regular, and temp positions. This process should account for A) budget and B) resources for someone (e.g. founder, executive, recruiter, hiring manager, or agency) to work on the role, and C) defining the role and responsibilities.
Initiating a hire
The hiring leader discusses new requisition needs with the decision-maker whenever a department has a need to:
Open and recruit for a new position
Rehire for a position after a layoff or firing
Hire a freelancer, contractor, or other temporary staffer.
The person who makes these approval calls could be the CEO or CFO, depending on your org structure.
Approving roles: A step-by-step guide
Here’s how to go from recognizing a role you need filled to kicking off recruiting. Remember that depending on your team size, the recruiter, hiring manager, head of HR, and even the founder could all be the same person.
The hiring manager emails the decision-maker to request a new open position — this is called a requisition form. You can make this an easy-to-access template and post on your wiki for all hiring managers to access. This should include:
-Is this a new position, refill position, or temp position?
-Title
-Seniority level
-Who the person will report to
-Basic scope of the role/responsibilities/skillset required — attach job description if this is a refill for a past role
-Compensation benchmarks
-The decision-maker approves or rejects
If approved, the requisition form is sent to HR (if you are a small team, this step may be handled by finance). It’s helpful to attach a job description at this point if it is available. For help, check out SignalFire’s job description template and our deep-dive into turning role needs into job descriptions later in this chapter.
HR/Finance reviews the requisition form to verify that the job’s responsibilities, necessary skills, and compensation match the open role, and suggest edits if necessary.
Once approved, HR/Finance updates the compensation benchmark spreadsheet with the new role’s compensation bands and shares with the hiring manager and CEO/Finance for final approval.
The recruiter is given all relevant information and begins working with the hiring manager to launch the recruiting process.
How much should you pay a software engineer? How about an intern vs a manager? How should that be divided between salary, bonuses, and equity? And how much equity should you provide in refresher grants over time? These are critical questions for both attracting and retaining talent, but also for hiring planning so you don’t outstrip your runway.
Hypothetical example, not based on real data
This downloadable compensation benchmark spreadsheet and template from Option Impact (dummy data set previewed above) includes recent data on expected ranges for engineering salaries, bonuses, and equity for a variety of seniority levels. While it’s not perfectly up to date and doesn’t take into account COVID-19 or remote work’s impact on compensation, it should give you a foundation for headcount planning. The additional tabs provide templates for building your own compensation workbooks for engineering, product, sales, marketing, and customer support.
You can click File->Download->Microsoft Excel to download the compensation example and templates for your own use. Check out Option Impact’s compensation data services based on 3000 participating companies for more resources like this look at Bay Area startup CEO compensation.
Given COVID-19 is pushing many companies to be remote-first, it may be appropriate to consider compensation changes for employees that move from near your headquarters to lower cost-of-living locations. Payscale’s calculator will show you the change in housing and living costs for moving between different cities.
Payscale’s calculator
Step 2: Headcount and capacity: When to hire
Despite uncertainty, it’s important to maintain both a short- and mid-term hiring plan and document where you stand on recruiting each quarter. Tip: Investors and board members appreciate seeing these quarterly checkups in your updates to them.
If you are fortunate enough to have someone besides a founder leading talent acquisition, it’s important to give them (your recruiter, people ops, HR team) guidelines in the form of a headcount plan and forecast. Like salespeople, recruiters are often working with pipelines and managing connections with job candidates over time, so giving them insight into future hiring needs will help them nurture the right relationships.
There are two major points to consider: headcount planning, which is defined as deciding which new employees you’ll be adding to your organization and the rough timeline this will follow, and capacity planning, which is considering how many roles your recruiter will be able to take on at any given time.
Headcount planning
The budgeting process for new headcount typically happens early in Q4 for the following year. At this point, all new positions are discussed and go through the annual budgeting process for planning and approval.
In many cases, circumstances will dictate additional headcount needs outside of the already approved roles. In this case, there should be a discussion justifying the new approval so that the team is aligned as to why the role is being prioritized over the formerly planned roles. The whole team must understand that the recruiter will not be expected to work on or source candidates for un-approved roles.
