Eating Our Own Dog Food

A week ago, we decided to start looking for onsite developers to join our team here in San Francisco. We knew it wouldn’t be easy; like many small startups, we have neither dedicated recruiters nor our own candidate database to pull from. However, we decided to give it “the old college try” - at the very least, we would get a chance to see RoboRecruiter in action for ourselves and therefore “eat our own dog food.”

Exciting times! Not only were we growing as a team, but we could also utilize RoboRecruiter to facilitate automated conversations to help us to both source and vet candidates for these newly opened roles. First, we created and published the Job Descriptions on our website. As we have worked with hundreds of recruiters over time, we have developed flexible template conversations that generate high quality responses for a variety of use cases, which are preloaded into our platform. We selected one of our job vetting conversations (which we call JobVets), and with a few prompts from the system, we were ready to launch an active campaign.

The campaigns were ready. Now we had to get the word out there. We listed our roles on both AngelList and LinkedIn alongside a targeted Facebook ad campaign to create our primary source of candidates. With no candidate database, we did not originally have much to work with. However, we at RoboRecruiter like to think the web itself has become the premier candidate database. Putting this theory to the test, we were not disappointed - by using RoboRecruiter to cut through the “noise” of using the web to advertise the roles, we have received over 150+ applications for these positions.

As recruiters know, there is still much work to be done after making initial contact with applicants. Each applicant was first vetted by RoboRecruiter’s conversational application process. After logging into our platform, we could then pare down our applicant pool to the 10% that best met our search criteria. Our chat conversations asked questions around their current position, availability, location/relocation, and skillsets for these roles. Through the conversation we also gathered LinkedIn profile information and/or a copy of applicants’ latest CV/resume. Our platform returned all of this information back to us organized in the backend, and as candidates filled out their applications, RoboRecruiter emailed reports directly into our jobs inbox, so we could act and follow-up on “hot” candidates in real-time. Overall, we were happy to see how much easier the recruitment process was with RoboRecruiter.

Really when you come down to it, RoboRecruiter looks to solve a core problem in the Recruitment cycle – Time! Time that can be used to fully qualify for effective hires, time that can be used to effectively communicate and build your staffing reputation and time that can be used to onboard, welcome and train new hires.  


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All and all this process has been a huge success. We are at offer stage now with a few candidates and have choices as we work through these details of hiring new team members. What’s great here is that RoboRecruiter really did help get us to where we are today in this process and did so at speed. We have clients that tell us their average time to fill roles takes them weeks. Don’t get me wrong – we understand wholeheartedly that there is much more to hiring than speed and truly believe that RoboRecruiter and its conversational interview will help increase your quality of hire as well but in terms of immediate value, we have eaten our own dog food, and see the value that this platform has brought to our own business. We would love to show you how we can help yours as well.

Give it a try!