What Happened When We Renamed a Job Listing: Hiring at Buffer in August 2015

Sep 17, 2015 5 min readReports

aAs the end of summer nears, we’re still excited to grow the team and are getting much closer to 50 Buffer team members – you can see the live list on our salary spreadsheet over here!

We would love to share with you our hiring numbers, how Buffer Bootcamp has evolved, how we are currently set up for hiring, and what happened when we changed the name of our “UX Researcher” position. Let’s dive right in!

We start September with 15 open positions, including a few new open positions we’ve recently added: Android Developer, Press Crafter, Finance Planner, and Life Saver.

Let’s see what happened at Buffer for hiring in August..

  • 8 team members started their Buffer bootcamp!
  • Also, we’re very excited to say that Philippe (a.k.a “Pioul”) has accepted his offer and joined us full time!

Here’s at look at the August 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.

Screen Shot 2015-09-07 at 3.42.25 PM

It’s interesting to see that we’ve had a fairly similar number of conversations as last month. July and August tend to be a little bit slower in terms of applications, so we are excited to see how September will shape up!

# of conversations Last month
Back-end Developer 85 86
Front-end Developer 48 97
Growth Hacker 75 73
iOS Developer 60 42
Android Developer 19 N/A
Product Creator 113 98
Product Designer 120 184
Traction Engineer 23 15
Reliability Developer 36 14
Happiness Hero 330 274
Community Champion 320 252
Content Crafter 152 209
Customer Development 69 N/A
Press Crafter 8 N/A

A brand new Buffer bootcamp: Meet your buddies!

Buffer’s six-week bootcamp period is a great time for both newcomers and team members to get to know more of each other. It’s an opportunity for both the new teammate and for Buffer to ensure that the fit feels perfect on both sides.

In the past, bootcampers have synced up periodically with their team lead. Since we began experimenting with self-management at Buffer, roles are a bit more fluid than they have been in the past when it comes to who is a “leader.”

As a result, bootcamp has evolved! Now, every new bootcamper gets assigned three buddies to assist them throughout the entire bootcamp experience: A Leader Buddy, a Role Buddy and a Culture Buddy.

A Leader Buddy

image (2)

A Role Buddy

image (3)

A Culture Buddy

image (4)

We feel that three buddies is a great way to give bootcampers a variety of interactions within and outside of their core areas. Bootcampers will interact with their three buddies, and they will also connect to those who have a similar role (e.g. other product creators) and team members they are paired with every week.

Here’s an email from Dave welcoming our new teammate Lorenz as a bootcamper:

image

Becoming a Buddy also feels like a great opportunity for Buffer team members who are interested in taking more of a mentoring role to progressively explore how to work with others in an “advising” capacity. The first step would be to become a Role Buddy or a Culture Buddy, and after a few experiences become a Leader Buddy.

Here is a timeline of how the Buffer bootcamp is currently set up:

image (5)
image (6)
image (7)
bootcamp timeline
image (9)

In 2014, we shared that “about 70 percent of the new hires become full-time employees after the 45-day bootcamp.” This ratio holds true today. We had 12 bootcampers start their 45-day journey in July and August, and as of this writing 3 of those will be pursuing other adventures than Buffer.

How we hire right now: The tools and process

In August, no less than 10 Buffer team members were involved in hiring through HelpScout, and quite a few more got to share their thoughts and jumped into interviews.

With a team of nearly 50 people and 15 open positions, we started thinking a little bit more about how we hire overall. At Buffer, we tend to hire based on our values and look for people who use our product.

Recently, I was lucky to investigate quite a few nice HR software solutions, and through that process we realized that we do things quite differently. We currently don’t have anyone working in HR full time, we don’t ask for CVs or resumés, and we don’t have face-to-face interviews (since we are distributed). Finally, we don’t pro-actively use external job boards at the moment (although we’re always happy to get featured!)

For now, it feels quite good to work with a combo of HelpScout and Trello to get feedback on applications and keep moving fast. It will be exciting to see how this solution works in the future! Here is how we are set up to work with applications for the Product Creator position:

image (10)

What happened when we renamed a job listing

Last month, we reported that we changed the title of our “UX Researcher” position to “Customer Development” – see the listing over here!

Patrik always has such a great perspective on bringing together our intuition and data – he just ran the numbers to see what impact this change had on applicants, and it has been quite surprising!

Views for both roles

Here’s the number of weekly page views the role got when it was called UX Researcher:

  • Week of 8/24: 892
  • Week of 8/17: 1,141
  • Week of 8/10: 1,293
  • Week of 8/03: 820

And here’s the number after the role was changed to Customer Development—a 2-4x increase in weekly page views:

  • Week of 8/24: 2,331
  • Week of 8/17: 1,959
  • Week of 8/10: 3,554

Applications for both roles

  • 65 Customer Development applications since August 10
  • 16 UX Researcher applications from August 1-10
  • 48 UX Researcher applications in July

Interviews for both roles

  • 0 interviews for UX Researcher in August
  • 3 candidates + 6 interviews for Customer Development in August

It has been great to witness a serious bump in visibility thanks to a small change in language, and we also feel that the “Customer Development” title tends to attract applicants closer to the profile we had in mind. By mid-August, this listing had become the second most-visited job listing among all 13 open positions!

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. :)

Brought to you by

Try Buffer for free

140,000+ small businesses like yours use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month

Get started now

Related Articles

ReportsAug 13, 2020
Shareholder Update: Q2 2020 and July

Note: This is the quarterly update sent to Buffer shareholders, with a bit of added information for context. We share these updates transparently as a part of our ‘default to transparency ’ value. See all of our revenue on our public revenue dashboard and see all of our reports and updates here . It's been quite the y

OpenApr 10, 2020
Pay Analysis Update: Examining Equal Pay at Buffer in 2020

Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. You can’t improve something if you don’t know that it needs to be improved. That was very true for us four years ago when we first started looking into equal pay at Buffer. We have long used a salary formula to determine all of our salaries – the same role in the same part of the world receives the same salary. That m

Buffer Shareholder Update: COVID-19 Impact and Approach

Ever since the world got turned upside down by COVID-19, it’s been “business as unusual” for everyone – Buffer included. I sent this update out to Buffer’s investors one week ago. I hesitated on whether to share it more widely, as I know a lot of companies have been impacted more severely in these times. That said, I believe it makes sense to lean into our company value of transparency, since there may be some companies this could help, and it shows Buffer customers that we will be around beyon

140,000+ people like you use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month