StartThis Idea #11: A recruiting tool that lives in your email inbox
An easier way for SME's to manage their hiring process
Hello! I’m back with more ideas for other people to go build! While I’d love to maintain a regular weekly cadence for these, I think most folks who read this are looking for quality over quantity…. so if the inspiration isn’t there, I’m not going to force out a subpar idea and waste your time. Anyways, thanks for continuing to read, and I hope you get some inspiration from these!
Onto idea #11, which tackles I probably that is near to my day-to-day pursuits at HigherMe - hiring!
A plugin-style email extension that allows small businesses and startups to complete HR processes directly from their email inbox.
Categories: app development, applicant tracking software (ATS), hiring and recruiting, SaaS, web integration
Skills needed: coding, cross-platform integration, UX/UI, web development
The Pitch
For startups and small to medium-sized businesses, recruiting is often a challenging process. It’s critical for being able to fill out the teams an organization needs to run successfully, but it’s also a heavy drain on people who are already stretched thin. Many small organizations don’t have full-time, dedicated HR teams to take on the hiring process. As a result, the onus falls on other leaders whose attention has to be split from their primary responsibilities to do the recruiting.
There’s already a world of applicant tracking system (ATS) apps for startups on the market. Think BambooHR, Lever, and Workable, among others. These ATS platforms consolidate applicant information from third-party job boards, can track applicant lifecycles through interview stages, and allow recruiters to automate parts of the process. The problem is that all of those functionalities are located on a separate platform from where recruiters normally work.
High-touch tools like these offer valuable functionality and a smooth user experience within their own platform, but that’s where the market has a gap.
What about the side-of-their-desk recruiters who need to be able to navigate the hiring process without losing focus on their other priorities? They want to hire fast, but also see logging information into another system as a pain.
What’s the impact of having a simple, low-touch HR solution that works without the need for separate logins, apps, or interfaces of its own?
It’s streamlining at its finest: an ATS that’s nested right in the email client eliminates the need to switch apps or log into a separate site to take actions on an applicant file. Each new email alert is already integrated with the applicant’s whole file, so all of their up-to-the-minute data is present right in the chain. The applicant’s lifecycle can be changed and updated right in the email window on desktop and mobile.
Buttons that execute options like accept, reject, contact, schedule interview, and other recruiting tasks actually function from within the email client itself - no redirects, no secondary logins. One touch, then back to work.
The low touch recruiting extension is in position to dial back the need to spend hours on recruiting apps. It’s a robust recruiting email extension with back-end integrations to popular job posting sites, while the front end allows recruiters to operate from where they already are - email!
Most of the costs associated with hiring comes from the time spent by recruiters reviewing applications, conducting interviews, and administering job postings. Reducing friction here puts a dent in how much a company is spending per applicant over the course of the hiring process. It also allows companies to move much faster, and hire the best talent before they get scooped up by the competition.
An integrated email recruiting tool works primarily in the background, logging changes and maintaining organized applicant files that can be actioned directly. Depending on the configurations, there can be features like automatic reminders, calendared events, and accomplishment-triggered notifications that bring down administration time.
An ATS can be both low-touch and thorough. The experience of the applicant improves when they receive updates and feedback quickly, while the recruiter saves time and energy with the ability to complete tasks in the program they use most often.
Since hiring processes are often ongoing, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription service model creates a low-spend option that lasts for as many recruiting cycles as necessary.
Background
The hiring process is especially time consuming in the era of online job boards that garner hundreds or even thousands of applicants at a time. For organizations without robust HR support, it’s a lot to ask that the equivalent of one or more full-time positions be taken up by others. They’re already fielding calls and messages based on their own role - to ask them to incorporate a new dashboard to monitor only contributes to the likelihood of extended recruitment timelines, to say nothing of employee burnout.
A key element that contributes to recruiting inefficiencies is how touch-heavy separate app-based or third-party HR software can be. They don’t take functional integrations like push notifications and email alerts to their most efficient ends, which would be to allow immediate access to the relevant information. Consider the number of touches or clicks it takes to go from an email alert for, say, a new applicant on a job posting, to moving them into an interview position.
The recruiter has to navigate to the email client, then to the separate ATS app. They sign in, access the new applicant, review their submission, then execute the action from within the app. As soon as they land in the app, though, they’re inundated with other submissions, account notifications, and mountains of applicant data. The single task they went there to do might get done, but any thread they might have had on their prior work is lost.
Those five to ten clicks and ensuing minutes or hours can be whittled down to one or two clicks and mere moments when all of the relevant data is right there in the email, along with the embedded action buttons.
A simple, streamlined, time-saving email extension has the potential to save hundreds of dollars in any given organization’s cost-per-hire.
Data points & research
The average time recruiters spend on an initial resume screening is 7.4 seconds, but the average recruiting lifecycle from application to hire (“time to fill”) is 42 days. [HRDive; Workable]
Cost of hire [Recruiterbox]
The cost of hire provides hiring manager with a consistent tool for measuring the cost of resources used to hire talent. What we need to keep in mind here, is how much are we spending on finding the right person and how can we make the process simpler in the name of the bottom line. The Huffington Post has a very insightful infographic on cost of hire , and the different avenues you can take.
Posting on Job Boards: The average time for a posting is about 1.5 hours and the cost can vary from $37.50-$457.50 based on your methods.
Reviewing Applicants: Total time spent is up to 23.5 hours, making the average cost up to $587.50+.
Prescreening Candidates: Up to 4 hours of time, and over $100.
Interview Prep: An average of 1.5 hours and $31.50.
Wrapping up and Hiring (including final interviews, testing, calling other applicants, and reference checks): Can take 7.5 hours with an average cost of $187.50
Every day that goes by that this position isn’t filled, your time-to-fill rate goes up, as do costs across the board.
Of all recruiting costs, including fees for job boards, advertising, and candidate assessment tools, the most expensive is related to internal recruiters. Their salary (not to mention benefits and travel expenses related to recruiting) over the time it takes to hire a single candidate overshadows all other associated costs. [Workable]
Strategy notes
There’s potentially a huge market for a service like this, though the sweet spot is probably the best fit for startups and SMEs who are in a growth stage and who hire fairly regularly, but who hire on a fairly small scale (ie. a small number of jobs at a time). It’s these types of companies who usually don’t have a dedicated recruiter or HR team.
Two ways to penetrate the market are through online thought leadership newsletters targeting startups and entering spaces where entrepreneurs/investors/SMEs tend to cluster, like incubators and co-working spaces. Virality is ideal rather than simple outbound sales. Establishing beta-tester groups for further usership studies can help build interest as well as a referral/waiting list for the beta version.
Experienced coders and developers who have built extensions for email clients before (think Gmelius, the light project management tool that can live in Gmail, or Superhuman) are likely the best candidates to build out this tool. The next step beyond building the back end functionality is considering how to develop job board integrations. It will be helpful to work with developers who have experience with third-party extensions, since a significant chunk of the toolkit will be pairing with sites like Indeed.com and distributors like equest.com.
Calendar integration is a piece that will slide pretty easily into the interface, since many extensions can already export data directly into Google/Outlook/Apple calendars with a single click.
SaaS subscription pricing is in a position to significantly decrease internal recruiting costs based on the salary/time spent differential versus the monthly SaaS spend. An alternative would be usage based, which is seeing a resurgence in SaaS.
Possible names
1Tap ATS, Catapult, HireFlow, Sprout HR, Workup Lite