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.--This template is part of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide chapter on building your employer brand and careers page. To get the next chapter, sign up here

Startup recruiting dossier template

Quick Facts:

• Focus: [Industry]
• Founded: [Year]
• Funding: [Series, Total, Lead Investors]
• Headquarters: [Neighborhood, City, State]
• Team Size: [X] Eng: [Y]
• Website: [URL]

What We Do:

• One-sentence description of your product
• 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. Mentorship opportunities & regular guest speakers
• Ex. Daily catered meals & unlimited snacks
• Ex. Wellness & health benefits (gym membership)
• Ex. Paid parking or public transit pass
• 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

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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.

This template is part of SignalFire’s Startup Recruiting Guide chapter on building your employer brand and careers page. To get the next chapter, sign up here. 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: crystal@signalfire.com

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: crystal@signalfire.com

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