Lever: Pathfinders in the Gen-Next Hiring Process
Sarah Nahm, CEO Long gone are the days when recruiters sifted through piles of paper resumes to identify and shortlist the most suitable candidate for a job post. The recruitment process has witnessed a massive upheaval in recent years, driven by rapid technological advances like social sourcing and data analytics. The onus now rests on recruiters to promptly reconfigure their hiring strategies, processes, and supporting technologies related to recruiting. But the question at hand is: What makes this shift so critical? Today, millennial workers are prone to switching their jobs at the drop of a hat and statistics point that, after two to five years of tenure most employees are likely to change their jobs. This signifies, that in order to retain the size of the company, investment in recruiting is a never-ending cycle. Also as C-suite executives shift their focus from quantity to quality, recruiting cost and time-to-hire have also been on a steady rise. “To top it all, 98 percent of organizations are using software that debuted over a decade ago,” exclaims Sarah Nahm, CEO of Lever. Given the increasing emphasis on talent and effectual recruitment within organizations, Lever offers game changing hiring technology in line with a modern recruiting process, enabling companies to be more transparent, proactive, and accountable. Redefining the Traditional ATS
Built from ground up to seamlessly connect sourcing workflows with the hiring pipeline, Lever is a hiring software that provides a rich suite of sourcing tools. It is distinctive from other Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) because it seamlessly integrates collaborative, company-wide sourcing into the hiring process. “We’ve enhanced all the features of a traditional ATS with powerful relationship management tools you would typically find in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems,” remarks Nahm. Deriving inspiration from a lever, Nahm elucidates on the deeper meaning behind the company’s name, “Like a lever which is a simple machine but also a force-multiplier for greater impact, similarly, our technology solutions help organizations gain leverage and accomplish ‘more with less.
Using Lever, recruiters have the discretion to concentrate on strategic aspects of hiring like building the company brand and crafting customer experience. Following a user-centered principle, Nahm reveals that in order to device a cutting edge tool, the company spent its first nine months conducting research on how top tech companies in Silicon Valley were employing technology in the hiring practice. “We did not jump into building a solution and instead studied every painstaking move in the recruitment cycle.
This led us to the consensus that sourcing and referrals yielded the best candidates, while the applicant pipeline was a high volume of generally lower quality candidates,” adds Nahm. Powered by such deductions, Lever built the first version of their software as a hybrid of the traditional ATS and modern-day CRM, where proactive sourcing was centered as the most scalable method for finding top-tier talent.
Engage Top Talent with an All-in-One Platform
Historically, sourcing lacked a proper technology stack and so was time consuming to maintain. Lever unlocks the sourcing potential for all organizations by simplifying sourcing tools so that it can be used by everyone in an organization. “Any employee can install our browser extension to create a candidate’s profile in one click from their professional presence on the web,” says Nahm. Through Lever, referrals can also be made via social media profiles, which enable companies to increase their employee referral rates by 30 percent. Disregarding the source of a candidate whether a referral, campus recruiting, cold outreach, or a traditional application Lever centralizes all recruiting activity into one system. Often, minor setbacks like resumes with complex interfaces can detract a hiring manager, eventually leading to a logjam in the hiring process. Keeping in mind the possibility of such untoward events, features like a fast, elegant, and mobile-friendly resume viewer within the app, facilitates hiring managers and recruiters alike.
Another compelling feature delivered by Lever is scheduling, which provides a robust and agile method for companies to effortlessly organize all the variables that go into a successful day of interviews. “Scheduling interview panels is an art and a science. To construct the right panel of interviewers is preeminent, as complexities like adapting to schedule changes and coping with several back-to-back interviews is bound to crop up,” says Nahm. In a smooth step-by-step process, with Lever, a user can select interviewers, view their availability, book several back-to-back interviews, and send invites to all parties involved, including the candidate. In addition, on the day of the interview, Lever automatically handles reminder emails for the event and follows up with the interviewers for feedback which saves recruiters time.
Lever’s scheduling feature helped Change.org—a petition website—double their productivity as a team. “Instead of dedicating resources to logistics and administration, our client can now spend more time on strategic parts of the hiring process like sourcing and closing candidates,”
Improving Every Aspect of Hiring
Assisting a wide variety of industries ranging from real estate agents to fashion designers and security consultants, Lever has a comprehensive and global clientele that have an employee count from 10 to 10,000.
Engage Top Talent with an All-in-One Platform
Historically, sourcing lacked a proper technology stack and so was time consuming to maintain. Lever unlocks the sourcing potential for all organizations by simplifying sourcing tools so that it can be used by everyone in an organization. “Any employee can install our browser extension to create a candidate’s profile in one click from their professional presence on the web,” says Nahm. Through Lever, referrals can also be made via social media profiles, which enable companies to increase their employee referral rates by 30 percent. Disregarding the source of a candidate whether a referral, campus recruiting, cold outreach, or a traditional application Lever centralizes all recruiting activity into one system. Often, minor setbacks like resumes with complex interfaces can detract a hiring manager, eventually leading to a logjam in the hiring process. Keeping in mind the possibility of such untoward events, features like a fast, elegant, and mobile-friendly resume viewer within the app, facilitates hiring managers and recruiters alike.
