11 New Teammates, 13 Open Roles: Hiring at Buffer in July 2015

In June, we brought back the hiring report after a long absence.

Throughout the summer, we’ve been working on growing the team. Today we have 13 open positions to fill!

Now let’s look into a little more detail into what happened at Buffer in July.

New teammates in July

Last month, 11 amazing people accepted our offer to join the Buffer journey. :) Some of those new team members will be joining us in August and beyond.

In July we welcomed Philippe (Front-End), Marc Anthony (Product) and Justin (Product) to their Buffer Bootcamp!

We’re currently processing Buffer applications through HelpScout and we are looking into getting more organized with our processes.

Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “new conversation” are the new email conversation we had through the month of July 2015.

It’s been interesting to see a fairly sharp increase of 38% in applicants in July. One of the main components seemed to be the opening of the Multimedia Producer. That has since been filled by a new teammate (whom you’ll meet in our August report!), so we took down that position.

Outlook and thoughts

In August, we intend to bring back our Android Developer listing and keep hiring across the board, bringing the total of open positions to 14!

In addition to open positions, here are some things we’re working on and learning in the area of hiring.

UX Researcher or Customer Developer?

At Buffer, we always get excited about testing new things, especially when it comes to customer development and user research! So we are trying something new for our UX Researcher position.

Tom Dunn, Patrik and I all work as UX researchers although none of us feel like we can identify strongly with the term “researcher”. We will try to change the position’s title from “UX Researcher” to “Customer Developer” to see if it brings any changes to the application flow.

General applications

Another learning we’ve had on hiring this month is how to manage those who have logged spontaneous applications with us—our general address has not been getting enough attention from us lately.

To fix this, we’ve put up a listing that will include criteria that are common to all hires at Buffer. This will make sure we can still connect and hear from members of the Buffer community that feel like applying with us!

Creating a better experience

Another fun project this month has been to look into how we organize our hiring efforts in order to give a better experience to both applicants and team members involved in hiring. Buffer does not have an HR department, and it is quite common to see 5 to 7 people involved at different stages of the hiring process with given candidates.

Today, we filter the applications we receive through HelpScout—a great software that helps us do customer support. It helps us list lots of interesting information about candidates, including how long they have been customers with us and any previous interaction we might have had.

This is especially interesting when you consider that we tend to hire people who use our product.

We have been pondering changing software so that we could get a little bit more organized in our hiring.

We decided a great first step would be to try and centralize the incoming applications we wish to engage with in a Trello board. With a volume of about 100 application across 14 positions every month, it would be great to better track how applications are progressing.

Hopefully that will help us give everyone a better experience and speed up our overall hiring email response time!

PS – If you are curious about how the team is growing overall, you can have a look at our team’s salary spreadsheet live here; more to come soon!

Over to you

I’d love for this report to be as transparent and helpful as possible for you.

What kind of information would you like to see here? Are there any questions I can help answer about Buffer hiring in the past month?

I’d love to engage in conversation with you in the comments. :)