1️⃣ New skillsets
cord is no longer just for tech hiring!
Project: All-in-one hiring tool 1️⃣ Type: 🚀 Launch User: 🤝 All users
Key changes
cord is no longer just for tech hiring! You can now hire every skillset and look for work outside of Tech & Product. Sales, Customer Success/Support, Marketing, Finance, Talent & Ops have been added to our existing job titles & skills.
cord now covers every position a technology-led company is likely to hire for as they grow. For companies, this means more value and more hires... at no extra cost.
Why?
Companies that use cord aren’t usually only hiring for Tech and Product positions. Wanting direct access to high quality candidates isn’t a Tech & Product specific need - companies want direct access to candidates for all of their hiring. Everyone looking for work - not just engineers - wants direct access to people inside technology companies.
What?
- Early access to candidates: New skillsets BETA is currently only available to existing customers. We’ve had 500+ candidates join in the past 5 days, and expect over 2,000 in the first month. Current cord customers have first access to these candidates.
- More positions, no extra cost: Whilst we grow our new skillsets BETA with our customers, we have removed position limits from all plans until July 2023 at the earliest. When this changes, we will communicate clearly with every user who is affected at the time.
How?
We formed a project squad whose sole focus for two weeks was to launch new skillsets on cord. It took a true team effort from all parts of the business to get this out and into your hands!
A special thank you to: Vinu (Front End Dev), Marco and Hasan (Back End Devs), Ania (Customer Support) and Tom (Product) for their work on this project.
The details
Taking cord from just being for Tech and Product hiring, to new verticals, so that any tech-led company can use it for hiring, and anyone a tech-led company could use it to look for work, was a big project. Months ago we thought it might take us a quarter, but in usual cord fashion, we decided we’d get it done in two weeks.
We broke the project down into the following steps:
- Determining new job titles and skillsets
- Moving information into the database
- Enabling companies to add positions outside of Tech & Product and for people outside of T&P to sign up to cord
- Communicating with our existing customers
- Verification criteria
Determining new job titles and skillsets
We started with a list of about 300 positions that current cord customers are hiring for outside of Tech and Product.
The goal was to have a list of job titles and skills that we could import into cord, and that would enable people look for work to start finding positions that are relevant to what they’re looking for. And for companies to be able to tag their positions in a way that clearly communicates their requirements.
Getting these right from the start is important because:
- How we tag the positions determines how easy it for the person looking for work and the company to find each other
- How we tag positions influences the suggested skills for future positions and for candidates when joining cord and building their profiles - more on that later
- We have an opportunity to make non-tech positions really transparent and so much better than how the recruitment industry currently does things - looking through 100s of specs made us realise that often the information is hidden or simply not there, so making the skills clear on cord will help people looking for work, by giving them accurate transparent information upfront
We used the following principles when working through job titles:
- We split job titles into categories so there is a category per function and we can group job titles under these (like we did before for T&P)
- The fewer, the better. This is so that it’s not overwhelming for users, and so that companies and people looking for work can find each other easily
- Where title variation is just a clarification of seniority, we don’t have separate titles, but just use the seniority tag.
We used the following principles when working through skills:
- No soft skills - no results focussed, driven, motivated, passionate
- Activities are fine e.g. demos, onboarding
- Tools are fine e.g. Hubspot, ATSs for talent people etc
We took samples of specs, worked through them to see patterns and what kind of skills companies were typically looking for. We ended up with a very long list of skills, grouped by category.
In working through 100s of job descriptions and working out how we’d map them onto cord, we had some realisations:
- Primary and secondary doesn’t make as much sense for non-tech people - it’s not a natural way to speak about them. We’ve changed what we call primary and secondary skills to Core skills and Other skills.
- Secondary skills are not essential, and forcing those people to add them could cause friction. So, Other skills are now optional
- Tech stack changed to tech stack / tooling and is now optional on positions so copy is vertical agnostic
- We have removed primary / core skills from autogenerated searches for candidates and streams for companies, for all non-technical positions. This is so what companies do not unnecessarily restrict their searches.
Moving information into the database
Once we had all the new job titles and skills, we ended up with a huge amount of new data that we needed to get into the database. Marco and Hasan led the charge on this, creating a Google Sheet which Tom and Anna added all the data to, ready to import.
In doing this, we realised how sensitive Google Sheets connected to our database are, and that Product people should leave the data stuff to the devs.
Enabling companies to add positions outside of Tech & Product and for people outside of T&P to sign up to cord
Once we had the list of job titles and the skills imported to the database, we needed to make it really easy for companies and people to find the job titles and add skills.
Vinu led on this one, working to get something usable but simple out to our users. Very quickly, were able to test the new job titles on cord (and we were all very excited!).
We worked through how best to present the skills, and decided that we would update the way suggested skills are displayed so that:
- The suggestions are always displayed, even when skills have already been selected.
- The suggestions are based on most commonly used skills for the associated job title(s), using data from candidate profiles and company position listings.
After the first release, we realised that it could be even easier for users to add job titles if they could just type… that will be coming out very soon!
Communicating with our existing customers
We wanted to give our existing customers a kick start to their hiring outside of Tech & Product on cord by building their positions for them. We also needed to communicate with our customers that this was happening!
The response from our current customers was overwhelmingly positive.
We then formed a position uploading squad who tagged every single position ready for a mass import. We used a position creator sheet that Hasan built to do this.. saving us hours of time. Big shoutout to Becky, Ania, James, Terrence and Tom for their help with this! It was a mammoth task.
Hasan and Marco then imported the positions. Then we formed a new squad of about 10 cordians to format the job descriptions. Once this was done, all the positions were verified and went live on cord. 🎉
And even before the positions went live, we were very excited to see that a company had already added a non-T&P position themselves, the night before.
Verification criteria
We aim at providing complete transparency on which people are verified onto cord (Verification Process), and how quickly people are verified onto cord once they have signed up (Time to verify). Due to this expansion, we needed to update the criteria:
This means that anyone who would get value from cord, can use cord to look for work.
Our full verification criteria explainer can be read here.
What’s next?
We’ll be listening to our users to understand how they find using cord for hiring and looking for work outside of Tech and Product. We’ll continue to iterate to ensure user experience is optimal for everyone.
cord outside T&P is currently only available to current customers on BETA - but we’ll be opening up to everyone very soon!