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Mozart Data: Getting support on all aspects of recruiting
Mozart Data helps companies spin up a modern data stack — in less than an hour, without an engineer, and with just a bit of SQL. Their software helps teams connect their various data sources together into one analysis-ready warehouse. From there, users are able to export this data into the various business intelligence tools that might already be at their disposal.
Their mission is to easily consolidate and prepare data for analysis without any engineering. The company was formed in April 2020 and after raising their Seed round and graduating from Y Combinator, the team needed to quickly hire an all-remote team — at the start of the pandemic, no less.
The team needed to develop strategies to recruit beyond their network - without an in-house recruiter
Mozart’s Head of People Operations, Sofi Pechner, is responsible for the full gambit of the team’s people ops spate: recruiting, onboarding, coordinating and scheduling, HR duties, and more fall in her lap alone.
In the early days, as many as 3/4 of Mozart’s hires were friends and friends of friends – a great signal that the company’s mission and team was compelling and stood out from the pack.
However, when the team exhausted its network, the company needed to be able to reach a more diversified audience and build a recruiting infrastructure that would help them continue to scale in line so they could meet their goal of doubling team size within a year.
Here’s how Sofi was able to do this while partnering with Dover:
Key #1: Mozart used Dover to build their talent pipeline after they exhausted their network
As the only People Ops team member at the company, Sofi needed to be able to scale herself while meeting ambitious hiring targets: “Building hiring pipelines takes undivided attention – I couldn’t focus on recruiting unless I did it full-time, so I needed something like Dover to give me my time back.”
Sofi, through partnering with Dover, was able to tweak our native job descriptions or “personas” for the hires the team was pursuing, and use Dover’s sourcing technology to find best-fit candidates for their open roles. As candidates came in for review directly to Slack, the team was able to calibrate and re-calibrate on what skills, experience, and qualities they were looking for in a candidate, creating a continuous feedback loop that sped up the hiring process.
The team hired early members of their marketing and content teams – a Content Marketing Manager as well as a UI/UX Designer – and are expanding their Dover searches to include engineering, sales/BD, people operations, and customer analyst roles, as well.
“Building hiring pipelines takes undivided attention – I couldn’t focus on recruiting unless I did it full-time, so I needed something like Dover to give me my time back.”
Sofi Rechner, Head of People Ops
Key #2: Mozart leveraged Dover Concierge to supercharge their recruiting efforts
While Mozart used a recruiting firm successfully for a previous role, they felt it ultimately wasn’t agile enough to be able to scale for all of their open roles.
Instead, the company leveraged consistent check-ins with their dedicated team to build out a hiring plan for the year directly in the Dover app: the tool allows you to input hiring needs and timelines for the company at large, on a year-long or longer timespan. The plan prompts alerts and forecasts hiring timelines - this marks a reversal in the hiring plan teams are typically always behind on: the plan is accountable to you, not the other way around.
As the plan grew, the team moved towards a higher touch offering with Dover Concierge, which allowed them to receive additional support with scheduling, coordination and overall recruiting strategy, as well, without requiring a full time recruiting coordinator to come onboard.
Key #3: The team deeply customized their approach, using Dover Interviewer, Inbound, and Referrals
One of the keys to Mozart’s success has been their willingness to continuously revisit their recruiting infrastructure and make improvements as needed.
For example, the Mozart team leverages Dover Interviewer, which means they use Dover to complete first round phone screens, moving only the right ones through the funnel, faster. After reviewing their pipeline data, they introduced a set of custom questions and a light assessment at the beginning of their process to ensure they were keeping their Customer Support Analyst funnel healthy. Once they did so, they saw markedly less candidate drop-off:
“Working with Dover has meant we get support on all fronts, and from every angle of recruiting including sourcing, optimal channel usage, and interview best practices.”
Additionally, the team ramped up channels outside the realm of sourcing - including Dover Inbound (posting on various job boards and filtering applicants that come in based on the selection criteria you choose while creating a role) as well as Dover Referrals, which allows teams to review their collective LinkedIn connections to see if any are a good fit for their open roles.