Array, a financial enablement platform founded in 2020, has grown to over 150 employees in just a couple of years. But they’re not resting on their laurels: Array is aiming to accelerate that impressive growth even more by doubling its headcount in 2022.
What is their approach to meet this ambitious goal for a “banner year” of hiring? For starters, they’re building a strong recruiting team and hiring process that leverages technology, insights, and data. BrightHire has become an essential part of their toolkit, supporting Array as they drive explosive growth in a way that is both responsible and competitive in the industry.
Don’t just take our word for it. We spoke to Kelly Shea, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, to learn about the three big ways Array is leveraging BrightHire to hire better and faster.
Expanding adoption to hire more people, more efficiently
While Array works with several tools in their tech stack, BrightHire has quickly become a critical asset to the company overall. In about a month since kicking off with BrightHire, Array has conducted hundreds of interviews on the platform. Part of the success of this introduction is due to wide adoption of the software across departments. Among the resources at their disposal, “BrightHire is definitely at the top of the list for us in terms of overall use, where we get the most value, and adoption across the company,” says Shea.
Array’s engineering team has been the biggest adopters so far, using BrightHire to assess candidates more quickly for urgent, high-priority roles. The ability to record, highlight, and asynchronously review interviews has been a particular benefit for engineering leadership. For example, Array’s CTO is able to use BrightHire to stay more involved in hiring processes by reviewing streamlined, highlighted results in far less time than it would take to interview each candidate himself.
Building in structure to train hiring teams
Array, like many companies scaling their hiring, knows that a well-oiled hiring machine brings colleagues across the organization into the fold as interviewers. This also means that hiring teams need to have a baseline set of skills, knowledge, and experiences to conduct effective interviews and deliver excellent candidate experiences.
At many companies – especially startups with growing teams – not everyone has had the chance to participate in structured interview processes before. Fortunately, Array has found solutions through BrightHire, which allows their teams to establish baseline processes, teach interview best practices, and bring everyone on to the same page before they interview candidates.
In practice, this means hiring team members can explore Array’s library of recorded Brighthire clips to learn the ropes on their own time, creating a sort of self-service training program for interviewing. Giving prospective interviewers exposure to recordings and other data allows the recruiting team to show them what a good conversation looks like. Shea notes: “Interviewers in training respond really well to visual learning, so saying ‘hey, this is a really good example of how we want to pitch Array’… or ‘this is a really good example of what to tell candidates when they’re asking us questions about our product roadmap, take a look.’”
These company-specific best practices are applicable across teams and allow Array colleagues to speak a “common language” in interviews. However, Array also plans to expand this initiative, leveraging specific insights to create tailored examples and checklists for different departments such as sales and engineering.
Improving existing processes
Even within a short use period, BrightHire has given Array new ways of collecting and analyzing interview data to improve hiring. Shea told us about two examples in which BrightHire identified opportunities for improvement in Array’s processes, showing them exactly what needed to be fixed to restore efficiency and effectiveness.
In one situation, Array noticed that their pass-through rates weren’t where they wanted them to be. They had a sense that the engineering team wasn’t extending enough offers relative to the number of people they were interviewing per month and they wanted to understand why. With the help of BrightHire, Array was able to parse their interview data to bridge the gap. They found that while candidates were getting high praise throughout the interview process, hiring teams were hesitant to extend offers at different levels than the job descriptions had advertised. After identifying this trend, Array could begin to shift its approach, emphasizing a goal of hiring for the organization as a whole rather than for a specific level or role description. This had an immediate tangible impact: using BrightHire, Array’s CTO was able to review some of these stagnant applications to move several qualified candidates forward in the hiring process.
In another case, Array reviewed BrightHire recordings to repair a disconnect between interview performance and work simulation performance among candidates for Business Development Representative roles. While many candidates had received great feedback in their interviews, they were falling short in working sessions, raising questions about how they should be assessed at each step. With BrightHire’s recording library, Array’s team was able to review previous sessions to analyze discrepancies and make revisions going forward. This allowed them to implement structural changes that better reflect the on-the-job responsibilities of the Biz Dev role, making the hiring process more cohesive.
Array’s successes are proof positive of how BrightHire helps growing companies meet ambitious scaling goals while making quality hires. We are excited to be a part of their journey and to find even more ways to help them grow!
Curious about how you can level up your hiring, conduct great interviews, and build the best teams possible? Schedule a demo with BrightHire!
