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

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.

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!

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

A Role Buddy

A Culture Buddy

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:

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:

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:

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. :)