How Blackhawk Network made its hiring smart, objective and scalable with Cutshort

An overview of Blackhawk Network’s hiring strategy in India

Blackhawk Network started setting up their engineering centre in India in late 2019. The senior leadership used their professional network to build the initial team and also started using multiple recruitment agencies to build their engineering team in India.

However, the team soon experienced the common challenges faced by top notch technology companies: a higher rejection ratio that wastes precious time of their interview panel, operational bottlenecks around interview scheduling and assessment tests, slower hiring cycles and too much productivity loss in managing hiring data in emails, sheets, Microsoft teams and so on.

Hiring process at Blackhawk Network India

As a merit driven company, Blackhawk Network has made its hiring process as unbiased and objective as possible..

It follows a distributed approach to hiring in which the technical team members collaborate actively in the hiring process instead of depending too much on their recruitment team for everything.

After an initial shortlisting by the technical lead, they give a carefully designed assessment test to enable discovery of talent without any biases by their team members. Once cleared, the rest of the interviews are planned in quick succession, each of which focuses on a specific area.

Challenges before using Cutshort

1. Sourcing enough high quality talent pool to close roles faster
2. Bottlenecks in the areas of shortlisting candidates, interview scheduling, assessment test operations
3. Inefficient use of the hiring team’s bandwidth

Blackhawk Network noticed the need of removing these bottlenecks to meet its goals of scaling their India engineering centre in line with their expectations.

How Blackhawk Network started using Cutshort to supercharge their recruiting

Blackhawk Network turned to Cutshort as it found it to be a unique solution since:

• It could be used not only to source quality talent but also.
• As a centralized platform where their talent and engineering teams both could participate in the hiring process without getting bogged down by the operational overheads.

Weekend recruitment drives powered by Cutshort

To try Cutshort, Blackhawk Network started using it to drive weekend recruitment drives. The first drive focused on SDET roles and saw 4 offers out of 7 candidates. The next one focused on Frontend engineering roles and again saw 3 offers out of 9 candidates. These results were much higher than the average, and more importantly, the effort spent was a fraction of what it used to be.

Organization wide adoption of Cutshort

Energised with the successes of the hiring drives and to further its vision of making its hiring future ready, Blackhawk Network started using Cutshort as the place to centralize their hiring process. More than 12+ engineering team members across different business verticals, started using Cutshort as a go-to platform to meet the candidates directly.

New hiring process design on Cutshort

With Cutshort, Blackhawk Network build different hiring workflows for their different job positions.

• It not only got high quality candidates form Cutshort, but also connected candidates from its LinkedIn job postings and job referrals to its Cutshort pipeline to see the most relevant first thanks to Cutshort’s machine learning based matching algorithms.
• Conversational screening questions helped collect essential data points from the interested candidates without high dropoffs.
• In-built integration with technical assessment solution, DoSelect, helped cut down on the operation overhead of sending the test and checking the results manually.
• Automated messages helped build a great candidate experience by giving meaningful updates, faster.

The Impact of Implementing Cutshort

In just 3 months of using Cutshort, Blackhawk Network has achieved some of its major goals with Cutshort:

• Closed 15+ roles, including the role of an Engineering Manager.
• Removed the bottleneck of interview scheduling by having the hiring team directly chat with the relevant candidates.
• Increased joining ratio from 65% to 85%, thanks to faster turnaround team and direct involvement of the hiring team in the hiring process.

The Cutshort impact

• Cutshort became the only and exclusive platform to hire for technical role.
• Higher predictability of closing roles: Instead of depending on external sources, talent acquisition team could deliver candidates faster for requisitions made by the technical team
• 90% roles closed internally instead of outsourcing them to recruitment agencies, thus bring the TAT down by 75% and cost per hire down by 95%.