How the fast team of Sales pros at Capsule naturally adopted Crew

The Challenge

Capsule was founded by a group of experienced entrepreneurs who were focused on building a top-notch product and didn't want to be sidetracked by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). With no recruitment process in place, the team had to start from scratch, which wasn't an easy task. Founders have been involved in several hiring processes in their previous companies, and used many ATSs too. But never had to set them up from square one.

Initially, the team decided to use a simple Notion page to manage the recruitment process. But the thought of staring at a blank page and setting up an outreach pipeline from scratch was overwhelming.

The three founders each brought different strengths to the table. Léo had a deep understanding of the market and software development, so he was in charge of conducting interviews. Robin, who used to be a Business Development Manager at Aircall, naturally took the lead for outreach activities. The challenge was coordinating all the backend of the recruitment process, especially since all the founders had never-ending to-do lists.

“We’ve always had a very intensive sourcing strategy to build our team, and we used several tools to do so. With Crew, we do everything in a single tool. It’s so easy to use and so fast to get results, we’re very happy to use it.”
Dan Elkaim, Co-founder & CEO at Capsule

That's when they decided to turn to Crew. As true salesmen, they knew that nothing beats a powerful CRM.

"As sales experts, we were intrigued by Crew, a new-gen recruiting CRM that goes against traditional ATSs. We weren't let down - Crew combines the functionality of several top-notch sales tools into one. For example, we often use separate Chrome extensions, enrichment tools, and outreach automations in sales, but with Crew, we were surprised to see that these capabilities are built from the start, saving recruiters years of maturity time.”
Robin Philibert, Co-Founder & COO @Capsule

The race was on. We used this opportunity to bring our readers a behind the scenes take, Top Gear style.

Get-set-go

• Robin signs up for Crew and sets up a sleek, customized career page ready to go, for the credibility effect.
• 20 mins crafting a couple of visuals with Léo and they’re good to.
• Copy-paste a draft job description for a software engineer he made over coffee with Robin and Léo before, and we’re on a roll.

Day 2

• Ever the salesman, he finds in Crew’s native chrome extension a sales-like-tool to find and transfer leads from LinkedIn to his CRM. Search → Click → Add.
• He starts the search with some keywords for tech stacks and known FrenchTech scale-ups. A few filters for >2 years XP, and common connections, and we’re good to go. Click → add, Click → add, repeat.

• While reviewing talent profiles, he discovers additional impressive startups using similar technologies, from candidates' prior experiences. Click → add, Click → add, repeat.
• While pedalling through the leads, he notices Crew enriching his leads on the go. Phone, email, bingo!
• Just before jumping off for a product meeting, he sets up a simple outreach sequence a la “We’re building an exciting product with the founder of Aircall, interested to find out more?”

Day 3

• Robin notices that they’re getting some interest. For the job posts he feels like they need to think out of the box for, he adds in a little spice.

Day 4

• The replies are coming, Robins checks the analytics dashboard built-in to Crew. He can see who’s ahead by most amount of conversations started.
• All the notes from those conversations are right there.
• Time to start replying, get those first conversations in early, “are you free for a quick chat next week? here’s a Calendly link”.

Day 5

Checking his outreach funnel

• The pipeline is filling up. More replies, more calls booked.
• Tasks are automatically done or assigned to the right team member. Léo is taking most of the calls to do the technical drills on Tuesday and Thursdays. Robin and Dan pick up his notes and schedule their follow-up interviews a week later.
• All feedback is put on Crew, even if all three of them sit across the table, they’re apt to forget with everything going on.

Day 7

• First interview, Léo kicks it off. Which questions to ask, there are Crew templates from the best-in-the-business, let’s try the YC template here.
• All notes automatically go on the Crew tool, candidate is good to go forward, press a button and update, so Robin can set a time for his turn. Follow-up email gets pushed through automatically.
• End of call, submit notes, Dan gets a ping on the updated progress in the hiring funnel

Day 9

• The pipeline is filling up
• They begin setting rules for whom to take through to maintain a high bar. Those not yet replied are assigned to the talent pool, Crew will keep nurturing them.
• The feedback lists are building up, with clear favourites leading the race.

Day 20

• First final round interview, everything looks good. Robin thinks he’ll make an offer, let’s put that on the platform and ask a friend for a good contract template.
• Quick look at Figures (check out our piece with them on the blog) to check if they’re not undercutting on the salary offer and are good to go.
• The template contract goes on Crew, for the next offer.

Day 21  - The candidate accepted the offer! 🏁🎉🍾

The results

With Crew, the 3-man Capsule team was able to bring structure and agility to their nascent hiring process, faster and cheaper than any other ATS or external services. With their burgeoning talent pool there’s more to come. Overall, it just took a few hours of founder-time and, thanks to Crew, Capsule has a streamlined hiring process that allows them to attract top talent and make quick, informed hiring decisions. 20 mins a day now suffices to maintain the building talent pool, the core team is slowly on the way to getting signed. Best of all, Robin and co. won’t be scheduling long meetings to coordinate, only quick check-ups on Crew.

“The CRM combined with enrichment capabilities and seamless integrations has streamlined and automated our workflows, saving us time and resources. Simply put, Crew is a game-changer.” Robin Philibert, Co-Founder & COO @Capsule