foundU x attract.ai

Supporting a growth spurt at foundU

foundU is an end-to-end workforce management platform that automates everything from employee on-boarding and shift scheduling, to payroll and compliance. Since its inception in 2016, they’ve acquired clients all over Australia, in sectors as diverse as aged care to take-away restaurants. We interviewed James Harvey, CTO at foundU about his experience.

Through Quiet Times…

When Covid-19 hit, most companies were hunkering down, cutting costs and making staff redundant. foundU had the opposite problem.

With the government injecting billions in fiscal support to the casual & healthcare workforce, foundU’s customer-base of brands like NurseU and The Mex were in need of foundU’s software more than ever.

With the increased customer retention and acquisition rates, foundU suddenly found themselves needing to make a couple of hires. As most do when experiencing sharp demand, foundU turned to traditional recruitment methods, but finding little success, realised they need to approach their ideal candidates.

“We tried Seek ads and were inundated with too many applicants who weren’t the right fit.”

“In my experience, the best people in the market aren’t out there looking for a role, they need to be tapped on the shoulder and invited on the journey, so we needed a different process or platform.”

James Harvey

The uncertain state of the pandemic and sharp increase in workload meant foundU could have easily tipped into reactive hiring, leading to rushed decisions and expensive solutions. Instead, they leveraged attract.ai‘s tools to build out their strategic hiring engine, where they could plant seeds that, with nurturing, would blossom into great hires.

…and Busy Times

foundU joined attract.ai to help discover, and target these ideal candidates. Together, we built a strategy to actively build relationships with great candidates so they were well positioned for future growth.

Our strategy involved looking beyond mass-outbound messages and instead drip-fed, high-quality candidates with hyper-personalised outreach. This strategy allowed us to create a great candidate experience from the beginning, and achieve high response rates.

Through Attract Assist, James was able to have control over the entire recruitment process. Owning and be in control of the sourcing, outreach, nurturing and interviews was key to helping James create the candidate experience that leads to hires through nurturing.

“I’ve worked with some talented recruiters over the years and had some great results, but there’s a lot of value in owning the full journey with your future hires.”

“With Attract, you get a bunch of new leads every week, more control and ownership over the process, and you choose who you reach out to. You’re filling your pool with good candidates, and that compounds over time.”

James Harvey

During the nurturing process James was able to learn about the candidates and gain an in-depth understanding of how they would fit within foundU’s culture, their skillset and career goals. When it came time to make hiring decisions, James was able to make a highly informed decision about which candidate was right for foundU’s current position. He was confident in his decision that he hired the best-fit candidate, not the best interviewer

“When someone is joining your team for hopefully many years, it’s critical you get the right mix of skills and culture fit. A resume and a single interview is not a lot of information to go on when making such a long term decision. Interacting with the candidate directly throughout the hiring process gives you a far better indication of what that person will be like as an employee.”

James Harvey

The Results

In only 8 months, attract.ai has helped foundU make hires in their software, product, infrastructure, and QA teams, saving them around $65,000 in recruitment agency fees. 

More importantly, James has built relationships with his ideal candidates across many spaces, and is currently nurturing them as hires he expects to be making in the future. This strategy creates a compounding effect, as the value of building meaningful candidate experiences and nurturing fruits over time.

“The core algorithm and the human layer – once you have your proactive strategy in place and keep following the process, you get to this point where you get to harvest all the fruit and just keep seeing awesome results,” he says.

James Harvey

Want To Learn More?