Josh Carter is the lead talent partner at 9fin. In this blog he discusses how he worked with the engineering team to ensure 9fin’s hiring process was candidate-centric and representative.

I joined 9fin at a time when the business wanted to greatly expand our engineering team in order to speed up product velocity so that we could achieve our ambitious company goals, faster.

This was a high volume recruitment process run to tight deadlines. To ensure our process was efficient, I worked closely with the people and tech teams, all the while prioritising the best candidate experience possible. Against this backdrop we also wanted to increase representation within our tech teams.

Here’s how we made that happen.

Representation: changing our targets

Historically, our engineering hiring process has been focused on recruiting for specific skillsets and engineering backgrounds. But when you’re tasked with hiring over 30 engineers, you need to adopt a different approach.

It’s less about hiring an individual, and more about demographics, team structure, and varied capabilities — all while maintaining the high standard of product delivery we’ve come to expect from the engineering team.

We saw this as a huge opportunity to be proactive about building the team we wanted and one of the factors we prioritised was diverse sourcing.

Shifting the gender balance

At the time, female employees made up 17% of our engineering team. We wanted to improve this for two main reasons:

1. Variety of thoughts, insights and opinions in the hiring process. Our engineers have a lot of ownership of the work they do, so we wanted a diverse range of thoughts and opinions influencing the decisions being made at the business.

2. Establishing role models. Gender diversity is an impactful goal but it’s also important to ensure that we have that balance across the organisational hierarchy. This means more women in leadership and senior engineering positions.

This felt like a great opportunity to really make a difference with our hiring efforts.

Making intentional decisions

With our target in place we decided to be intentional about what we were looking for, and our hiring practises had to reflect this. The healthier our candidate pipeline looked, the higher the chances of seeing that representation in the end results.

We didn’t want to approach this at a surface level — rather we wanted to really dig into where the representation was lacking, and how we could be genuine about making a meaningful impact.

1. Offering training opportunities. We trained a larger group of engineers to conduct interviews, so that candidates would see our diversity reflected throughout the process at every stage. We also ran trainings on unconscious bias, which helped the business approach candidates in a fair and equitable way.

2. Making meaningful changes to our policies. The business launched several initiatives, including our enhanced parental leave support, 9fam, to encourage working parents to apply and join a business that placed family and health first and prioritised flexible working.

3. Collecting data from a range of sources. We wanted to make sure our hiring pipeline was diverse, so we collated data from a variety of sources — this included our own careers page, market research, LinkedIn, Cord, Otta and other tech-focused hiring platforms that made it easy to refine our searches.

At the end of the project, 36% of our hires were female, taking the female representation in the team to 27%, up from 17%.

We didn’t have any senior female representation in our engineering team before this hiring push — now we have 23% female representation at this level, including two female engineering managers.

There’s always more we can do, but we now have a platform from which we can build and keep improving.

A candidate-focused hiring process

After figuring out how to get the right people into our pipeline, we wanted to focus on the candidate experience itself: how could we make our application process better and faster?

A high quality candidate experience not only speeds up the process — it builds trust throughout by ensuring transparency and clear communication on the next steps. This was something on which we didn’t want to ever compromise.

Here are a few highlights from the experience.

Bringing the team along for the ride

Success for the talent team equals success for the business — so we wanted to get buy-in on our hiring process from the start.

The most impactful way we did this was getting the engineering team involved — instead of the candidate only communicating with the hiring managers, they had interviews with a panel of engineers of different seniorities and with varying backgrounds.

We also had a group consensus approach to decision-making, as opposed to leaving it in the hands of a single person — and these small changes had a huge impact. It felt more like a team effort instead of something that sat solely with the talent team; hiring became everyone’s priority, which made it easier to deliver results, and faster.

It also improved the candidate experience — they had an opportunity to interact with various people, in different interview formats, which opened the space up for genuine conversation, as opposed to a structured Q&A.

Measuring success with data

Going into this project with targets in mind made our work much more tangible, which was important in a business that valued a numbers approach to everything we did. Some of the metrics we tracked included:

• Time-to-hire — the time taken from applying to a job to receiving an offer. Before our engineering hiring project this number sat at 64 days. After the project, it was 27 days — which was impressive, especially given we were also looking for senior hires, which typically take longer
• Time-to-decide — the time it takes from a candidate receiving an offer to accepting and signing. We wanted to improve this without setting deadlines or adding time pressure on candidates. On average, candidates took just over a day to decide whether they wanted to accept the offer, and 100% of those candidates accepted the job

It’s a testament to how the team was delivering a positive candidate experience, in that people were bought into 9fin before they had even joined.

We’ve taken big steps to improve our hiring — but it’s only the start, and there’s always more we can do to keep raising the bar.

Getting acknowledged for a great process is awesome. And completing a hiring project successfully is fulfilling — but it’s also really exciting to see how we can find future 9finners who are buying into our mission and vision.

Learn more about our values, our culture, and what it’s like to work at 9fin on our careers page.