“Our incentives are never misaligned, it’s a good, trusting relationship”

Background

Founded in New York in 2016, Troops is a Slackbot for sales teams. It helps customer-facing teams stay on top of everything that matters and aims to help streamline the data management process and provide users with real-time insights, surfaced from "systems of record" like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zendesk, into "systems of engagement" like Slack, and Microsoft Teams using software bots.

Tech Team

The engineering team at Troops is optimising for easy product iterations, while building scalable infrastructure. They are self-starters that take pride and ownership in their work. Scala's powerful type system, functional idioms, and concise patterns allows their engineering team to quickly model business solutions.

Intro

We’ve been working with the team at Troops for a few years now to help them find Senior Functional Developers.

In 2022, Troops.ai signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce, therefore becoming part of Slack, a Salesforce company.

Being a startup, Troops had a small team with limited time and a very high bar for talent. In the current market environment, recruiting is a full time job that requires efforts from multiple people to find the best candidates. While looking for tech talent, they lacked in-house resources to successfully find the people they needed to build a successful team.

Over the years we’ve sourced a lot of senior functional programming engineers for them resulting in more than a hundred interviews and close to ten hires.

Get in touch to discuss your hiring needs

Community

Scala, React, TypeScript

Tech Stack

10-49 people

Size

Messaging, AI, SaaS

Industry

CVs
sent

208

Interviews done

146

Senior FP Engineers hired

9

Q&A

How did your journey with recruitment start?

The journey started with my co-founder, who has a sales background, thinking - the more people we'll work with, the more candidates we have in the funnel, the better results are going to be. And what we initially did, is we partnered with close to 20 different recruiting agencies at any given time, anybody who sent a request to work with us, we said yes.

What do you think has made our relationship so successful?

Greg Ratner

Co-founder and CTO at Troops

What is your opinion about our work processes?

A couple of reasons. First is the WorksHub approach of going after a niche of candidates and finding the best ones in a specific niche is very smart. For instance we use functional programming, and Functional Works (a WorksHub community) established itself as a service where there's a high bar for quality.

I really like the Slack channel approach, it makes it very easy - if I have to go find a candidate, all the context is there or if I bring somebody new from the team in, they jump on the channel and can read everything that happened in the past. So that's super, super helpful.

I always feel that recruiters at WorksHub are incredibly honest, and I feel like they got our back.
That is incredibly helpful, because it's an honest conversation about compensation and it's an honest conversation about who else this candidate is talking to, this is what I think is going to be helpful to close the deal and so on. That feels like a partnership. In general, the project management of the whole process has always been really good.

Going back to other agencies, a lot of the recruitment industry relies on younger people who are excited and hustle, but the downside of this is often at recruiting agencies, there's a lack of experience and lack of organisation. So people forget to send an email. Or the feedback on a candidate. In this market where every second counts and good candidates go very quickly, that's really important.

What other aspects are important to you besides a streamlined working process?

Finally, do you have any advice for other companies considering to use our service?

Very quickly we realised that this was a very bad idea as we were getting flooded with candidates that were not a good fit, and recruiters that didn't actually care about our business, didn’t understand it - they just had a pool of people and they were trying to quickly hire them.

So we decided to fire everybody besides a few agencies, WorksHub being one of them. And honestly you were the most successful ones. We hired close to a dozen senior functional programming engineers via WorksHub.

The second one is the relationship we established over time. I got introduced to the founders very quickly. Also every recruiter that we worked with cares deeply about the relationship. We've worked with a number of people over the years that are consistent, and we never had a conversation like “Hey, we just got a new recruiter and this is not good for us, we need to switch gears.” Every person that we worked with tried to understand our business, was very receptive to feedback, and asked us about our culture and what we look for in successful candidates.

Sometimes, depending on the market conditions, you might be sending us more or fewer candidates. But I know that every time a recruiter from WorksHub sends a resume, I won’t push it back. Nine times out of ten, I'm pretty certain about their profile. Sometimes when I say “I had this concern about the candidate”, the recruiter will already say - "I had this concern as well, we already talked to the candidate about that".

Internally, culture is very important to us. Everybody says that, but we put as much care into our culture as top tier companies who care about it. To make sure that our values are clear, there is a clear interview process that's aligned to these values.

So it's very important that we're able to align our culture with WorksHub. It took time to understand what types of candidates fit our culture, but we already have a relationship for years now, so at this point, even with a change in recruiters and people coming in we consistently received candidates that are valuable, and that's not easy.

I always recommend you and advise my friends who I care about to use this service. I do strongly believe that you stand by your quality. And not everybody does that. This is proved by the fact that you practically build our entire team.

So my advice would be - make it a partnership. It can't be a relationship where a recruiter is the help and you're the boss, calling the shots, it needs to be a two way street. That's going to create the best environment. Ultimately it is a human game, so being good, nice, helpful and supportive to the people you work with is going to result in better service for you. Be very communicative about your needs and expectations.

We know it works. We’ve done it a thousand times.

Ready to see it in action?