We launched The Hiring Circle, a shared candidate pool based on circular economy, a month ago for the Spanish startups’ ecosystem.
How The Hiring Circle works
Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies like Buffer or GitLab lead a trend on being as transparent as possible. Buffer even shares their real time revenues and metrics. They’re building their companies in the open.
We believe that’s a fundamentally good way of creating products and startups.
In this post, we’re thrilled to start our own path of creating The Hiring Circle while publicly sharing our journey. This is what we learned during its first four weeks.
Entering Madrid’s startup ecosystem
From the very beginning, we’ve had full support from the Spanish startup ecosystem. We are grateful for the incredible welcome our product has had and for the very useful feedback we’ve received. Today we are proud to say that we have the best Spanish startups and the top tech talent in Madrid.
Gonzalo from Peoople
PoC: our hypotheses
As we mentioned in the previous post, the current incarnation of The Hiring Circle is merely a Proof of Concept to prove three hypotheses.
- Companies were willing to recommend not-hired candidates. The Hiring Circle relies on building a circular economy platform and this hypothesis is the top of our funnel.
- Recommended candidates were willing to sign up on The Hiring Circle —no candidates, no party — . Remember: it’s completely up to the candidate to join The Hiring Circle once a company recommends them.
- Finally we wanted to verify that these candidates were a fit for other companies hiring in the platform and viceversa. In the end, what counts is the number of hirings we are able to facilitate.
Remember: it’s completely up to the candidate to join The Hiring Circle once a company recommends them.
Some numbers
Our whole strategy for acquiring companies consisted on a couple of tweets and a few emails to our network. Results: 175 companies have already registered with The Hiring Circle. Many of them were only scoping out the product or needed candidates for other locations which are not currently available in our product (we only cover Madrid and remote roles, for now). 67 of those companies are active: either they have recommended candidates or they have posted an opportunity.
Those 67 companies have recommended 118 candidates: around 1.8 candidates recommended per company. Hypothesis #1: ✅
Even after speaking to many friends and people on our network, we didn’t know if candidates were willing to join: it’s a crowded market after all. However we were quickly proven right: 79 out of 118 (67%) recommended candidates accepted the invitation. Hypothesis #2: ✅
We got traction on both sides of the marketplace but, would there be new hires? From 61 opportunities we’ve generated 24 interviews and 3 confirmed hirings, with additional hirings presumedly coming from those interviews. 3 people have already found jobs and 3 companies have already found top talent without losing time or money. Hypothesis #3: ✅
Next Steps
Metrics are important but qualitative feedback is crucial at this stage. We received feedback from 20 user interviews and had more than 30 email conversations with users of The Hiring Circle. We’re implementing some new changes in the user flow to make the The Hiring Circle proof of concept even more useful to companies and candidates.
Additionally we’re putting a lot of thought on how The Hiring Circle could become a successful business.
Some obvious questions we’re asking ourselves and companies:
- What should we charge for? Posting opportunities? Getting access to the circle as a subscription? Receiving candidates for opportunities?
- How much should we charge?
- Should we charge the same to all companies or should we have different plans?
What we know for sure is that we want to create an innovative business model around hiring. Stay tuned if you want to come with us in this journey!