Another compelling feature delivered by Lever is scheduling, which provides a robust and agile method for companies to effortlessly organize all the variables that go into a successful day of interviews. “Scheduling interview panels is an art and a science. To construct the right panel of interviewers is preeminent, as complexities like adapting to schedule changes and coping with several back-to-back interviews is bound to crop up,” says Nahm. In a smooth step-by-step process, with Lever, a user can select interviewers, view their availability, book several back-to-back interviews, and send invites to all parties involved, including the candidate. In addition, on the day of the interview, Lever automatically handles reminder emails for the event and follows up with the interviewers for feedback which saves recruiters time.
Lever’s scheduling feature helped Change.org—a petition website—double their productivity as a team. “Instead of dedicating resources to logistics and administration, our client can now spend more time on strategic parts of the hiring process like sourcing and closing candidates,”
Improving Every Aspect of Hiring
Assisting a wide variety of industries ranging from real estate agents to fashion designers and security consultants, Lever has a comprehensive and global clientele that have an employee count from 10 to 10,000.
The company’s customer base also includes bigwigs like Yelp, Netflix, and Eventbrite. In the case of Quora, a prominent social media site, the company was facing numerous challenges with their ATS. “For instance, proactively sourced candidates were tracked in siloed spreadsheets because the client’s system only tracked applicants. Scheduling interviews was incredibly tedious and time-consuming, and interviewers frequently complained about their difficult-to-use system,” explains Nahm. To add to Quora’s woes, candidates’ data were fragmented, spread across multiple systems and almost all sourced candidates were managed outside the ATS. To scale to the next level, the recruiting team needed a fundamental change. Lever stepped in and centralized and unified Quora’s sourcing and applicant workflows. “Now, the client has just one place to track candidates through the entire end-to-end hiring process,” says Nahm.
Lever also helped the recruiting team cut down on the time spent in hiring, allowing Quora to shift their focus to sourcing new prospective candidates. “The Quora team was surprised to find that their engineering and design departments had gone from complaining about their prior system to being highly engaged in Lever. Many hiring managers installed Lever’s browser extension to help source candidates side-by-side with the recruiting teams,” states Nahm. The ultimate measure of success for Quora was in their hiring rate, where over 40 percent of the hires were proactively sourced and a five-fold improvement was observed over the previous quarter.
Pioneering Hiring Technology
In line with the company’s chief goal to help organizations form, grow, and sustain teams of talented people, Lever is constantly innovating best practices in accordance with technology advancements. As more and more firms engage in HR analytics, progressive ATS, and social media as a panacea to their hiring challenges, the future of recruiting indefinitely lies in the adoption of sophisticated, automated tools. Across organizations, functional groups are resorting to technology to enhance their collaboration and communication, which has opened the door to a whole new breed of software that focuses on great design, user experience, and intuitive functionality. “With several exciting transformations revolutionizing HR, Lever will continue to leverage technology and design—paving the way for a futuristic and humane workplace,” ends the CEO.
We’ve enhanced all the features of a traditional ATS with powerful relationship management tools you’d typically find in CRM systems
Lever also helped the recruiting team cut down on the time spent in hiring, allowing Quora to shift their focus to sourcing new prospective candidates. “The Quora team was surprised to find that their engineering and design departments had gone from complaining about their prior system to being highly engaged in Lever. Many hiring managers installed Lever’s browser extension to help source candidates side-by-side with the recruiting teams,” states Nahm. The ultimate measure of success for Quora was in their hiring rate, where over 40 percent of the hires were proactively sourced and a five-fold improvement was observed over the previous quarter.
Pioneering Hiring Technology
In line with the company’s chief goal to help organizations form, grow, and sustain teams of talented people, Lever is constantly innovating best practices in accordance with technology advancements. As more and more firms engage in HR analytics, progressive ATS, and social media as a panacea to their hiring challenges, the future of recruiting indefinitely lies in the adoption of sophisticated, automated tools. Across organizations, functional groups are resorting to technology to enhance their collaboration and communication, which has opened the door to a whole new breed of software that focuses on great design, user experience, and intuitive functionality. “With several exciting transformations revolutionizing HR, Lever will continue to leverage technology and design—paving the way for a futuristic and humane workplace,” ends the CEO.
Company
Lever
Headquarters
San Francisco,CA
Management
Sarah Nahm, CEO
Description
Lever offers a hiring software which seamlessly connects and integrates
collaborative, company-wide sourcing into the hiring process