The executive team should decide how to prioritize roles — determine which three to five you’d like the recruiter to focus on and what ranking roles come in after that. It’s also a good idea to come up with a plan for handling backfill if an existing team member leaves. Be sure to prepare for scenarios where you need to ramp your headcount plan up or down depending on fluctuations in runway or unexpected cash crunches.
Here are a few points to consider when defining your headcount plan and forecast:
Which people do you need today, in two quarters, in a year, or even later? If you’re looking to hire mostly executives in a short timeframe, you’ll probably want to work with external recruiters from a capacity standpoint. If you only want to hire a few individual contributors, an in-house recruiter should be able to handle that.
What are the salaries for the roles in your short- and mid-term plan? Also, consider how much you should allocate for agency fees or referral bonuses for each role.
What’s your estimated time to hire for each role? When will each role be projected to start? How long will it take them to ramp up and become productive?
Capacity planning
You need to develop a realistic workload for your recruiters to avoid burning them out. This is why it’s helpful to create a framework for defining the complexity of roles. For example, recruiting software Greenhouse’s 5-point scale allows you to assign a difficulty index to each role. Roles that are easy to fill or already exist and require little setup (e.g. adding another SDR to your team when you already have one) get a score of 1. Roles that are higher levels of seniority or require specialized skills (e.g. senior software engineers or executives) get a score of 5. Recruiters can typically fill around 12 points a quarter, so using this approach can help create alignment around priorities and realistic expectations.
You’ll want to measure or at least estimate your recruiting yield ratio. This is defined as how many candidates will you need to source and move through each phase of the interview funnel to reach your hiring goals.
Here’s a hypothetical recruiting yield ratio pyramid from Workable, though your numbers will vary widely.
Hiring managers and recruiters will work closely throughout the entire recruiting process (which could be quite lengthy if you’re looking for an especially tough-to-fill role), so they need to be on the same page from the outset. Be sure to spend time defining roles and responsibilities as well as creating realistic expectations about how long different steps will take. Hiring is a full-time job, so factor in all the work!
Check out these resources to learn more about recruiter capacity planning:
When considering who to hire, start with the big picture: What’s the ideal composition of your company? What distribution of experience do you need? Then you can zero in on questions like what each incremental hire will bring to the table and how to optimize your hiring order. Your management team should discuss upcoming hiring needs within each management meeting. These conversations should then be factored into the company’s annual hiring plan to make sure that growth projections are being hit and the budget is not being compromised.
When you’re ready to think about individual roles, the hiring manager and recruiter should work together to create a detailed job description. We often recommend asking the hiring manager to articulate their needs for the approval process first and then to go back later with the recruiter to refine them at the start of the search.
Here are the questions that should guide these discussions, both at the leadership and hiring manager levels:
Why are we adding this role?
In what direction will they take the company?
Why are we hiring for this now?
How will this role interact with existing leadership?
What does it mean to be great at this role?
What will their success look like in the first 6 months? The first year?
What companies do we admire? How have they done what they’ve done?
What companies obviously have top talent in this role?
What does the ideal candidate need to have done before in their career?
Who are the people doing this job extremely well right now? Do we know anyone in our network that has a great reputation or could introduce us?
Don’t want to handle this all by yourself? Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks most of the top tech talent in the Western world and can generate reports on the best and most hirable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is headed by former Facebook Talent leader Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to make sure you score your ideal hires. We made over 1000 job candidate intros to our portfolio companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor.
SignalFire’s Director of talent operations & development Crystal Guerrero
For first-time founders and serial entrepreneurs seeking a refresher, we start by offering a program based on my (Crystal Guererro) decade of experience leading talent operations for startups. We partner with founding teams to help them establish a world-class recruitment process. We refer to this as a “recruiting engine” — systems implementation, brand building, role definition, recruitment process, sourcing, interview training, and compensation benchmarking to enable teams to identify, attract, engage, close, and onboard top talent quickly and effectively.
