Switching from fundraising to building mode, how Payflows built a dream team in less than 2 months with Crew

The Challenge

How many startup founders would dream of winning the support of incredible investors right in the early day, who believe in their vision and plan, and provide a financial runway to go build a killer product? Payflows found themselves in this fortunate predicament. They have managed to raise money from top-tier early-stage investors, by selling their unique and incredible vision. Once done, they needed the A-player team to execute this vision. On the menu was to hire a PM and a team of top engineers in under two months.

Easier said than done. For many, it would be an impossible mission. Especially for a startup like Payflows which is in stealth mode - basically, no one ever heard of them. Plus, they didn't even have a product to show. Top engineers and PMs typically want to see a product or at least some evidence of progress before committing to a new company. The founding team at Payflows needed then to establish a strong employer brand, that brings confidence, and have some evidence of progress to show. However, building a smoothly functioning career page and creating an outreach funnel that would allow them to systematically and consistently reach out to top talent was a real challenge, especially for such a small team that is already busy building the 1st version of the product.

The team looked for tools to help them become productive and accelerate their hiring efforts. But found that the tools available on the market either took up too much time and effort to set up and orchestrate, or were too complicated and difficult to use. Additionally, they struggled to coordinate between members of the founding team and keep track of all the candidates they had reached out to, and found that while spreadsheets were too messy and time-consuming to always manually keep up-to-date, the typical tracking systems were way too hard to set up and maintain. They were in desperate need of a tool that was user-friendly, powerful, efficient, and would allow them to focus on building relationships and engaging with their target profiles instead of maintaining tools.

The solution

Crew saved us! We were able to add a solid career page to our website and post new jobs in seconds, which made a tiny start-up like ours look a lot more established! Pauline Glikman, co-founder and CEO @ Payflows

Luckily, they came across Crew’s platform, which offered them 4 main benefits:

• A user-friendly platform that empowers collaboration, making it much easier for this founding team to work together and efficiently on the hiring process.

• A sleek and beautiful career page that they could build in minutes, while easily customizing it to match their employer brand. Where they could post new job openings and provide potential hires with more information about their company, their mission, and what they are building, as well as the opportunities available. The addition of this career page made a big difference in the perceived legitimacy and professionalism of the tiny startup. By taking the time to create a dedicated page for each job, they were able to present themselves as an upcoming player in the industry. This, in turn, helped them to attract the attention of top talent and convince them to consider joining their team. Less than 30 min after starting to use Crew, they’ve already added the career page to their website, posted jobs, and shared them with their networks. And started to see their first incoming candidates applying.
• They were also able to instantly set up an outreach funnel to systematically and consistently engage with top talent. Using the Google extension, they were able to constantly search for and add interesting talent to their CRM with just a few clicks, and start interacting with them right away. While always knowing which talent was already contacted by which team member, and which wasn’t yet. Indeed, The Google extension provided by Crew proved to be an invaluable tool for their recruitment efforts.

Thanks to the Google extension, our team was able to stay on top of their recruitment efforts and identify top talent as soon as it became available. This enabled us to move quickly and establish relationships with these individuals. Pauline Glikman, co-founder & CEO @ Payflows

• They were able to automate all the main steps of their hiring process. By using the automation features of Crew they ensured that each task was either automatically done, or assigned to the right person. The team was constantly in the loop, and never missed an opportunity to engage or re-engage with potential hires. Without constantly, and manually moving parts, and updating the system. It was all done automatically by the system, behind the scene, which is exactly what they were looking for. And it had to be done across the whole funnel because they knew that by automating part of the top-of-the-funnel, they would have even more candidates to handle. With Crew, they found a tool that would boost their productivity from A to Z, allowing them to maintain a high bar even when volumes were going up.

The automation features of Crew were instrumental in helping our team stay on top of their recruitment efforts. This feature ensured that the team was constantly updated and informed about new candidates and at which stage they were in the hiring funnel, as well as any opportunities to engage or re-engage with these individuals. This meant that the team was never caught off guard or caught unaware of any potential leads or openings for new hires. It significantly helped us speed up the process. Joseph Assouline, co-founder & CTO @ Payflows

The result

As a result, thanks to all these powerful features, the quick and easy career page to set-up, as well as the collaboration layer, they were able to successfully recruit 8 highly qualified engineers, a PM, and even a couple of interns within the 2 months time frame! This would not have been possible without the help of Crew.