How the startup studio eFounders uses Crew to recruit teams that build unicorns

eFounders' success hinges on recruitment. As a startup studio that launches 4-6 startups a year, eFounders' mission is to attract exceptional founders and great first employees. Startup studios are recruitment-intensive operations and eFounders is no different with over 50 recruitments in a given year.

The eFounders core team is made up of fifteen people with two that are fully dedicated to recruitment. Recruitment truly is a team effort at eFounders and the two talent acquisition managers constantly collaborate with members of the eFounders team and the startup founders to hire the founding teams.

The Challenge

The team at eFounders wanted to keep its competitive recruiting advantage and feel more productive while recruiting. They had been using another ATS for six years but felt that, in the last couple of years, it failed to meet some of their most pressing needs.
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"The job market is increasingly competitive and we needed a tool that would allow us to hire top talent, especially technical talent, faster. Also, at eFounders we're big on collaborative hiring and our previous tool had only the bare minimum when it came to working with teammates. Finally, we wanted a tool that would cut out all the manual and tedious tasks us recruiters have to do (think following up with talent!). What we really wanted was to be more productive" said Adélaïde, Talent Acquisition Manager at eFounders.

The solution

Migrating data to Crew

eFounders implemented Crew to recruit for all of their openings, whether they're for the eFounders team or the startups. The team at Crew had to migrate all of their data from the previous ATS onto Crew.

"In our previous ATS, we had a total of 172 jobs and a database of 25 000 candidates. As a recruiter, our data is what's most sacred. It's at the core of everything we do. And to be honest, migrating years and years' worth of data was a bit nerve-wracking. But the team at Crew was amazing. They reassured us along the way, were there to answer any of our questions, and migrated everything in just a couple of hours. We didn't have to do anything" continued Adélaïde.
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"What was pretty exceptional was the fact that Crew was able to retrieve all the candidates from our previous ATS, transfer them into Crew in the right order, in the right job, and at the right stage. I didn’t have to waste any time looking for information. It was all in there."
— Alix Vandame, Talent Acquisition Manager @efounders

The results

Sourcing and connecting with talent faster

eFounders recruits a majority of tech talent. From developers, engineers, product managers, product designers etc. The issue? The pool of talent is increasingly scarce and finding the right person for each startup can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Crew helped eFounders source and connect with talent a lot faster, leading to more recruitments in less time.
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"Sourcing candidates is fast and intuitive with Crew. The Chrome Extension has been a huge time-saver. It makes it really easy to identify talent on LinkedIn and add them to Crew in just one click."
— Adélaïde Eudier, Talent Acquisition Manager @efounders

"Once we've sourced talent onto Crew, I create email sequences to reach out to talent in an automated but personal way. Automated because Crew takes care of sending them at predetermined time intervals. Personal because I've got all the information in Crew so I can adapt my emails to each talent." said Alix

"Plus, Crew is incredibly fast. Any action I take is almost instant. For instance, when I use the search to look for candidates on the platform, the results come almost instantaneously. And overall, the UI and UX have been delightful. It's made recruiting a much more enjoyable experience".

An ATS and CRM combined for more visibility

"Compared to our previous ATS, one aspect that's been particularly great is the fact that Crew works much more like a CRM than a pure ATS. In our previous ATS, we had only had the jobs view and candidates were divided in each of the opened jobs. With Crew, we have two views: the talent view which centralizes all of our candidates and works like a CRM and the more traditional jobs views." said Adélaïde.

With this more intuitive way to structure candidates, eFounders has more visibility on its pool of talent and can more easily reactivate and nurture candidates. "When we close down a job because it's been filled, we don't lose all the good candidates in it, they stay in our pool of talent and we can continue to nurture them and suggest to them other opportunities that could be a match" Alix said.

Closer collaboration throughout the whole hiring funnel

Crew enables eFounders to collaborate more deeply on recruiting. Anyone in the team can easily collaborate on recruitment within Crew.

"At eFounders, one day I'm working with the founder of Kairn, the next minute with the founder of Collective and right after with a member of the eFounders team. Our hiring processes have a high amount of stakeholders and Crew has made it really easy to collaborate with all of them. For instance, you can set reminders for team members, tag them in comments and assign them to hiring stages." as explained by Adélaïde.

The Crew Chrome Extension has also been a key driver of collaboration "Rather than having to wait to source someone to start collaborating, we can already tag team members in the Chrome Extension while we source candidates. With Crew collaboration starts right from sourcing. And it continues throughout the whole hiring process" concluded Alix.
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"With Crew collaboration starts right from sourcing. And it continues throughout the whole hiring process"
— Alix Vandame, Talent Acquisition Manager @efounders