This hiring plan guide is part of our Recruitment Process Optimization program where I work in tandem with our founders and talent teams to devise a comprehensive recruiting strategy, advise on systems development, and aid in recruiting execution via our various individual contributor talent pipelines as well as Beacon Talent. To support this program, the Talent Academy Playbook outlines the nuts and bolts of implementing a well-oiled recruitment machine which is a compilation of best practices and learning from my recruiting career. This should help guide your thinking as it relates to building your talent engine.
Service Level Agreements For Hiring Teams
How to create clear tasks and timelines for everyone who’s involved in the hiring process.
So much of recruiting relies on timing. If you’re too slow to follow up, schedule interviews, or make an offer, chances are that promising candidates will get snatched up by another company. But many steps in the hiring process depend not just on a single person but the coordinated efforts of several people. This is why it’s so important to commit to timelines, deliverables, and success metrics so you can move candidates through the pipeline quickly.
Service Level Agreements (or SLAs from here on out) clearly spell out exactly what each team member is responsible for and the timeframe they have to complete each task. SLAs will help you make more offers, get more candidates to sign, and bring your company that much closer to a world-class team.
Which SLAs should you assign?
The charts below provide an outline of what generally happens in each stage of the hiring process along with some recommended timelines for the recruiter, hiring manager, recruiting team (which may overlap in smaller teams), and the decision-maker (who may be the CEO, Head of Finance, or Head of People). Take a look and consider how these map to the people and processes at your company.
You can use this template below to make your own hiring SLA with tasks each role is responsible for.
How long should it take to complete each task?
Time kills all deals. To put it simply, you want to move as quickly as possible in every stage while accurately assessing candidate value.Still, you need a realistic time frame for each task. These numbers will vary depending on complexity and seniority of the role, the recruiter’s existing bandwidth, etc., so consider them a rough guideline:
Recruiter sources and gathers initial list of candidates: 2 weeks
Hiring manager provides shortlist of candidates to interview: Within 24 hours
Recruiter schedules interviews: Within 24 hours of hiring manager approval
Interview panel provides feedback on candidate: Same day as the interview
CEO/decision-maker approves offer: Within 24 hours
Hold a kickoff meeting with stakeholders to decide which tasks and time frames should be included in your SLAs. Consider how you’ll hold people accountable to them. For example, you may want to incorporate SLAs into their goals or performance evaluations.
Grade your experience
You’ll also want to gather insight from the candidates who are going through this process. A candidate experience survey can help you collect data to identify if there are any slowdowns or inefficiencies they perceived in the process.
You can use Google Forms, Typeform, Survey Monkey, or another survey tool.Here are examples of a candidate experience surveys to get you started. You can see what the survey should look like in PDF form, and copy text from the Google Docs versions to paste into your own surveys:
SignalFire’s Candidate Experience Survey — Version for offer accepted candidate — Text in Google Doc
SignalFire’s Candidate Experience Survey — Version for offer declined — Text in Google Doc
SignalFire’s Candidate Experience Survey — Interviewed but Rejected — Text in Google Doc
Defining who you want to hire
Creating a detailed job description that can be used both internally and externally to promote a role.
Your team needs to be able to align around the skillset and qualities that will make someone successful in this role. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting candidates’ time — and your own.
One of the best ways to come to a consensus on your ideal candidate is by crafting a detailed job description. Think of this as a piece of marketing collateral: It should speak directly to candidates and convince them why your company is the perfect place for them. We made this startup job description templateto help you out.
Hiring manager kickoff
Before you get started on the actual job description, the hiring manager needs to carefully consider the ideal candidate for this role. What type of company do they currently work for? What are some keywords that define their work to date? What specific work experience and personality traits do they have? We know these are deep questions, which is why we’ve created the Hiring manager kickoff document to walk you through these major categories. Plan to spend about an hour conducting the research and filling out the document, and then you can continue on to the next section. Don’t worry — we’re not going anywhere. This is what we do.
