Hiring, much like sales, can be messy.
You’re juggling candidates, emails, and feedback. Most companies settle for applicant tracking systems (ATS) that feel like they were built in 2008. 🥱
But at Close, we wondered, “What if we skipped all that and used our CRM to build the team of our dreams?”
Spoiler: it worked.
I’m Maddie Tierney, Talent Lead at Close. I’m here to show you how we turned our CRM into a hiring powerhouse—one that keeps us organized, effective, and efficient.
While we don’t necessarily recommend using Close for a Human Resources solution, we found power in dogfooding our product and are sharing the tale to inspire your sales process.
Here’s how we use Close to hire smarter, faster, and better.
How My Team Uses Close for the Hiring Process
Most startups hire with intention, and that requires a lot of resources and energy to find the best people. When you have a small team, each hire has an outsized impact.
At Close, we relate to that. In the last year alone, I managed the hiring process for 250 candidates across various roles and sent more than 2,500 emails back and forth throughout those candidates’ hiring journeys. The team at large interviewed 580 candidates.
Keeping all that data straight meant we needed an agile platform that allowed our team to manage candidates collaboratively without hamstringing us into a prescriptive process.
The challenge was that most legacy tools aren’t purpose-built for this flexible approach; they’re either expensive and rigid in what they can offer (and are often built explicitly for large-scale organizations), or they’re not customizable enough to adapt to the quick adjustments needed within a startup-style environment.
In sales, you move prospects through successive calls, follow-ups, and touchpoints to determine whether or not they're a fit. The same is true for hiring. As a result, it’s critical to have the right tools to be creative and track what we need and how we need it, making our process more effective.
There are two ways new candidates can enter our pipeline:
- Inbound: Someone applies to an open role at Close. These candidates apply through recruiting software like Lever or Ashby. We use Zapier to pull those applicants into Close.
- Outbound: These are candidates we’ve identified as a potential fit for an open role. We reach out to them using automation and Workflows in Close, which are a way to automate a series of steps (like an email cadence, for example.)
Seeing a Single Source of Truth for Candidate Information
Once the data is in Close, we have the necessary context, which includes info like:
- Where the candidate came from
- What they wrote in their application
- Any previous communication with any member of our team, including if someone from the internal team referred them for the role
- Candidate’s contact info and location info
- Candidate’s LinkedIn and website, as well as what roles they applied for (and any roles they've applied for in the past
Using Close allows us to get very granular with the data. This means the candidate’s whole story is at our fingertips at every point during the hiring process. This context allows our team to come informed to interviews, understand the full picture of a candidate, and stay organized so nothing falls through the cracks.
Adaptability within the process is also key: We use Close’s customizable Statuses to show where a candidate is in the hiring process, which allows us to mark candidates as “applied” or “interviewing with senior leadership,” for example. This personalization means we can adapt these Statuses to fit our current process or change them as we continually improve.
Best of all, we can see all the information about a candidate summarized at the top of the page with AI-generated Lead Summaries. So, I need to check where a candidate is within the hiring process, I can see that immediately on one screen, with the highlights at the top.
Logging Interview Feedback and Notes
At Close, our hiring process is extremely collaborative and holistic. Each candidate is interviewed one-on-one as they progress through the pipeline. Every conversation has specific objectives and evaluates many facets of a candidate’s experience, including everything from communication style to subject matter expertise.
While this is time-intensive, it helps us hire the best possible additions to the Close team. Some companies prefer each interviewer to evaluate candidates in a vacuum, but that’s not how we’ve chosen to do things.
Our hiring philosophy is in-depth and outcome-oriented, and as such, it’s important for each team member interviewing a candidate to be able to review the notes and feedback from fellow team members who’ve already spoken with the candidate, getting as much context as possible upfront.
This is also important when you consider our hiring process isn’t quick (we typically see candidates move through our interviewing process over 30-90 days.) Keeping organized is a MUST.
To accomplish this, we use Custom Activities to track feedback in a standardized way after every interview.
It allows us to track:
- Interview Stage: This dropdown option lets the interviewer select which stage of the process this candidate is in.
- Outcome: The interviewer’s overall decision about the candidate. This is a dropdown option with six choices to indicate their opinion.
- Summary: This free text space allows the interviewer to add more details about what happened on the call and format it however they like. There are three questions to prompt them:
- Raw Call Notes: Another free text box where the interviewer can write notes during the call.
In addition to this Custom Activity, we use Notes in Close to track references, take-home projects, and other details. This is helpful as it keeps all this important data in a single, easy-to-access place that’s convenient across the organization.
