Your time to make a hire can add up rapidly, especially when your initial outreach takes a lot of effort. Traditional outreach response rates typically hover just between 18-25%. Here’s how doctorly, a Berlin-based startup with offices in Cape Town and a remote/hybrid culture, saved significant hiring time and costs by switching to OfferZen as their all-in-one solution. With a 97% developer response rate, they hired three developers in just three months!
Check out the full case study here!
Addressing doctorly’s hiring challenges
doctorly is a German health-tech startup on a mission to create modern, easy to use and highly optimised software that helps doctors manage their entire practice. When initially scaling their product, they relied on traditional hiring channels such as LinkedIn, but the performance of these channels failed to meet their growth goals.
The team decided to trial OfferZen as an alternative solution, very quickly signing a subscription to make unlimited hires. Here’s how that helped them reach their hiring goals.
Saving on upfront effort during outreach
When using traditional hiring models, doctorly spent a significant amount of time on outreach trying to find developers that were actively job-seeking:
“It was a huge effort for not very much return: You’re doing cold outreach to people who might not specifically be looking for a job. In order to get a response, you need to personalise every message, and you end up messaging 50-100 people over a few hours. And if you do get a response, often people aren’t looking for a job,” says Jack Godau, Chief Digital Officer at doctorly.
They could reduce on this initial time by tapping into OfferZen’s marketplace of developers that are curated for their job-seeking intent:
“Having a platform where people are definitely looking for a job and freshly on the market is a massive bonus,” says Jack. “I don’t have to send hundreds of messages hoping for a response. Now, I quickly find developers that I want to talk to and almost all of them want to talk to me. It removes this huge effort at the start of the process.”
When reaching out to these developers, their team usually gets a response within two days, allowing them to quickly move their shortlist of candidates through their pipeline. In addition, the access to detailed candidate profiles means they can be confident that their shortlisted candidates are a good match for their technical needs.
Improving efficiency in the hiring process
Besides being able to ramp up their outreach, the team finds several features on OfferZen useful in streamlining their team’s hiring process. This includes the filtering capabilities and being able to see candidates’ expected salaries upfront:
“I appreciate the option to easily customise my search filters, and the favorites function is really useful. It allowed me to shortlist potential candidates, and also to see candidates that other team members have flagged positively,” says Felicia Ortel, HR Lead at doctorly. “In addition, having the salary expectations and years of experience at the top of the profile when screening is helpful when searching through numerous profiles in one go. It’s convenient not having to open every candidate’s profile to get these details.”
Felicia also highlights the weekly, tailored updates of profiles that match her requirements, which help the whole team. Jack finds the ability to filter for workplace policy particularly useful, since they’re focused building a globally distributed, hybrid/remote team:
“It’s really useful to be able to make those kinds of selections, and to have control over the profiles you see,” he says.
He adds that the message templates save the team a great deal of time when it comes to outreach. “We invested time in customising our templates. We wanted to make sure it reflected what it’s like to work at doctorly while explaining the role details. This saves us so much time: Anyone on my team can just select a role and a template, and reach out to a potential candidate!”
After the initial outreach, the whole team has visibility on the conversations with developers. This transparency helps prevent any misunderstanding with the candidate or unnecessary back and forth between multiple team members.
Saving on cost to hire with subscriptions
doctorly has been on the lookout for several developers to join their team. This made OfferZen’s unlimited subscription the obvious choice when it came to saving on hiring costs, as they could make unlimited hires at a flat cost.
“Once we got started and saw the platform was working, we decided to not bother with other hiring channels,” says Jack. “It’s not long before you see a return on investment with a subscription – developer salaries and senior tech salaries are not getting any cheaper. Once you’re looking at two or more hires, everything beyond that is a discount compared to a traditional recruitment fee.”
Want to start saving on hiring costs and make unlimited developer hires for a flat fee? On an OfferZen subscription, you can make unlimited developer hires and avoid paying individual, varying hiring fees for every hire. Learn more.
Dedicated support and responsiveness to feedback
When doctorly first started hiring on OfferZen, Jack and the team received hands-on support from their senior Account Manager, Shara Chernel, to get them up and running:
“Shara has been really super in terms of getting the initial company profile setup, showing us the best practices, and generally being on top of how everything works,” he says. “She was always helpful with any questions we had, and I know she’s available whenever I need support”.
As they started using OfferZen more extensively, he also knew that his feedback would be taken seriously:
“I see our relationship with OfferZen as a partnership. As such, both parties need to have communal trust. OfferZen is always willing to listen and act on feedback. You’re always improving the product to help the companies who are using it, and take the time to understand what I’m doing. That sets OfferZen apart in my mind, it’s really valuable,” he says.
The results
Once set up on OfferZen, doctorly were able to hire three developers in just three months.
“When the time comes to look at more roles, then we’ll do it on OfferZen, because we have the subscription. We have the company profile and everything set up. We can just go and use it whenever we need it,” says Jack.
Are you hiring software developers? OfferZen is a curated developer hiring marketplace that connects job-seeking developers with exciting opportunities at over 2000 companies in South Africa and beyond.
Hiring teams can make unlimited hires across all the roles on OfferZen, saving up to 50% compared to traditional recruitment costs.
