Hipcamp

When I was hired as the new Head of Talent, my first task was to double the engineering team in 3 months. Hipcamp is a culture-first and very mission-driven company, so I had to judiciously hire engineers for mission and impact alignment. I also focused on Senior Engineers that had a similar experience building consumer web applications using our particular stack.

I came across Key Values at my previous company, Lever, and couldn’t find a better site that put values and mission first. At that time, Hipcamp was a small and scrappy Series A team. We didn’t have engineering resources to build and maintain a robust careers page, and Key Values was like having employer branding on contract. (And honestly, it’s a way better careers page than we would have been able to do internally given our limited resources.)

It’s essentially a low-maintenance employer branding tool that influences every hiring cycle.

Additionally, given that our recruiting function was really just me, I really wanted my strategy to be targeted. Other sites cast a wide net, but the quality is low. I’d rather go through 20 quality candidates than sort through 100 mixed ones.

Our results from using Key Values are four-fold:

1. For us, it’s an employer branding tool that is simple. It’s an integral part of our candidate sourcing process. One candidate literally said, “I wasn't considering other opportunities until I looked at your Key Values page. It seems like a unique team and culture and I'm definitely open to chatting.” We also had another candidate that we reached out to that said, “I’m not looking right now but my friend is and your [Key Values] page looks perfect for them.” We ended up hiring that friend.
2. Our engineers love our Key Values profile and are so proud of our team and culture. Working together to create our profile genuinely bonded us more. Before our Key Values page, they weren't sure how to brand themselves and get their story out there to share their identity. The process of putting together our page was so valuable, made us feel closer as a team, and we are all so proud to share our profile now.
3. Phone screens are way more fun. I send our Key Values profile to every candidate before we do our call and invite them to ask questions they might have (as opposed to my having to spend half the call selling our values and culture). It is very normal to hear an applicant say, “Well I read through your KV page…” Our Key Values page continues to build our pipeline even when we pause on hiring (because believe it or not, we met our hiring goals for the year!).
4. Low cost, high impact. As a small company, I feel we have a lot of great perks for our size, but our mission and team are the biggest perk over it all. We really do believe that our mission and team are so beyond flashiness. There’s something truly special about our company, and we finally have an easy way to showcase it to the world.