Tracking Custom Activities for Candidate Feedback
We want candidates to have the best experience possible during the hiring process, so we track all candidate feedback to improve our process and overall experience. This feedback is usually unsolicited and given in a call or email. We can then pull this feedback into our Custom Activity.
This simple Custom Activity allows us to write what was said and then add the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). Tracking these in a Custom Activity means we can add them to dynamic lead lists with customized filters, which report on any trends within the dataset.
With this data, we can ask ourselves: How are our candidates feeling throughout the process? How do candidates for a specific department feel? From there, we can brainstorm ideas for continually improving the hiring process.
This is another example of how crucial it is to have the flexibility to define what matters to us and track what is valuable to the team.
Creating Smart Views for High-Level Tracking
Smart Views gives one-click access to your favorite searches and shows you only the leads (or, in my case, candidates) that fit the criteria you’ve set at that moment.
Here are some of the unique Smart Views I’ve set up in Close to make my life easier:
Role-specific Smart Views: Whenever we’re hiring for a role, I set up a Smart View that filters for that role and where the current Status shows they’re still active in the hiring process. With this, I can quickly see who’s in the pipeline for any role.
Today’s Interviews: This Smart View filters for all candidates with a scheduled meeting that hasn’t been canceled. This gives me a birds-eye view of the interviews going on today. (I also have a Smart View to see Tomorrow’s Interviews and Next Week’s Interviews.)
Today’s Feedback: If I want to review the interview feedback given today, I can check this Smart View, which filters to find candidate profiles with an Interview Custom Activity created today.
All of these are visible to the rest of the team, meaning any interviewer can also check these Smart Views.
I also keep track of my outbound efforts with Smart Views. I track all the candidates we’ve contacted and whether they’ve opened or responded to an email or booked a call with the team.
How Close Enables My Outbound Recruiting Workflows
Hiring professionals know that recruiting is a huge piece of the puzzle, and that’s where outbound comes into the picture.
When recruiting talent, I work similarly to salespeople tackling outbound sales: first, you have to find the people who fit, reach out to them cold with a thoughtful and sincere message, and hopefully get them to book a call!
Here’s How I Run my Outbound Workflows in Close:
First, I’ll research to find the right people for our hiring role. The Hiring Manager and I are working closely to thoroughly review every profile and ensure they’re a promising fit for our team.
I’ll typically find people on LinkedIn and use a tool like ContactOut to get their email addresses. Once found, I use Zapier to get all that info into a lead profile in Close. From there, their Status is Outbound-Queued, meaning I need to contact this person.
Next, I’ll enroll them in a Workflow. In Close, Workflows are automated flows that include emails, SMS, phone calls, tasks, etc.
Each role gets its own unique Workflow in Close. Our process is collaborative, and I’m working closely with the hiring manager, so new outbound candidates have already been green-lighted. From there, I use the Send As feature so that the emails to the candidate are sent directly from the hiring manager.
Here’s what a typical outbound Workflow would look like:
This is a piece of the recruiting puzzle where keeping organized in this way pays off: Can you imagine trying to manually keep track of multiple outreach email threads with possible candidates?
Keeping track of these conversations (with minor automation that we fully customize) means no threads are dropped with could-be candidates, and no communication slips through the cracks. It helps us maintain a full view of recruited candidates (and helps me maintain my sanity, too.)
Tracking Our Talent Pool
Close has been around for more than 10 years, and we’re focused on building a sustainable business. We have an advantage over other companies competing for talent. We’re not running out of runway and don't have fundraising challenges.
We have the privilege of thinking about recruiting in the long term. So, when we find a fantastic human we want to work with, but the timing isn’t good right now, we store them in our talent pool.
We use Custom Activities to track people who enter our talent pool. These might be referrals from internal team members, a person someone saw giving a great talk at a conference, or people we’ve interviewed who weren’t a good fit right now or ended up taking another job.
They’re not actively interviewing, and we’re not contacting them right now. Close gives us the flexibility to keep track of those people—and when we want to reach out again, we have all that context and historical communication stored in Close.
Final Thoughts: Staying Organized While Hiring and Recruiting
I’m a context-heavy person, especially when it comes to recruiting. I want all the info and to understand everything that’s happening. Through this creative use case, we’ve found ways to use our own product so the whole team gets the context we need every step of the way.
Speed is everything. This is true in sales and hiring—great talent gets snapped up quickly. With our approach, we can quickly surface the right candidates and reach them where they are with intentional, efficient messages.
It may be unconventional, but that’s just how I Close. 💅
Stay in touch with Close or me on LinkedIn — and, of course, see the recruiting process in action if one of our open roles suits you!