The key elements of a job description
It can be tempting to turn a job description into a wish list of everything your company wants. But if the description seems too broad or demanding, it can scare off applicants. Instead, try to frame your job description in a way that puts the candidate first. Why should they be interested in this role? What will they get, both personally and professionally, by joining your company? This will boost your rate of inbound applications and outbound recruiter response rate.
Here are a few points you should aim to include:
Brief description of the company’s product, purpose, and mission
Traits and work style of who will be successful in the role
Responsibilities of the role and what they’ll spend time doing
Skills and experience required
Challenges they’ll tackle and opportunities for career progression
Employee value proposition explaining the highlights of working at your company
That might seem like a lot to include, but you shouldn’t just lay out a laundry list of prerequisites and projects they’ll work on. Tell them what they’ll actually spend their days doing.Most importantly, you want your job description to be unique. Candidates will likely be comparing yours to several similar roles at other companies and you don’t want to get lost in the crowd. Don’t be afraid to add a little flavor from your work environment and company culture.
Check out SignalFire’sjob description template for a deeper look at all the major components. We recommend having hiring managers and recruiters partner on writing this up. Remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can recycle some wording from previous job descriptions, especially when it comes to your perks, benefits, and company culture.
A note about inclusive job descriptions
Research has shown that the language in job descriptions can affect how they’re perceived by candidates and discourage certain groups from applying. There are a few steps you can take to create more inclusive job descriptions. Here are a few examples:
Use gender-neutral terms like “they/them”, “applicants” or “the candidate”, not “he or “she”
Avoid gendered or loaded terms like “rockstar” and “dominate”
Limit the external job description to “must-haves” rather than “nice-to-haves”. Men appear to be more likely than women to apply to jobs when they don’t have all the requirements. For internal promotions, Hewlett Packard found men applied when they met 60% of the requirements, but women were much more likely to hesitate unless they met 100% of the qualifications
Cut down on corporate jargon and acronyms
Emphasize your company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion
Highlight your inclusive benefits such as parental leave (which is broader than just maternity leave)
Consider dropping strict education requirements, as this could exclude candidates that were unable to attend university or that could not afford a college degree. Many talented candidates are self-taught or learned their skills through experience
Check out tools like Textio.com that help identify non-inclusive language in your current job descriptions and make recommendations for how to use more inclusive wording
How to train your hiring team to conduct consistent interviews and provide vivid candidate feedback
Anyone who joins your company is going to change the team dynamic, and this is especially true when you’re small and early stage. They’ll be communicating and collaborating with the rest of your squad, so it’s critical to have other team members participate in the interview process and consider who would be the best addition to your company. Plus, interviewing is tough and time consuming. The burden shouldn’t only rest on the hiring manager’s shoulders. Spread the love (or to be more accurate, the workload)!
How to choose your hiring dream team
You’re looking to create the right mix of people who can handle the two major tasks in an interview: the assessment and the sell. You need talented specialists and team leaders who can judge the candidates on the skills required for the role, and evaluate how they’ll add to your culture. Meanwhile, you need friendly and persuasive team members to represent your organization in an authentically positive light, and effectively “sell” the role and your company to convince candidates to accept your offer.
Start by reviewing your job description and outlining the key skills you’re trying to assess. Consider which employees would be well suited to evaluate candidates on these skills. If you’re hiring into an existing team that already has a few members, some should definitely be part of the hiring team. If you’re building out a new team that doesn’t have other members yet, you can pull in leaders from other departments in order to get perspective from people with broader work experience.
You may also want to think about conducting cross-functional interviews to get a better sense of the candidate’s personality and general work style. That means including some interviewers for assessing technical skills, and others to judge culture fit. If you’re still relatively small and your executives have the bandwidth to do so, we recommend having your CEO or co-founder participate in the interview process as well.
In addition to the hiring manager, consider one or two interviewers from the same team, one or two cross-functional interviewers, your CEO or co-founder, and potentially one or two hiring team members who can participate in a more casual way, such as taking the candidate to a [virtual] lunch or coffee, conducting the culture-add interview, or participating in the take-home assignment presentation.
