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eSpark Learning: Developing a URM hiring strategy
eSpark Learning was created to help students succeed in school and in life. As Ray Lyons, VP of Product, eloquently put it: “The education system in the US is one of the last places where kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds get a fair shot.” eSpark’s curriculum is student-centric, differentiating typical K-5 instruction with fun games, videos, and creative challenges, to meet students’ unique learning needs and help districts achieve stronger outcomes.
In early 2022, eSpark raised a $25M Series B and was ready to scale, but didn’t have an in-house talent acquisition team to help streamline and run their process. As an early-stage company, Ray knew that the key to their success would be candidate volume and efficiency. He realized he needed a scalable and simple solution — that’s where Dover stepped in.
Key 1: Highly personalized outreach at scale
Although recruiting can be a tedious process with lots of moving parts, sometimes it simply comes down to volume: the number of interviews you hold is directly correlated with how many emails you send out or applications you receive from qualified candidates.
Ray knew top technology candidates receive dozens of recruiting messages and emails daily. In order to stand out, his team’s outreach would need to be highly personal and well-written in order to attract responses. He was in luck: Dover’s platform sends highly personalized outbound outreach at scale, resulting in 20-30% more interested responses.
With this task off of his plate and in Dover’s hands, Ray was able to focus all of his attention on interviewing candidates who were genuinely interested in what eSpark was all about, and were qualified for the job.
“Personalized emails have been a game-changer for us when it comes to breaking through the noise and standing out. We’ve seen a lot of responses that say: ‘Hey, I get a lot of these, but I had to respond because you took the time to really look at my background.’”
Ray Lyons, VP of Product
Key 2: Slack integration
With Dover’s Slack integration, Ray and his team approve or reject interested and qualified candidates directly in the app where they’re already working. For each role, Dover automatically and continuously calibrates each search.
With a continuous feedback loop, each search continues to provide even higher quality talent over time without any adjustments by the hiring manager, making it easy to grow and scale a department quickly.
Key 3: Prioritizing diversity with the click of a button
Since engineering and product teams are typically white and male-dominated, Ray and the eSpark team wanted to develop an equitable organization early on in their growth. In order to do so, they needed to ensure they were speaking with and reaching out to folks from diverse backgrounds.
In Dover’s app, Ray is able to ramp up searches specifically for underrepresented groups with the click of a button, making their efforts to prioritize DEI more than optical. By building these into their hiring process early on, they’re ensuring that a focus on equity and diversity will be a key component of their talent acquisition strategy from 50-150.
Key 4: Leaning on Dover as a sounding board for recruiting strategy
Before eSpark had a dedicated talent team, each hiring manager had varying levels of experience with recruiting, hiring, sourcing and interviewing. By leaning on their dedicated account manager, Ray was able to learn tips and best practices for each persona, in addition to using the in-app benchmarking data to compare himself to other companies of their size.