How Boulevard creates a stellar candidate experience

About Boulevard 

Boulevard is a vertical SaaS company that provides fintech and scheduling for the self care industry. They help salons, spas, and medical spa providers focus on delivering a great customer experience with a scheduling and payment platform to drive business results.

When Travis Baker, Boulevard VP of Talent Acquisition, wanted to uplevel the candidate experience for hiring, he started at the top of the talent acquisition funnel. By using data and automation for search, hiring manager coordination, and outreach, recruiters had more time for the personal touch. They can sell top candidates on Boulevard as the best company for their career. 

“How do we reach anyone on the planet with the right skills for our open opportunities?”, said Travis.

Broken sourcing, broken recruiting

“We wanted to differentiate Boulevard as an employer brand throughout the talent lifecycle," said Travis. "A stellar candidate experience makes people feel valued. We wanted them to feel special, and to feel wanted.”

The traditional sourcing process does the opposite. A broad match search generates a pool of candidates that takes time and effort to validate. Recruiters worked in different, disconnected tools and had to sync with hiring managers using Google Sheets of candidates. 

Everyone was frustrated. Recruiters bounced between tools. Hiring managers waited for results. The best candidates slipped away. Recruiters spent time in qualifying interviews to remove candidates from the talent pool instead of prepping top talent for hiring manager meetings. 

“Talent acquisition is not efficient and just not that much fun for anyone,” said Travis. “We wanted to move the profession forward, past the transactional mindset of recruiting. By applying data integration and AI technology to the top of the funnel of the talent acquisition problem, we could focus on the human touch at the bottom of the funnel.” 

Travis set out to find a sourcing aggregator with better search capabilities and more automation. He discovered Findem when an introduction to Findem’s CEO Hari Kolam turned into an hour-long conversation about the future of talent acquisition. 

Discover hidden talent and curate talent pools

Findem’s precision search provided immediate success for Boulevard. Findem’s 3D data expresses people data and company data over time. When someone worked at a company, how they grew, and the stage of the company have become searchable attributes instead of time-consuming research projects. 

“The profiles surfaced in Findem are richer, and 3 dimensional. That means we can make better decisions, and have more confidence that we are reaching out to the right people,” said Travis. “Then we can pull out all the stops to make the hire happen.” 

Gina Blair, lead business recruiter, put Findem to the test with a director of payment operations role that had stumped the team for months. With Findem, Gina was able to use 3D data attributes such as “has SaaS experience” and “has startup experience.” She set a list of targeted companies where she knew the best candidates might come from, and found talent she could not find any other way. 

“The first slate generated with Findem hit the mark, and we made the hire in a matter of weeks. We created a candidate generation engine that we couldn’t manage with any other platform,” said Gina.

Boost efficiency and speed hiring

Findem enables the team to manage talent pipelines from internal and external candidates all in one place. With multichannel search, they can shortlist talent from their ATS, CRM, and outbound sourcing, then prioritize outreach. Here’s how it works. 

Recruiters create a search in Findem, then notify the hiring manager when the list is ready for review. Hiring managers have 1 business day to go into Findem where they review and rate profiles. 

The top rated candidates go into an automated outreach sequence. Candidates who don’t meet the mark can be added to talent communities to be nurtured for future opportunities. Gina uses the input to further refine the search and improve results.

“The turnaround time with hiring managers showed right away how efficient using Findem was,” said Gina. “We were able to send outreach ‘on behalf’ of the hiring manager, and saw a 2x improvement in response rates.” 

Findem brings together advanced filtering, multichannel search functionality, and advanced outreach, all in one place. Instead of managing spreadsheets and tracking down feedback, Boulevard recruiters have more time to engage with top talent and win them over to Boulevard. 

Strengthen hiring manager collaboration

The talent team at Boulevard is building trusted partnerships across the business where hiring managers work in lockstep with recruiters. 

“The quality of candidates that we’ve been able to identify and engage has massively improved with Findem," said Travis. "Executives and leaders across the organization are amazed and pleased with the candidate profiles being uncovered.”

Findem’s Talent Data Cloud helped Boulevard create a collaborative candidate review process between its recruiters and hiring managers. By optimizing recruiting workflows to focus everyone’s time on engaging with the right talent.

“I can have much higher level conversations with hiring managers and candidates, because we’ve done the calibration up front," said Gina.

Next steps

Findem quickly proved its value to Boulevard. Travis made the decision to reduce seats in LinkedIn to invest in Findem’s multichannel approach to talent acquisition. 

As Travis sees it, time to fill will no longer be an issue in talent acquisition. Companies will know the people in their talent pipelines, before they need to hire them. And people in the talent pipeline will have Boulevard on their shortlist of companies to work for. Findem will help Boulevard leverage AI and automation so recruiters and hiring managers have more time to win them over. 

“Findem will enable a small company like Boulevard to operate like a large company. We will be able to use AI to create a candidate generation engine and build candidate pools. When we are ready to hire, we’ll know who to hire," said Travis.