Each interview should include no more than four interviewers. That will keep you from soaking up too much of your employees’ time, and ensure everyone has space to participate. If you find some of your hiring team to be off-putting to candidates, it’s important to pull them out of the process as soon as possible so they don’t scare away hires.
How to train your hiring team
Next, you’ll want to create a training experience so that all interviewers use a consistent process for evaluating and giving feedback on candidates. Even if members of your hiring team have conducted interviews before, you’ll probably want them to participate in order to brush up their skills and align them with your company’s unique process. Interview consistency is key because otherwise you’ll have no way to accurately compare candidates who met with different hiring teams or answered different questions. That can allow too much subjectivity or bias to creep in. Most modern applicant tracking systems will provide a scorecard system to make consistency easier.
Many companies will hold an in-person interviewer training class on a regular basis (e.g. once per quarter) and may require each new interviewer to complete additional online training courses that cover other topics. Some aspects of interviewing are clear cut: There are questions that you absolutely can’t ask candidates, such as their age, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, disabilities, and marital status, for example (for more on non-compliant interview questions, see this article). But there are also many elements of interviewing that can vary from company to company, including the format and length of interviews and processes for collecting and reviewing feedback. We’ll go deeper into all the questions to ask during interviews in future recruiting guide blog posts.
Be sure to schedule time as soon after interviews as possible to sync up with the interviewing team and confer about the candidate. This lets you have the most vivid discussion possible with impressions fresh in everyone’s mind. It also lets you compress the interviewing timeline so you can make an offer or move on to more candidates as quickly as possible. This is particularly critical after the final interview because delays can cause candidates to lose enthusiasm or let other hirers swoop in.
Remember you don’t need a unanimous decision from the hiring team. You’re not looking for the least offensive average of all skills and traits. You want someone who’s the best in the room at something to help level up your company. Still, you’ll need buy-in from at least the key decision makers and people working closest to the new hire.
We recommend dedicating some of your training time and resources to raising awareness of unconscious bias, which has become a hot topic in the interviewing world lately, and goes hand in hand with creating a more diverse and inclusive company. Everyone has natural preferences which can unintentionally shape their opinions of candidates. These can make it more difficult for people from underrepresented backgrounds to get hired, and wrongly favor candidates with similar work or education histories to founders and early team members. Many companies have begun to offer unconscious bias training to help limit some of this bias and make their hiring practices more inclusive. These two blog posts by the recruiting team at Cockroach Labs are a great introduction to this topic: How We’re Fighting Unconscious Bias and Open Sourcing the Interview to Reduce Unconscious Bias.
To the same effect, you shouldn’t tolerate intolerant behavior from candidates. Remind your hiring team to be on the lookout for culture red flags like inappropriate jokes or casual sexism.
Optimize your hiring team
Once you have created or selected a training program, all interviewers should be required to complete it before participating in the interview process. Send out the message that interviewing is both a big responsibility and a badge of honor (not a chore!) — only high-performing employees who embody the company values should be invited to participate in the process. Remember that the individuals you choose to participate in the interview process are representatives of the company and you should be confident in their evaluation and decision-making skills. Consider if there’s a modest gift or reward you can share with employees for being pulled into the interview process given it will eat up time from their primary role.
After you’ve established a cohort of experienced interviewers, you can also create an interview shadowing process, allowing a fresh group of team members to sit in on interviews with more experienced interviewers. While this involves some extra bandwidth initially, it will ultimately expand your number of available interviewers, allowing people to sub in as necessary when someone is not available. This also helps to avoid interviewer burnout and interview scheduling delays while bringing diversity of perspective to evaluations.
Now you should understand how to develop your hiring plan, approve a new role, build out your hiring team, divide tasks, write job descriptions, fire up a recruiting process, and prepare for interviews. Sign up for our next chapter to learn about the hiring funnel. We’ll explore how to source job candidates and move from initial contact to final-stage interviews. To be invited to the next expert talent council event, email our Director of Talent Operations & Development Crystal Guerrero at [email protected]
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to ensure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact this article’s author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero: [email protected]
Startup job description template
A list of essential components for writing job listings
A boring job description implies a boring job. By instead communicating the opportunities for career growth instead of just the responsibilities and qualifications, your open positions will help fill themselves. Here we’ll lay out a template for writing an appealing job description.
