How Harmonic 3x-ed their quarterly engineering hires, multiplying their top-of-funnel for difficult roles on Paraform.
For an ambitious company, which is harder: growing sales, or growing your team?
Harmonic is building a startup discovery engine to help investors uncover great opportunities outside their immediate network. Their customers include all the household VC names you can think of, and they’re backed by Craft, Floodgate, Sozo, and more.
Since joining Harmonic over a year ago, Soham Kamat, Head of Business Operations, has been responsible for tackling Harmonic’s most pressing business challenges. Last quarter, the team determined that building out a scalable technical recruiting function was the top priority at Harmonic:
“Hiring engineers to keep up with demand was the one thing holding us back from really growing. After talking to our customers, we knew exactly what we needed to build. We needed more engineers to help us build that.”
To further up the stakes, Soham made a bet with Harmonic’s Head of Sales.
Could the company generate $1 million in net new sales by the end of the quarter?
Or could Soham hire 4 engineers first? Both seemed like lofty goals, and would be major milestones for the company.
Could Harmonic actually hire as fast as they grow? The bet’s loser– whoever was further from their goal by end of quarter – would have to take the other department out for a Michelin-starred meal.
And so Soham gave Paraform a shot. He shares his experience with us here.
Results:
- 6x the number of quality candidates, who progressed faster down the pipeline.
- 3x the number of hires made, from 1 hire a quarter to 1 hire a month. 75% of Harmonic’s engineering hires this past quarter were made on Paraform.
- More cost-effective than agencies, with no upfront retainer.
- “Incredible support from the Paraform team.”
“We've had the most success with Paraform, for both volume and quality of candidates, out of all the channels we’ve used. It really helped us increase our top-of-funnel with high-caliber candidates.”
High-caliber talent. Always. All the time.
Before Paraform: Initial volume of quality candidates would dwindle over time.
After Paraform: Access to multiple recruiters and their talent networks means consistent access to new, carefully-curated talent pools.
“The candidate quality was much better at Paraform compared to other channels. We’ve worked with a few agencies and found that they initially give a lot of great candidates, but as time goes on or maybe once they've exhausted their rolodex, the quality of candidates can decrease.
On Paraform, because you can work with multiple recruiters and add new recruiters to your search, you’re always getting access to strong new talent pools. That ensures the candidate quality and volume are both higher, for a longer time.
One platform powers the entire talent search process.
Before Paraform: Soham’s top-of-funnel volume and candidate conversion rates were much lower. He spent a lot of his day on operational tasks, from sending emails to scheduling calls to moving candidates down the funnel. This reduced the time he could spend building up the recruiting function and improving key funnel metrics.
After Paraform: Soham has a solution that enhances (and integrates with) his existing tech stack:
- Send outreach emails directly from the platform.
- Embed a calendar link if you want candidates to schedule calls directly.
- Integrate your existing ATS, such as Greenhouse or Ashby.
“The user interface was very easy to use — I can always see the candidate’s resume and LinkedIn right there, and I send intro emails directly from the platform. We embedded our calendar link directly into our outreach email; reaching out to candidates we like on the platform and getting a call scheduled on our calendar is very seamless.
I also love the ATS integrations – we use Greenhouse and the integration helps us automatically add candidates into the system, reducing time spent on operational tasks. The team has also been immensely supportive and easy to work with. Our dedicated account manager from Paraform is super responsive anytime I have questions.”
“While the relationship you have with recruiters can be different on Paraform versus at other places, I enjoy written communication with recruiters. We have a big writing culture at Harmonic — writing reduces time spent in unnecessary meetings and makes it more efficient to collaborate on ideal candidate profiles with recruiters asynchronously.
Recruiters can score candidates and add notes to our scorecard, where we set metrics. It’s easy to read and calibrate based on their notes.”
Specialized talent from Paraform is already making an impact.
“Joe and Kevin started a month ago and are already making an immediate impact. From day one, both of them have been digging into core issues and making progress right away. All initial signals are extremely strong; even in terms of just their backgrounds, you can tell they’re high-quality candidates.
Our ideal candidate for our AI/ML roles is someone who not only has deep data science experience, but also financial services experience. Given our main customers at Harmonic are VCs, we’re dealing with very nuanced financial data. So our search profile is more specialized.
But Paraform’s recruiters managed that well; both Kevin and Joe have deep AI/ML experience, and Joe has worked in equity research at a large investment bank. The quality of candidates we’ve been getting has been excellent.”
So, who won the bet – can you hire as fast as you scale?
Turns out, Harmonic has both generated $1M in net new sales and hired 4 new engineers this past quarter. Soham hired 3 of 4 engineers on Paraform, and is continuing to use the platform to grow Harmonic’s team.
These are incredible accomplishments for both the ops team and the sales team, and a testament to Harmonic’s commitment to scaling their business.
Start your search today.
Speak with our team to learn more about how Paraform can help you fill your difficult positions