Alongside

Our team has been using Alongside since it's early iteration as Qimple so we've had the chance to use the product as it's grown in features and refined its user experience.

If you don't want to read the wall of text below, TL;DR - Hiring for a start-up is never easy; you're not going to relinquish control to external recruiters, and finding the right fit is important. Alongside allows us to stay in complete control of our external hiring, letting everyone up through to exec management spend their time connecting with prospective hires to find the right fit rather than sifting through resumés. If you're handling your hiring in-house, doing it with Alongside is a must.

Our story:

We used Alongside (formerly Qimple) to hire our first non-founder employees with great success in mid-2015, and then used it once more to hire another round of team members in mid-2016, again with great success (5 roles, almost 2000 applicants, concurrently). The caliber of local, regional, and international team members we've been able to hire has been astounding, and put a lot of that onus on a high-contact hiring process supported by Alongside's tools.

Our executive team, individual division managers, and key stakeholders were brought into the hiring process for each potential candidate as needed - Alongside made the organization of candidate information, the capture of internal notes and feedback from the team, and the management of the ongoing hiring pipeline straightforward yet powerful.

My biggest caveats in hiring for complex, technically-savvy roles that require strong team skills is that there's a massive requirement to "get it right" the first time; strong people have strong personalities, and multi-functional teams need to gel. Team members left tech darlings and Fortune-500 companies, relocating halfway across the planet, to work with us. Our hires have all been high-stakes, and using Alongside has minimized the friction inherent in a high-contact process that sometimes required upwards of 12 separate screening calls, informal conversations, strategic discussions, etc. for an individual hire. Alongside allowed us to get the hiring backend "right" the first time, to curate postings in the best locations effortlessly, and use our time to qualify and connect with prospective hires as efficiently as possible.

If you're handling your start-up or small-business hiring in-house and you're not using Alongside , you're simply wasting your own time.

Simplicity with creating and posting jobs, within our budget and excellent support.

It's been great using Alongside for a couple of our open positions - the build quality is solid, and UI/UX is top notch - customer support is also super helpful and quick. Our only complaint is pricing for startups like ours who aren't advertising on third party job boards - ie. feels like we're paying to simply have a place for our job postings to live (without marketing them). That being said, we're a startup, and so we totally understand that we may not be your target market :)

Alongside is fun to use. It's easy to create a posting and share it. But the most value is in being able to see all applications in one place, rank them, sort them, share them with others, etc. And the customer support is fantastic also. Their team always checks in on how I'm making out with a posting, suggests different job boards and listens to any feedback that I provide.

Alongside made my life as Director of HR easier.... from writing postings and then publishing them in the electronic world using a simple pick menu; for collecting and cataloging resumes in one database to allow for timely feedback from my team; to communicating with my candidates throughout the recruiting process. The Alongside Team provided great customer support and have always been open to feedback on how to improve their offerings.