[ROLE DESCRIPTION: Overview of the job’s responsibilities and challenges]
[Company name] is seeking an experienced senior product manager who can contribute to… A PM at [Company name] has “full stack” product responsibilities including working hand-in-hand with our designers, engineers, customer success representatives, and sales teams to deliver a timely, high-quality product.
We are interested in a PM who has [this work experience] who can apply [these skills]. The person who will be most successful in this role has [work style traits] and can [solve challenges particular to the job].
[DESIRED JOB CANDIDATE VALUES] Who will love this job:
[Attracted to a specific challenge we’re tackling]
[Work style trait that gels with our culture]
[Alignment with company mission]
[RESPONSIBILITIES] What you’ll be responsible for:
Owning the … strategy of the platform
Collaborating with … to prioritize features on the roadmap
Driving…
Working with the … team to develop…
[QUALIFICATIONS/DESIRED TRAITS] What we look for in a candidate:
Strong … skills
Passion for…
…experience a plus
[WHAT WE OFFER] Perks at [Company name]:
Competitive salary, bonus, & equity packages
401(k) retirement plan
Pre-tax health care, dependent care, and commuter benefits (FSA)
Flexible medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
Life insurance & disability insurance
Parental leave
Fitness discounts for gyms or home equipment
Unlimited paid time off
Option to work 50% of your time in [location X] satellite office
Free catered lunches and dinners for in-person employees, and meal stipends for remote employees
Office social events including happy hours, parties, and community service projects
Fully paid on-site parking, local commuter pass
$10,000 referral bonus for new hires
Apple laptop and ergonomic home office stipend
Employee activity groups for runners, cyclers, rock climbers…
Much more
[WHO WE ARE] About Us:
[Paragraph outlining the following: Product description, customers or demographics using the product, location, well-known investors, advisors, executives, and the company mission]
Diversity Commitment: We are focused on building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives and are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
Learn more at [company website link].
Spotify starts by breaking down its job listings into broad categories and acquired companies
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to ensure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact this article’s author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero: [email protected]
You’ve got an open job position to fill, but how do you write an accurate job description or start to screen applicants? This document will walk you through preparation for defining an ideal job candidate’s skills and experience, determining companies and industries from which to recruit, and which top-selling points and questions will score you the best applicants. Then we’ll outline which questions to ask applicants to quickly understand if they might be a good fit.
This resource is part of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide chapter on hiring plans and launching a recruiting process. You can sign up here to get our next chapter and more guides for startups.
PART 1: Recruiter → Hiring Manager initial communication
Recruiters: You can copy and paste this into an email or a working document to share with your hiring manager. If you’re a smaller team, the leadership, hiring manager, recruiter, and HR roles may overlap, and you might just be filling this out yourself.
[JOB TITLE] Details – link to Job Description
Let’s start preparing for the kick-off! I am getting things prepped and ready to post the [JOB TITLE] role. [LEADERSHIP] mentioned you will be the hiring manager for this role and to sync up with you accordingly.
I have created a preliminary doc that helps outline the specifics of the role. This is an information-gathering doc that will help me both in the candidate-sourcing phase and the recruiter phone interview phase.
Please spend 30 minutes to 1 hour adding details about this role. Please fill out the sections that I designated with [HIRING MANAGER], as I would like you to think about and define this before we meet. This is a template version so I have added ideas to get you started. Anywhere you see a “?” or “…” is somewhere to fill in the information.
We can figure out the rest of the details ad hoc. If you would like me to share this template with anyone or ask anyone else to participate, please let me know. I will also set aside an hour for us to review the info and discuss logistics.
The more info you can provide, the better!
Link to Ideal Candidate Profiles [HIRING MANAGER: please add at least 5 LinkedIn profiles]:
Companies to Target [HIRING MANAGER, please add]:
Are there companies that are known for having strong teams around this position?
