How we’re growing our team at folk – using folk

Building a quality team is a long-term and ongoing effort. It requires building and maintaining relationships with talent over many years. At folk, we've been growing our team for almost 3 years and we've been using folk the entire time.

When growing a team at pace, you’ll be meeting with people and maintaining contact regularly, and you need a robust workflow to support these efforts. That's what folk helps us to do: build a scalable, personalized workflow to manage the contact data for each person we're looking to get and stay in touch with.

Our entire recruitment process, from sourcing to interview to onboarding, is managed in folk. Let's deep dive into how we do it.

Leveling-up our sourcing

Every potential candidate that we contact is logged in folk. It’s super easy, thanks to folkX, the Chrome extension. folkX lets us create contacts from LinkedIn, Gmail, or anywhere on the web, and import their profile into folk with just a click. It also detects existing contacts in folk that match a profile we are on, so we can avoid duplicates and see at a glance any past interactions with that person.

We collaborate as a team by leaving notes on contact profiles. This level of visibility ensures we can share knowledge, target the right people, and don’t double-contact candidates.

To build the most effective engagement funnel we use the Strongest Connection smart field in folk, which calculates who on our team has the closest relationship with a contact.

🪄Insider tip:

Combining folk with a messaging tool like LaGrowthMachine is highly effective. In 2 clicks through a CSV export, we're able to set up messaging campaigns across various channels, from the sender of our choice. It helps us raise engagement while doubling down on personalization as we can use folkX to craft a personalized icebreaker without even needing to navigate away from their profile on LinkedIn!

Creating an outstanding hiring experience

At folk we know that job applications and hiring processes can be demanding of candidates’ time, energy, and emotions. Therefore sharing honest and constructive feedback with candidates has always been a key principle to the hiring experience at folk. Most of the recruiting tools out there only enable you to send generic feedback.

When reviewing an application or sharing feedback after an interview, we fill out a custom feedback field in folk. When it’s time to reach out to a candidate, we use the Messages mail merge function in folk to share the feedback.

In Messages we already have an email template saved, complete with variables that are linked to our custom fields, meaning the email is automatically populated with the feedback we logged in folk. It’s quick and easy for us, and we get lots of appreciation from candidates for the detailed feedback.

🪄Insider tip:

Our application form is a Typeform that is connected to folk through Zapier. All new applications are logged in folk based on the job description, resume or LinkedIn profile and their answers to our application form. This way it only takes a couple of minutes to review an application and share valuable feedback, all within folk.

Following-up with candidates

With the pipeline view, each team member can check ongoing interview processes at a glance.

All interactions (interviews and email exchanges) are logged in folk automatically thanks to the integration with Gmail (also available for Outlook) so everyone on the team has visibility of a candidate’s interactions with us.

We also log all our interview feedback as notes on folk. This is especially important as most of our roles have multiple steps and involve several teammates. This lets us all keep track of our notes and feedback and best prepare the next stage in the recruitment process.

Maintaining relationships with our talent pool

In recruitment, timing is key, and building long-term relationships is crucial. Often we’ll pick up a conversation months, sometimes even years, later.

But in the meantime, we don't want to lose touch so we:

• log all our interactions to easily recall full context and make the next touch point thoughtful and personalized
• set up reminders in folk so we never forget to follow-up, and can ensure the best timing
• prepare email templates in collaboration with different members of the team so we can share news about folk through regular catch-ups

folk offers a complete end-to-end collaborative system for recruitment that gives us full transparency and the freedom to choose our own workflow without overwhelming us. Sure, we’re highly biased but we do love using folk to manage our entire recruitment workflow 😄

And you, which system are you using to manage your recruitment workflow?