Why we launched a recruiter and hiring manager profile

Build your profile here if you are already using Circular –or signup instead!–

Building two-sided marketplaces is particularly difficult because you have to find a value proposition and build a product for both sides –recruiters/hiring managers and candidates in the case of Circular–.

On the talent side, since Teo and myself have been product and tech candidates ourselves, it was easier. We had experienced what was broken with recruiting and started Circular with huge changes in the candidate experience right from the moment we defined the proof of concept: curated companies and offers, replacing job applications with interview offers, no messy CV uploads, moving communications to existing messaging channels, and a clear focus on a more humane and personal customer support. That positioned Circular early-on as a high NPS platform in an industry were satisfaction is, well, not-that-good. And we are just getting started.

Understanding the recruiter and hiring managers side was more challenging. As co-founders, we accumulate a lot of recruiting experience from our previous lives, over 2,500 interviews and more than 200 hirings, but we are not recruiters.

The whole “disruption can only come from outsiders” mantra goes a long way for writing inspirational articles but we respect the recruitment industry too much to be naive about its complexity. That’s why we started looking for people that could complement our point of view. And we were really thrilled when Anna and Juan, both recruiters with exceptional international experience, joined the team in key roles: Anna as software developer and Juan leading customer success.

Insights from the behaviour of recruiters and hiring managers

With this internal know-how, the data from a product already used by hundreds of recruiters and hiring managers and dozens of user interviews, some patterns and behaviours started to emerge. We were particularly surprised by three realisations:

• A organic reputation system was emerging within the product. Recruiters and hiring managers have a certain level of credibility that is transferred to the candidates they invite to Circular. “If a candidate came from recruiter X, she should be good”. This reputation is more obvious for people that have more visibility in the industry but more difficult to achieve for other less-known (although equally good) recruiters and hiring managers.
• Some candidates were reporting what we consider unacceptable behaviour from a small percentage of recruiters (e.g. not answering after we introduced them to a candidate) and that was risking the reputation of the whole community of recruiters in Circular –where the best in class recruiters and hiring managers in Madrid are–. This is an industry-wide challenge, too: the bad manners of a few turn into bad reputation for the whole industry –and that’s not fair–.
• There is a group of recruiters (e.g. Jose or Tania) and hiring managers (e.g. Ricardo or Jeremie) that are exceptionally committed to helping out talented people they interviewed access exclusive opportunities. This means that they are also the ones generating more hirings for others in the community.

Introducing Circular’s profile for recruiters and hiring managers

Months of research and hard work around existing specialised solutions, reputation systems and social networks, resulted in our first version of a profile for recruiters and hiring managers. With the new profile, and based on the previous insights above, we have very specific goals about what we want to enable for recruiters and hiring managers:

• Showcase your hiring experience both as recruiter or hiring manager. We want to become the main professional profile for a recruiter or hiring manager, with industry specific information you cannot add on any other platform (e.g. which types of profiles do you usually hire).
• Receive feedback around how each recruiter and hiring manager deals with candidates and make this information available to them and to the community.
• Be rewarded as a significant giver within the community: awarding the top contributors with advantages in terms of access to candidates.

Want to know more about how your contribution to Circular and the feedback from candidates work? Check this

We are very excited about launching the first version of the recruiter profile, it is a big part of our vision on how to change recruitment forever. As always, we are doing this together, any feedback is super valuable and will be received with joy 🌈.