Any need for X years (total) in a …-facing role in a … related industry or field?
Experience working with…
Strong understanding of…
Has experience taking a company from X size to Y size?
Has launched a …-type of product?
Ideal Candidate Traits (Who are they/Culture) [HIRING MANAGER, please add]:
Ability to work in a fast-paced, diverse, and rapidly changing environment.
Someone that can…
Attention to…
Soft skills/attributes such as: Energetic, no ego, willingness to take full ownership, wear multiple hats, doesn’t fold under pressure, cross-functional communication skills, someone that feels like they have to be a part of a startup (this is part of their goals/dream)
Red Flag examples:
Contractor/Consultant
Large gaps in experience
Job hopper
Anything else?
Top 5 Selling points for this role? Why is it compelling? Why join this team instead of another? [HIRING MANAGER, please add]:
Please don’t mirror what is already listed on the job description. If you were trying to sell a candidate on the opportunity, what are the major reasons why this role is HOT?
You will establish yourself as a…
You will have the ability to…
You will build…
You will contribute…
You will lead…
You will learn…
Team structure [HIRING MANAGER, please add]:
Who does this hire report to?
Who is on their team?
Who is on their pod?
Who do they work with cross-functionally?
Team dynamics?
Growth opportunity?
Phases of the interview and times for each: [Hiring Manager, please coordinate]:
Recruiter Phone Screen (Name – 30 minutes)
Hiring Manager Phone Screen (Name – 30 minutes)
Video Call / Onsite 1: meet with [TEAM NAME] team member (NAME – 45 minutes) – Optional person to rotate in if not available (NAME – 45 minutes)
Video Call / Onsite 1: meet with [TEAM NAME] team member (NAME – 45 minutes) – Optional person to rotate in if not available (NAME – 45 minutes)
Video Call / Onsite 1: meet with cross-functional team member (NAME – 45 minutes) – Optional person to rotate in if not available (NAME – 45 minutes)
Video Call / Onsite 2: HW presentation (60 minutes total)
Required to meet: (1 hour total)
Name(s)
Optional to meet: ?
Video Call / Onsite 2: (Other 1:1’s)
PART 2: Guidelines for initial phone screen
Here we’ll go over major question topics to discuss in your first phone call or video conference with a job candidate.
Note that we’ve omitted topics regarding citizenship, family status, and compensation history. These are regulated by laws that protect candidates from discrimination and compensation suppression. Please be sure to comply with these laws and consult an expert before asking about these topics.
Employers can still gauge the applicant’s pay expectations without asking for their salary history by including a range in a job description. You can use this compensation calculator to get a ballpark range. Even with a salary history ban, an employer can ask what an applicant hopes to earn. And nothing prevents highly paid job applicants from volunteering their current salary to set employer expectations.
Recruiter Intake – Questions for candidates:
Pain (motivators for looking):
Why are you leaving/looking outside of your current role?
What are you looking for in your next role that is lacking in your current role?
Career: What are your top 3 motivators to take a job?
1.
2.
3.
Location:
Where do you commute from?
Are you able to make that commute to [OFFICE LOCATION]? (Do you commute via car, train, bike etc.)
Are they moving? If needed, do they expect to be reimbursed for or given a relocation bonus?
Company:
What is your ideal team size? (team and company)
What is your main interest in joining an [early-stage / late-stage / public] company?
If coming out of something large, would you be able to transition well to a company of [COMPANY SIZE] because your level of contribution is going to be different? Are you ready for that challenge?
Compensation Expectations:
Base
Bonus
Equity
Total
Timing:
If we decide to move forward, what is your availability for this week? Get two days/times of availability for followup interviews.
If we decide to move forward, how quickly would you be willing to accept an offer and start working?
Do you have any upcoming vacations or projects at work that might obstruct this timeline?
Competition:
What companies are you currently interviewing with & what stage are you at?
Do you currently have any offers in hand? When do they expire?
Experience: [HIRING MANAGER, please add]: What about their past or present experience would qualify them for the role? Please edit these questions and create your own.
