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Panther: 12 hires in 6 months
Panther helps modern security teams build world-class detection and response pipelines using code and automation, developer-friendly workflows, and big data primitives. Their mission is to make security monitoring fast, flexible, and scalable for all teams.
This year, Panther raised a $120M Series B (at a unicorn valuation!) and needed to accelerate hiring in a world still reeling from the pandemic.
Old methods of recruiting weren't working in a newly saturated startup environment.
Joren McReynolds, the VP of Engineering at Panther, outlined how the old model of reaching out to 20 people on LinkedIn as a VP and expecting 5 people to respond was long gone.
Unique perks are now ubiquitous. Almost every startup is flexible and remote-first, increasing the pool of potential candidates by the thousands. In turn, this also means that top candidates can receive dozens of recruiting messages and emails daily.
In order to stand out, Panther needed to personalize and send high-quality outreach, and zero in on the type of candidate they thought would be successful on their team.
However, these efforts are time-consuming and difficult to do at scale. In order to grow rapidly, Panther needed to automate these aspects of hiring while maintaining a personal flair. That's where Dover came in.
Key 1: Using Dover for scalable, repeatable roles
When it comes to any role, every customer has different needs and expectations of what high-quality looks like. That’s why Dover takes the time to get calibrated with every team to ensure they’re connected with candidates they actually want to speak with. When Panther started using Dover, they were hoping to find multiple candidates to build out their teams.
For each role, Dover automatically and continuously calibrates each search by assessing the candidates that are approved and rejected in Slack. Additionally, each customer has an Engagement Manager who can re-calibrate searches based on hiring manager feedback. A continuous feedback loop means that over time, a search continues to provide even higher quality talent without any adjustments by the hiring manager, making it easy to grow and scale a department quickly.
“Once we have the playbook for a hire, it's very easy to rinse and repeat. Dover gave us so many good people in a week I had to tell them to turn it off.”
Joren McReynolds, VP of Engineering
Key 2: Spreading Dover across the organization
Once Panther got their first hire, Joren made sure every leader was aware of the efficiency of using Dover to source, email, and schedule interviews with candidates. With plates already full with other priorities for a growing team, recruiting didn't need to take hours away from more urgent tasks. This helped Panther to continue to scale and make the hires that they needed in such a short amount of time and allowed not just product and engineering, but design, sales, customer success, support, and IT to benefit, as well!
Key 3: Dover moved much faster than a recruiting agency
One of the qualities of the Dover product that appealed to Joren was the ability to automate the more time-intensive aspects of a hiring manager or recruiter's job, most notably:
1. Crafting high-quality, personalized outreach at scale. As stated earlier, top-quality talent is receiving dozens of emails a day — showing that you've done your research about a particular person's background can make your company stand out in a sea of emails. Plus, personalization goes a long way, potentially increasing the number of interested candidates by 20-30%.
2. Handling initial phone screens and scheduling first interviews. Dover solves both of these problems with efficiency, and at scale. When spinning up a role, the app autogenerates an initial email, and each candidate receives personalized, custom sentences about their background and interests. This increases response rate and gets more interested candidates in the pipeline.
Additionally, candidates are approved right in Slack. Once a candidate is approved, Dover handles initial phone screens and schedules initial interviews. With this flow, candidates progress through the pipeline much faster than they would with a recruiting agency.