Hiring in September: More Than 50 Teammates, More Guidance Through Bootcamp

September was a great month at Buffer! We extended 6 offers for new team members to join us in Buffer’s bootcamp. As a result, we are now more than 50 team members (accounting for both full time team members and bootcampers—you can see the full list over here).

September hiring conversations

Here’s at look at the September 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.

We had 1,545 conversations with a total of 1,414 applicants in September.

September applications by position

We’re currently hiring across 18 open positions, we have listed them on Buffer’s Journey page. Here’s how many applicants we’ve had, per position.

Updating our Journey page

As the team grows, we’ve been giving more thought to how to provide a better experience in recruiting and hiring. Both Ivana and Pioul have been amazing at implementing the on-going changes for Buffer’s Journey page.

How did you hear about us?

One change that we’ve recently introduced is the ability to ask our applicants where they found us.

We hope that we’ll be able to draw insights from this data in the future, and identify some of the best places possible for us to spread the word about Buffer’s open roles.

Are we missing your role?

As a growing team, we have been trying to remain open to people that feel passionate about joining Buffer, yet don’t fit into any position we have in mind at this stage. We’ve previously had an email address set up for these type applications, and we recently realized that we were not as thorough as we should be with checking it.

In September, we introduced the “Are we missing your role?” tab to make sure we provide a spot for these applicants, and allow them to elaborate on their ideas for positions we don’t have listed yet.

Grouping areas together

Finally, we’ve started grouping roles together to make the presentation a little bit clearer. Here is an example with all our open roles related to marketing:

Pair calls during Buffer’s bootcamp

As the team keeps growing, we’re also trying to think a little bit more of how it feels for a bootcamper to come on-board at Buffer.

When I joined, in April 2014, we were 18 people and it was still possible to meet every single person at Buffer through chat or a video call during your 6-week bootcamp.

Today, with 50 people, it feels best to provide a bit more guidance for bootcampers, especially with the amount of information transiting through emails, HipChat and our Discourse forum!

As we grow, some of us have found ourselves spending a little bit more time in syncs lately, so for now we’ve dropped our daily pair calls between Buffer team members to see how that feels.

One experiment we’re trying is to have bootcampers continue to do pair calls with existing Buffer team members, so they can meet more team members when they get started and get an immediate feel for the Buffer culture.

Over to you

We’d love to make this report as informative and transparent as possible.

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 talk with you in the comments. :)