Tell me about your experience working on a [TEAM NAME] team:
How was the [DEPARTMENT] function organized and where did you fit in?
What were your responsibilities?
Who did you report to and what is their title?
Did you have any direct or in-direct reports?
Tell me about your day-to-day/specific project/experience you worked on
What was the purpose of the project?
What did you solely contribute?
Who else did you work with on the project?
What was their role?
Did you face any issues?
What did you learn?
Did the project get implemented?
Did this help [increase productivity / boost metrics / lower metrics, etc]?
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About SignaFire’s Talent Program
Recruiting is SignalFire’s superpower. Our Beacon Talent engine tracks all the top tech talent in the Western world, and can generate reports on the best and most poachable job candidates for any role. SignalFire’s talent program is led by former Facebook executive recruiter Mike Mangini whose team assists our portfolio companies with high-level strategy and on-the-ground recruiting to ensure you score your ideal hires. We helped make over 1000 job candidate intros to our companies last year — just one of the reasons we receive a net promoter score of 96 from our portfolio founders, over 85% of whom say we’re their most valuable investor. Want to start working with SignalFire’s Talent team? Contact this article’s author, our Director of Talent Operations Crystal Guerrero: [email protected]
Why SignalFire funded Ledger Investing’s $10M Series A
Sometimes a wall of text isn’t the best way to explain a startup or its potential, so we’re trying something new: a mini slide deck. These four images reveal why we’re so excited about Ledger Investing and its insurance investment marketplace.
Today the company announced its $10 million Series A, led by AllegisNL Capital with participation from prior investors including, MassMutual Ventures, Accel, Crosscut Ventures, and SignalFire! We co-led Ledger Investing’s seed round back in 2017 and they’ve made outstanding progress demystifying risk and expanding access to investment capital for insurers.
Here’s why we found Ledger’s product, team, and go-to-market strategy so compelling:
And if you want an easy way to share the mini-deck, here you go!
A wall of text isn't always ideal for explaining a startup, so we made this mini-deck about funding risk marketplace @LedgerInvesting's $10M Series A pic.twitter.com/ga6TgGRoUi
Partnering with BluBracket to build security at the speed of code
As Tesla, Symantec and others see their source code stolen and even being sold on the darkweb, there’s a growing awareness of the importance of securing source code. This problem will only grow as every company across industries ranging from industrials to CPG/retail becomes a tech company, with internal source code becoming a core piece of IP. Not only that, as companies move to Git and cloud deployments, visibility on where that source code lives is becoming even more difficult as source code gets shared more often.
BluBracket is the first team that has figured out a way to not only provide this visibility but also give these companies a way to manage access across developers, alert on suspicious behavior, and enforce security policies. We are incredibly excited to participate in their $6.5M Seed round alongside Unusual Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Firebolt.
The founders Ajay Arora and Prakash Linga are serial security entrepreneurs that previously built Vera into the leading company securing access to documents. When working with clients like GE and Capital One at Vera, they heard frequently about the challenge of securing source code as the company moved to Git.
As employees come and go, we have seen major lawsuits crop up over code theft or even accidental instances of proprietary code ending up in open source repositories. Prior to BluBracket, there has been no way to segment access to sensitive repositories for people like interns, contractors, or others who should only have specific and temporary access.
In the old paradigm, developers would write code and throw it over the fence to ops who were responsible for standing up infrastructure. Now, developers make code changes that affect infrastructure in real time. That means that it is much easier for malicious code to get deployed to production. At the same time, enterprises are moving entirely to Git which has resulted in Morgan Stanley, Citadel, and many other companies having some of their code end up in open source repositories.
BluBracket offers a variety of security features to prevent code from getting into the wild or alerting if there are any breaches. They have developed an incredible offering that will continue to provide value to enterprises and help them protect one of their most valuable and defensible assets. They are already on a roll having recently been named a finalist at the RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest and having landed impressive customers like Compass. We could not be more excited to partner with BluBracket in their mission to provide a comprehensive solution that makes code safe.
