How Sento’s founders got in touch with 700 A-players using Crew, to build the gender-neutral team they dreamed of

How Sento Recruits

“As first-time founders, we naturally wanted to be able to hire more experienced than us, but without compromising on the value of diversity in our team” Felix Krauth, Co-Founder & CEO

Sento’s founders knew that being first-time founders, and all-male, they were going to struggle to attract a diverse set of candidates via the traditional inbound routes. That outcome didn’t satisfy the vision that they had for their company. Fortunately, the CEO Felix was well-equipped with the playbooks he had picked up from his ex-employer and investors to implement an outbound hiring funnel.

Sento started to double down on outbound reach-outs to identified prospects, with the idea of raising the bar with every hire. The only challenge was to pick the right tool to achieve it, which turned out to be crucial.

Hint: Crew saved the day

The Challenge

The obvious first step seemed to be to start off with an Airtable sheet. However, Felix can only describe this experience as being ‘frustrating’. Airtable is not made for the recruitment use-case and always leaves one wanting more features to fluidity the outbound process. In the end, the simple tool became too complicated and unpleasant to use.

Next, they upped their game and dove head-first into setting up an ATS. However, they quickly realized that coordinating an aggressive reach-out strategy requires a lot of upfront - ATS are complex, clunky systems, and above all built for inbound. This is valuable time lost for a young startup that still needs to focus on building product and growing its usage. Soon the founding team was complaining. Enter Crew’s Chrome extension.

The solution

In what felt like a breeze, the team stacked up a long list of prospects. Just for female candidates alone they managed to add into Crew and reach out to 700 A-players, with a few clicks, thanks to the powerful automation options. The LinkedIn integration made this as easy and quick as it could be. The next step was just to employ a killer outreach sequence. His favorite one was to add people on LinkedIn with a short message a la ‘Hey, you have an interesting profile, let’s connect’. Once connected, Felix and the team would try and get a real conversation going to talk about Sento.

“Crew is a flexible, performant and loveable tool that we could easily adopt into our hiring processes” added Felix

The result

Alas, after only a few weeks, the Sento team was able to hire 2 top-quality profiles who also aligned with their diversity objectives. What really appealed to Felix is that Crew is well-designed to work for power-users, with a strong emphasis on ensuring productivity for young founders who already have a lot on their plate.