About 5 — Patreeya — Chief of Staff & Operations Generalist

Building a startup team.

I love getting to show up and live in this world of recruiting you’ve built for me. —CEO

The company had been working with external recruiting agencies & automated recruiting software.

Several key strategic roles had been open for over a year, including one hire that would free up the CEO’s time by at least 5 hours/week.
Recruiting was pushed to managers who lacked time or consistency across departments.
There was no ATS or candidate management beyond an Asana board with outdated information.

Painpoints

Job kickoff was inconsistent and not thorough, and roles were opened before there was a clear consensus on the scope of the role. This led to constantly shifting processes and poor candidate experience.
Recruiting was incredibly manual. Managers were overworked, candidates were stalled, and information was scattered.
Executive leadership was “owning” too much of recruiting decision-making for the amount of growth anticipated — this led to bottlenecks and a lack of autonomy for the rest of the team to move quickly and have confidence in hiring decisions for their own departments.

Decreased the time-to-hire by 53% for repeat roles.
Successfully closed all open roles.
Freed up manager & CEO time by eliminating bottlenecks and increasing autonomy.
Eliminated the need for external recruiting agencies, saving $20K+ / month.
Improved candidate experience & employer branding through clear & quick communication.
Improved diversity of the company & presence of underrepresented groups by 43% through enacting fair hiring processes and bias-awareness training.

I took the recruiting process down to the bare essentials and standardized this across teams to expedite hiring without sacrificing quality.

I created a recruiting playbook with documented processes and standardized templates for job descriptions, interview feedback, and candidate communication.

To mitigate delays often encountered in hiring, I built a kickoff process that encompassed role research, compensation benchmarking, and profile calibration from the very beginning.

Evaluated and selected an Applicant Tracking System based on company stage, likely scale, and budget.
Stood up the ATS, customizing it according to the established recruiting process, migrating historical data, and setting up automation.
Created documentation + videos, and trained all hiring managers and teams.

Created a headcount planning process as a standard operating rhythm. This was approved and adopted by executive leadership and managers. This was a key shift from reactive to proactive in hiring strategy, and resulted in more accurate forecasts.

Defining the roles of the hiring process — This made sure that hiring managers and company leadership were bought in and had clarity before the role was even opened.
Functioned as PM — I became the point of contact between hiring managers and company leadership on hiring and “quarterbacked” role launch, sourcing, and offer process.

— VP of Engineering

Tools