cord
2 weeks sourcing 11 people and making our first direct hire
"That's the difference between cord and somewhere like Linkedin - there are a lot of passive candidates, whereas people on cord are active and looking for their next role."
48%
Positive response rate from active and qualified engineers2 weeks
Until they made their first direct hire by sourcing just 11 people for that rolecord usage
3 direct hires
7 positions
7 users
Greater London
About Funding Circle
Funding Circle deliver an amazing experience for small businesses powered by machine learning and technology. Over the past ten years, they've built a machine learning and technology platform that is revolutionising SME lending.
Since launching, Funding Circle have helped more than 120,000 businesses access £13bn. This has a huge societal impact—in 2020 alone the lending through their platform contributed more than £10bn to GDP and created and sustained 135,000 jobs.
Our Goal
We've got big hiring plans for 2022 so we wanted to make sure we're in the best place to maximise our hiring potential - we want to make sure we're utilising the best tools ready for a new wave of hiring as our business continues to develop.
Our Situation
Funding Circle is constantly growing, we've predominantly been trying to hire Senior Engineers and Mid-level Engineers across our Back-End, Front End and Full Stack roles.
cord is something one of our team-members had previously tried, he'd used it in a past role and thought it was a really good tool, so we were keen to use it as well.
Using cord
Quality, active Engineers
For front end developers, it's been really good, and that's an area where we've really struggled to hire and get the right candidates, back end engineers it's quite good as well. cord has been really helpful in the way it's helped us build our pipeline. Having a pool of quality candidates that are active and ready to switch roles, is really helpful.
Fewer messages, more responses
The reply rate that we get on cord is better than we get from typical reach-outs, on Linkedin we can expect to see 15-25% response rate, on cord we get nearer 40-50% of the people we message responding positively - you don't have to send out as much to get the same number of replies back which is really helpful.
I guess that's the difference between cord and somewhere like Linkedin - there are a lot of passive candidates, whereas people on cord are active and looking for their next role.
In terms of timing, I would expect if someone we message on cord is interested in our role, we'd hear back from them within 24 hours.
Time-saving features
A really nice feature of cord that is really good to ensure we're getting candidates as soon as they come onto the platform is how it integrates with slack. New people that sign up to cord and that fit our live positions will get sent to us in a private slack channel where we can view their details and either hide or message them. It helps us to access candidates as soon as they come onto the platform, which helps improve the chances of us getting a positive response back.
We also like the message templates that you can set up, you can create original template messages that include a follow-up and injected variables such as name, job title, previous experience and technical skills - cord just reduces the things we have to think about when it comes to the manual activity that we have to put in ourselves.
A diverse pool in two clicks
We do a lot of D&I focussed sourcing, and so we have certain days and periods where we'll focus predominantly on diversity. Another one of cord's features allows you to generate applicants from certain backgrounds (underrepresented groups) - we use that to help us generate the right sort of candidates for our D&I sourcing sessions.