Using Covey helped us find passive candidates who are more aligned with the profile we need. That created a competitive edge for us
CUSTOMER STORY
How Covey helped Zeal outreach passive candidates and speed up hiring velocity by 5X
Zeal helps companies build their payroll products. Like plug-and-play software, Zeal takes care of taxes, compliance, and payments so companies can focus on what matters to them - running their business and not worrying about payroll.
On top of Zeal’s easy-to-use payroll API, they are pioneering an all-inclusive tax engine to democratize a broken and cumbersome process. Zeal wants to provide accessibility to small, medium, and large businesses and help Americans get paid.
The Challenge
A fast-growing startup, Zeal was having difficulties with their top of the funnel for many of their open positions.
They raised a venture round and had 25 headcounts to fill in 5 months. The top-of-funnel roles that opened up ranged from engineering, product management, and operations and taxation. Up against a candidates’ market, Grace knew they had to find passive candidates to fill their top of the funnel.
Outcome with Covey
- The team sped up hiring velocity by 5X
- Greater involvement of employees in the sourcing process through Referral Network, yielding quality candidates.
- Iteration of outreach messages leading to the incremental increase in opened, replied, and interested rates from candidates
- Increased talent network activity and brand awareness
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Finding Gems through Covey’s referral network
Zeal found gems through Covey’s referral network. With the help of Covey's customer success team, Zeal ran a source-a-thon to gather top talent from the employees’ networks.
At this point, Zeal also embedded referrals into their onboarding workflow. Each time Zeal onboarded a new employee, they would send them a Covey invitation and get new employees on Covey.
While hiring for a product manager role, Covey’s referral network played a huge role, with Zeal some great candidates coming in for the product manager position. Since Zeal would reach out name dropping their current connection at the company, candidates started contacting the referrer and asked questions like, “Hey, somebody from your company just reached out to me. Can you chat with me more about the role?”
It was effective to have Zeal employees be part of the sourcing and recruiting.
Payroll Powerhouse
Zeal Highlights
Zeal’s API helps platforms build their unique payroll
San FranciscoLocation
40+Employees
Series AFunding
Zeal.comWebsite
Getting more effective with passive candidate outreach
Before Covey, the team was doing manual outreach on Linkedin.
When Zeal had to hire their first Lead Product Designer, the role remained open for a few months and became urgent. Manual outreach was not yielding enough volume of engaged candidates. Grace started using Covey to outreach passive candidates and connected with a candidate who wasn’t actively job searching at all.
Being a small team, Grace implemented a workflow where contractors helped source candidates, and she’d use Covey to outreach with drip campaigns and engage candidates.
The scheduled send feature has been a live-saver since candidates are more responsive at specific times. While she and her team might be sourcing candidates on a Monday morning, it’s unlikely that candidates want to read and respond to a recruiter outreach message on a Monday morning.
“Email scheduling has been a competitive advantage for the productivity of the recruiting team.”
Iteration of outreach messages leading to the incremental increase in opened, replied, and interested rates from candidates
Grace had two different outreach email templates for a program manager role.
She wrote one initially based on her intuition and another later through research on best practices. She had changed all the outreaches to be like that later iteration, imagining that she would have higher open rates or conversion due to the best practices article she read online.
After poking around in the reporting feature of Covey, she noticed that the one she hadn't spent much effort on had higher response rates. With that, she did a third iteration mashing the two together and was getting even better open rates and reply rates.
I like the reporting section of Covey so my team and I can review the results of our recruiting email campaigns and pivot where necessary to increase conversion
Building brand awareness for Zeal
With Covey, Zeal has been able to outreach more passive candidates within their network than before.
Whenever a recruiter connects with a passive candidate, they would say, “Hey, even if you aren't looking, let's stay in touch for future opportunities,” and put them in the “reach out later” bucket in the Covey workflow.
At the same time, they would go ahead and add them directly from LinkedIn on Covey’s extension on the side panel. So even if people aren't actively job searching, they get an impression of Zeal from the messaging, and Zeal can reach out to them in the future.
The Zeal and Covey partnership continues.
When asked about some of the things she loves most about Covey, Grace found that the support and product advocates at Covey are phenomenal and have made the experience super seamless and helped their company feel supported when they have questions.
Moving forward, Grace is excited to continue using Covey to uncover more gems and build out a great talent pool for Zeal.
“Covey is an easy-to-use sourcing platform that sits on top of LinkedIn. It was easy and intuitive for us to use the email campaign features and send emails to candidates.”