Hiring at Buffer in June 2015

We’re bringing back the hiring report!

The last time we reported on hiring was April 2014. Back then—15 months ago—Buffer had 20 team members.

Fast forwarding more than a year later, the team now has 34 full-time team members and three new teammates who will be starting their Buffer bootcamp shortly.

New team members

Just this last month, Danny and Kat both graduated from Buffer’s bootcamp and have accepted to join us full time, hooray!

In June, we also made four offers to candidates to join Buffer’s bootcamp, and three of them were accepted—Marc Anthony, Adrian and Justin will be joining us to start their bootcamp throughout the summer, all working as Product Creators.

Applications overview

We currently have 14 open positions, and we wish to be as transparent as possible in the way we hire and how we prioritize hiring people that use our product. We are also committed to monitoring diversity at Buffer through our new Diversity Dashboard.

It has been such a great experience to continue seeing a great interest from the Buffer community to join us and help building Buffer in so many different positions.

In June, we had 1,204 conversations about hiring with 1,130 applicants. Here is a breakdown of the different areas:

We sort applications through HelpScout and are currently looking into getting more organized with our processes.

Here’s at look at June’s numbers. Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “New Conversations” are the new email conversations we had through the month.

How has hiring evolved?

In March 2014, we saw about 2,000 applications coming in. In June 2015, we had 1,200 conversations about hiring—what changed?

We’re continuously evolving how we hire to reflect our self-management principles and to foster the Buffer culture. As we’ve done so, we’ve added some new elements to the application for many roles.

For example, the Happiness Hero position application now has various sections to be completed prior to applying, including suggested reading, questions about Twitter and Buffer use, and a few questions to answer.

Outlook and thoughts

Buffer has been growing a lot over the last year. Exactly one year ago we were 20 teammates, a year later we’re almost twice as many!

With 14 positions open, we’re learning how to hire as a team, always putting a special emphasis on culture and product use.

As a self-managed start-up, we don’t have a human resources department, choosing instead to have many team members help out in the hiring process.

This leads us to learn a lot about how we screen for cultural fit, how we interview, and how we extend offers to join the Buffer bootcamp.

As we learn, we’re trying to improve the experience for applicants. There have been instances where candidates waited for many weeks before they heard back from us—we wish to get better at connecting with candidates and providing them timely feedback.

We also try to provide as much detail as we can about the hiring decisions we make, including some more details on why we are sometimes passing on truly great candidates and applications.

Finally, we’re still working hard on figuring out how to best organize salaries at Buffer. You can still find our salary spreadsheet live here; we’re currently transitioning to self-managed salaries and are having internal discussions on the best way to handle it. More to come!

Over to you

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

Is there any specific metric you’d be interested to see? What kind of other information would you like to see here? Are there any questions I can help answer about Buffer hiring in the past month?

It’d be great to have your input in the comments!