Nina Issa placed engineering talent in two weeks using Paraform
Her talent for cultivating relationships is what makes Nina Issa an excellent recruiter.
She started her career as a successful account executive at Yelp, but she quickly realized that the transactional nature of sales didn’t allow her to continue cultivating the relationships she was building. When a friend told her that her friendly and personable nature would make her a great recruiter, she dove right in — and now she’s been in recruiting for over seven years.
Nina started recruiting at a UK-based agency for four years before moving in-house at Snap and Facebook. In 2021, a former client reached out with an opportunity to get back into recruiting. This freelance opportunity was the push she needed to start her own independent recruiting business. After this experience, Nina founded Growth League, where she’s been recruiting independently ever since. With Growth League, Nina is focused on scaling out engineering, sales, product, marketing, and customer success teams for startups and big tech.
The Problem
Recruiting is a very human and very time-consuming business. As she began to build out a book of business at Growth League, Nina found it incredibly difficult to maintain a good business development cadence while keeping up with placing talent.“Before Paraform, trying to fill eight-plus roles while actively connecting with founders and hiring managers was not only time consuming, but nearly impossible.”
Nina was only able to dedicate about 10% of her time to business development. And with onboarding new clients taking days and even weeks in some cases, she needed a more stable and streamlined process to manage her client and candidate load.
The Solution
When learning about Paraform, Nina was initially drawn to the ability to connect with companies looking to hire without having to handle business development or spend several days onboarding them. Once she was in Paraform, Nina quickly realized how streamlined the whole process was — from choosing a role to recruit for to submitting candidates to making the ultimate hire. With Paraform, Nina could pick a role and start recruiting on the same day.
She also found that having the whole process contained within Paraform meant that not only was the onboarding process with hiring managers way faster, but also, since hiring managers are engaging with the platform on their own, they’re so much more responsive. This alone has been a game-changer for Nina, as it has ultimately cut down on multiple wasted days’ worth of back-and-forth between her and hiring managers when working on a role.
Paraform has other features that make Nina’s job a lot easier, too. The level of detail in the job descriptions on Paraform allowed her to zero in on the best candidates quickly. For example, some hiring managers have preferences that they list in Paraform that aren’t added to the public job description, such as specific companies that the ideal candidate may have worked at. Preferences like these often take a while to surface in an intake interview, but having all the details readily available makes the process of understanding a hiring manager’s needs much faster.
Like any good recruiter, Nina also wants to be able to provide for her candidates that aren’t a fit the first time around. Because she’s able to see dozens of open roles where she can readily submit candidates on Paraform, she can make more placements than she would be able to otherwise.
“I was working with so many candidates where I was really only approaching them with one opportunity. If I didn’t have anything else, then I couldn’t really help them the way that I wanted to. Paraform has provided a way to help these candidates and keep them posted on what’s in the market.”
The Results
The fact that it takes so much less time to hire for a role on Paraform was a surprising but profound benefit that Nina realized. Because she was able to cut out so much back-and-forth due to extra-detailed job descriptions and much faster responsiveness from hiring managers, she was recently able to hire an engineer for Spatial Labs in just two weeks. With all of the time this opens up for her, she’ll be able to double the amount of placements she makes in a month.“Working with Spatial Labs was such a breath of fresh air. Not only is the company doing some great work, but the internal process with Paraform was straightforward and the communication line remained open. We were able to find an amazing engineer who genuinely loved the space they were in and interviewed quickly to get started within two weeks. Such a streamlined process — 10 out of 10!”
Another feature that Paraform adds to Nina’s business is that it provides a steady stream of role opportunities — a serious value add for a relationship-focused recruiter who wants to spend as much time as she can fostering meaningful connections with clients and candidates.
“Paraform took the business development out of my day to day, which made it so much easier for me to focus on sourcing and recruiting. It makes my life so much easier because it’s like I am hiring a business development person. As a result, I have so many more clients now, so it has been really great."
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