Hey there, and Happy New Year

In case we haven't officially met, I'm Chris Connors, the co-founder of candidate.fyi. We're on a mission to shake things up in the candidate engagement space and make your life in recruiting a bit smoother.

As we step into the new year, we’re thrilled to bring you a jam-packed newsletter filled with exciting updates and innovations from candidate.fyi. Get ready to dive into the latest product enhancements, including the much-anticipated release of our interview scheduling automation module. This game-changing addition is set to streamline workflows and elevate the overall experience.

Better yet, it’s fully integrated into our world-class candidate portal.

But that’s not all - as we bid farewell to 2023, join us in reflecting on the highlights and achievements that shaped our company’s journey throughout the past year. From milestones to memorable moments, this newsletter is your exclusive pass to a recap of our remarkable 2023 and how it all started.

Thank you for being an integral part of candidate.fyi. Here’s to a year filled with innovation, growth, and continued success.

Happy reading!

 candidate.fyi corner

Interview Scheduling Automation

We are thrilled to announce the release of the candidate.fyi scheduling product! 🎉

From the start, our goal was to empower talent teams to manage every touchpoint with candidates and create memorable experiences. With the launch of our scheduling feature, we've taken a giant leap toward that vision.

After several months of rigorous testing with our amazing customers, we are delighted to make it available to the public!

Fully Integrated Experience:
Whether used with the world-famous candidate.fyi candidate portal or as a stand-alone product, our scheduling feature provides candidates with a central and branded home base for seamless interview management.

From interview prep and communication to feedback and team member bios, scheduling now completes the suite of tools to make the process smoother than ever.

For Talent Teams Needing Complexity: Our scheduling solution addresses the needs of coordination teams with advanced features:

👉 Load balancing
👉 Recommended time slots
👉 Integration with Google and Microsoft
👉 Support for Lever, Greenhouse, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, Workday and 40+ others
👉 Self-booking or availability submission
👉 Tailored candidate invites

Our team has worked tirelessly to offer next-level functionality, intuitive UI/UX, and robust support. We're excited to help the community automate and streamline one of the most time-consuming manual processes.

customer success

Tropic’s outcomes with candidate.fyi

• 4.69/5.00 candidate experience rating
• 5.5 minutes average time candidates engage with Tropic’s content on the portal
• 61% pulse survey completion (industry standard is 20%)
• Cut 15 minutes off of every interview
• 10% increase in offer-accept rates

How It All Started

March 2022 - my partner and I were only home from the hospital for a few weeks. Our son was born on March 7th, and we were grappling with sleep deprivation and trying to figure out how to care for an actual human. They just let us go home? Where is the instruction manual? How do we do this? These were some of our initial thoughts when we got home from the hospital. We were new parents, and Reid was our first. He’s been the best thing to come into our lives since our discovery of Sugarfish (IYKYK).

A few weeks after we got home, I got a call from my co-founder, who most of you know is my brother. Kyle and I have been in tech our entire careers, him coming from the engineering side and me from the sales side. We’ve always worked on different ideas, but life would get in the way, and we had full-time jobs. Kyle, already having 2 kids at the time, knew I wasn’t sleeping anyway, so he said, “Let’s build a company”.

We were obsessed with fixing the broken candidate experience; it was something that we fought head-on from both sides of the fence. Kyle, from a technical leadership background, has always worked with his TA teams to win the best technical talent in the market. Time and time again, they came back to candidate experience being the differentiator. I came from the candidate side of things and experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly. I always focused on which interviewing team provided the best experience and transparency - that was the company I wanted to work for.

We began doing our research and speaking with our buyers, or would-be customers, and leaders in talent acquisition. We had to figure out if this was something that existed in the market and if it was something they would buy. Fast forward to August of 2022. We had spoken with about 100 different TA leaders and had enough validation that we left our full-time jobs. I had a cushy job at Google during that time, and Kyle was a CTO at a start-up. We knew the risk but were ready to dedicate everything to fixing this problem.

The next couple of months were a lot of building, speaking with customers, iterating, pivoting, arguing, still not sleeping much, and raising money from investors. By October, we had a clear vision of our product and how to bring it to market. That’s when we went heads down on the product/engineering side, and I continued speaking with customers. We had a handful of early customers who believed in our vision and committed to joining our beta launch in Feb 2023.

Our Head of Engineering, Connor Wilson, joined us in January from Dapper Labs and has been crucial in building our core product and functionality. He has been a blast to work with and is helping to mold our culture and mission statement.

Connor has an incredible team, with Stephen Appiah joining him on the engineering side.

They both understand how important things like customer support and success are. Our customers love working with them, and our time to respond to a customer's question, concern, feature request, etc., is within minutes because of this dedication and commitment from the Engineering side of the house.

What happened next was an absolute roller coaster.

We launched in February of 2023, and within a couple of weeks, we went viral on LinkedIn. Our product has been grabbing the attention of some of the industry's most well-known customers, investors, and leaders since.

We got our product to market as quickly as we could and braced for impact as we knew this was the best way to work the kinks out. Our team tirelessly fixed bugs, added new features, and supported world-class enterprise customers like I’d never seen before. Answering customer questions on a Saturday night at 7 PM. Getting up extra early to support our customers in the UK and always having an open-door policy with our customers.

That’s the kind of culture we’ve built at candidate.fyi - one of customer obsession. It’s the only way to bring a product to market these days. We’ve won world-class customers from competitors because of this mentality. We’re right there to pick it up when they drop the ball. 

Fast forward to October of 2023, and we officially came out of waitlist and launched our product to the public while also announcing our fundraise and investors.

We had industry veterans like the former CHRO of Disney join us as investors; the founders of JBC, Yext, Tropic, and a ton of customers joined our cap table. Ben Zises of superangel.fund joined us as our lead investor and has been an incredible partner to us.

The past year and a half has been an incredible ride for our company, and I’m so proud of everything our team has accomplished. From supporting publicly traded enterprises to unicorn startups, we’ve gotten so far since we started.

Our team has grown candidate.fyi from an idea to a piece of tech that customers can’t live without. A crucial part of an enterprise’s tech stack. We live there right next to the ATS.

The thing I’m most excited about for next year is how we’ll continue to grow as a company and the different kinds of customers we’re onboarding.

January is already packed for us as we onboard a publicly traded enterprise healthcare company that uses Oracle Recruiting Cloud and a $2B AI company. They’re both using the candidate.fyi all-in-one product, which consists of our core candidate portal product, complex interview scheduling product, pulse engine, and analytics.

If you’re just now jumping into our story, send me a DM on LinkedIn. My inbox is always open.

Community Resources

The Case for Giving Candidates Questions before the interview: One of my all-time favorite leaders in RecOps, Jeremy Lyons shares why companies should provide interview questions to candidates ahead of the interview. Providing them in advance enables candidates to prepare effectively, shifting the focus from on-the-spot performance to relevant skills and experiences. Another topic Jeremy focuses on is something that’s not discussed nearly enough: Neurodivergent Candidate Pools.

Decoding TA Metrics: This Voices in TA series seems to be re-surfacing around community channels as it’s been super helpful for TA leaders looking to better understand which metrics to track.

Until next time,

Chris Connors
Co-Founder, 
candidate.fyi 

Want to learn more about what we’re building at candidate.fyi? We’d love to show you!