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What challenges were you facing in your tech hiring prior to launching on Haystack?

Before launching on Haystack, we were using traditional recruiters. My perception of recruiters is that they don't have a great pipeline of roles and candidates and the feedback I was getting was that it was hard to find the right people with the right experience. This wasn’t the case once we launched on Haystack.

How did Haystack stand out from those ‘traditional’ recruiters?

I think the difference we found is that Haystack really listened to what we wanted. My big criticism of traditional agencies is that they find someone, and then they try and fit the person into the available role, whereas it was very different with you guys. I think it was great that your approach was to send us CVs and then get feedback to narrow down exactly what we wanted, rather than just trying to make people fit. I felt you were really focused on finding the right hire for us, not just the first available person.

How did you find the process of hiring your Tech Lead?

I think sometimes when you start recruitment, you don't know what you want until you see it. Having that process of “this is what I like about this person, this is what I don't like”, and then being able to get a good range of suitable people that we had to choose from was great.

I think when we started the process, we had our tech stack and we had a relatively vague description of what we wanted. We were looking for a Technical Lead, which is quite a challenging role to recruit because you want to get the right person. There are other roles you can take a bit more of a risk on, but that was really, really important, and probably actually more important than we realised at the time. So having a real breadth of people to interview and speak to was really good.

Finally, how would you summarise your experience on Haystack so far?

I think going with a platform like Haystack that has such a large candidate bank gives you the luxury of really being able to look at a wide range of people, and really helps you narrow down what you want.

You don't want to waste your time looking at hundreds of people, but you want to look at a good range of relevant people over a fairly concentrated period of time. Being able to say this is your bank of candidates, and speak to them and move through the process quite quickly is really helpful.