SUMMARY
- CircleCI, the world’s largest shared CI/CD platform, was hiring 20–25 people a month with a 14-person recruiting team
- Coordinators had to memorize or look up the job titles of 400+ employees for every interview email, because their applicant tracking system couldn’t output them
- After trialing several tools, the team chose TextExpander for its intuitive interface, data import, and Snippets pushed to the whole team
- TextExpander became the team’s single hub for candidate communication: kickoff emails, candidate answers, interview scheduling, and calendar invites
- The team expands Snippets 1,000+ times a month, saving 15–20 hours every month
CircleCI is the world’s largest shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. Software teams at companies like Spotify, Coinbase, and BuzzFeed use it to release code quickly by automating the build, test, and delivery process for mobile and web apps.
CircleCI was growing fast. With more than 400 employees worldwide and 20–25 new hires every month, a lot rested on its small recruiting team: 14 people, five of them recruiting coordinators. Alice Chu, Recruiting Coordinator & Analyst, is one of them.
“Our main goal is to set up interviews and to make sure everything is coordinated, confirmed, and scheduled once a candidate enters the process,” says Alice. “There is a lot of repetition in certain areas of the communication, templating, common phrases, verbiage, job titles, and things like that.”
The challenge: 400 job titles and nowhere to keep them
Every interview request had to include the interviewer’s job title. That meant coordinators either memorized titles or searched, copied, and pasted them for every email. The team used Greenhouse for applicant tracking, but it couldn’t store and output titles the way they needed.
The fix came from an unexpected place. “We were interviewing for another coordinator, and it was actually one of our interviewees that told me about TextExpander in response to a process challenge I mentioned I was having,” says Alice. “So I did some research and competitive analysis, and found TextExpander to be the perfect solution.”
Now a coordinator types a short abbreviation with the interviewer’s first initial and last name, and the title fills in automatically.
As we continued to scale, we just couldn’t expect our coordinators to memorize the titles of all 400 CircleCI employees, so it got to the point where TextExpander was a lifesaver.
Alice Chu, Recruiting Coordinator & Analyst, CircleCI
Why TextExpander
Before rolling out TextExpander in January 2020, Alice searched for shortcut tools and tried several trials and demos. Most felt “clunky and hard to grasp.” TextExpander didn’t. A few things set it apart:
- An intuitive interface that new coordinators could pick up quickly as the team grew
- Data import, so the team could bring in its existing knowledge base
- Centralized control: “I could create Snippets that were pushed out to the entire team, rather than each person having to manage their own account,” says Alice.
- Value: “Compared to the other productivity apps I found, the value of what TextExpander provides is quite high.”
One hub for all candidate communication
Job titles were just the beginning. With hundreds of open roles on any given day, the team now runs nearly all of its communication through a shared Snippet library.
New job kickoff emails
Internal kickoff emails share a lot of common fields, so they work well as templates. The team also keeps a shared library of update messages for staff and hiring managers that they insert with a couple of keystrokes. The coordinators send more than 250 emails a day.
Fast answers to candidate questions
A bank of Snippets covers common candidate questions and the hiring process. A short abbreviation inserts a complete, thoughtful answer that coordinators can send as is or tailor in seconds.
Calendar invites
Google Calendar had no way to reuse the same links across invites, so Alice built Snippets that add the right links to every invite, with no more copying and pasting.
Consistent workflows in every recruiting app
In Greenhouse, fill-in Snippets let the team personalize messages while making sure every candidate gets everything they need to prepare. Coordinators schedule 2–6 kickoff meetings a week and 30–50 interviews a day.
The results
From first contact with a candidate to scheduling, interviews, follow-ups, and final communication, TextExpander removes repetitive typing from the whole recruiting cycle. The team uses it more than 1,000 times a month and saves 15–20 hours every month.
“With all the time we used to spend continuously referencing our HR system to find titles, which is now done in seconds with TextExpander Snippets, that’s a huge time savings for us,” Alice explains.
It’s all about fast and easy communication with candidates and stakeholders. There’s no question that TextExpander helps us do that, while really improving our productivity and consistency.
Alice Chu, Recruiting Coordinator & Analyst, CircleCI