Customer stories
How rapidly growing start-up Socotra elevated its recruiting
How rapidly growing start-up Socotra elevated its recruiting
For Socotra’s TA team, agility is everything. See how the start-up keeps costs down while increasing diversity in the pipeline for key roles in engineering, sales, and more.
About
Socotra is the first cloud-native core platform for insurance and the first core system to believe its APIs and configuration formats should be open to the world.
101-250
San Francisco, CA
Software & IT
TL;DR: Since implementing Fetcher in April 2021, Socotra's talent acquisition team has effectively sourced hard-to-fill roles in engineering, sales, and marketing. Fetcher has also enabled the team to prioritize diversity without needing additional resources.
Introduction
The challenge
The solution
The result
Introduction
A lean team with aggressive goals
As Head of Talent Acquisition at Socotra, Dubi Ben-Shoham recognized that the demands placed on him and his team were becoming unsustainable as the company’s growth continued.
The challenge
An agile start-up looks for an agile recruiting solution
With 15 to 20+ jobs open at all times, the team needed help to source manually, work on job listings with hiring managers, and interview candidates. They also didn’t have a method for consistent outreach; if a candidate didn’t respond to the first touchpoint, they wouldn’t reach out again.
As a platform that provides agile solutions for insurers, having time for innovation was also crucial to Dubi. He has added four team members since he joined Socotra in 2019 and needed time to dedicate to mentoring and improving processes between team members.
The solution
Sourcing all day…without actually sourcing all day
Dubi has always prioritized learning about new hiring platforms and building solid relationships with the teams he decides to work with. On the demo with Fetcher, the ability to have curated batches of candidates stood out to him.
“I thought, this is a way that I can do the job that our [executive team] is expecting, but I’m actually passively doing a big part of it through Fetcher,” he added.
He also found a strong connection with the Fetcher team, which was the deciding factor in implementing Fetcher in April 2021. Since then, Socotra’s talent acquisition team has used Fetcher to source for hard-to-fill roles in engineering, sales, and marketing.
Dubi says that recruiting for diversity is deeply ingrained in his team. Fetcher’s sophisticated sourcing capability allows them to build diversity in their talent pool without investing in separate DE&I resources.
“Companies like Google and Amazon have so much money they can dedicate just to DE&I, and if you are a diversity candidate, you are probably really excited to get a call from one of those companies. However, it’s always challenging for a company like ours that no one has ever heard of. Our last 4-5 hires were all women candidates. That’s awesome,” adds Dubi.
The result
Keeping costs down and candidate responses up
Socotra has made crucial hires through Fetcher, including a Director of Sales Operations and a Senior Software Engineer. Dubi is also sourcing for a Vice President of Marketing, exclusively through Fetcher. “We are getting quality candidates we want to talk to,” said Dubi.
Fetcher has allowed Socotra to keep its recruiting budget lean because they don’t need to hire a sourcer or rely on contract recruiters. They also don’t plan on renewing their LinkedIn Recruiter seats since Fetcher pulls candidate information from LinkedIn and provides a simple, effective way to send outreach sequences. “What I’ve learned through Fetcher is that it’s actually the second or third email that gets them interested.”
Putting the people side of recruiting first
Because Socotra’s team can rely on Fetcher to source talent, they now spend more time moving candidates quickly through the pipeline while ensuring a great hiring experience. As the leader of the TA team, Dubi says he loves having the time to check in with his team, think about new ideas, and improve their processes. “In a start-up, being able to have headspace time is crucial, and sourcing takes a lot of headspace,” he added. Having this time back ensures Socotra’s compact recruiting team can continue to adapt and dedicate time to understanding candidate needs.
By incorporating Fetcher into their recruiting processes, Dubi has added value to his team by giving them time back in their day for people-focused tasks. He’s also brought value to his organization by ensuring Socotra stays competitive in today’s fast-paced hiring market.
