How Rula hires quality candidates 80% faster

About Rula

Rula (formerly Path) connects people with behavioral health services through a network of over 10,000 therapists. Rula’s platform matches patients with exactly the right provider according to their needs, availability, and insurance accepted.

Natalie Lynch, head of talent acquisition, has grown the company from 10 employees to nearly 300, and into all 50 states.

Rula helps people get the support they need quickly at an affordable price, while allowing providers to focus on delivering care instead of paperwork. By reducing friction in the recruiting process, Natalie helps her team focus on converting better candidates faster.

The challenge

Finding engineering talent in a competitive market is hard. Everyone searches the same way in the same channels. As Rula grew, their pipeline challenge shifted from connecting with talent to identifying the best applicants.

When Natalie recently made the switch from Greenhouse to Ashby for Rula’s ATS, she embraced a more holistic approach to the talent tech stack.

Despite the switch, Natalie still sought a reliable pipeline generation tool, one that would help her engineering recruiters match the skills they required with the talent available. 

To continue scaling the company, Rula needed qualified people to build out the technology and the business. Natalie turned to Findem.

The solution

“Findem is the number one pipeline generation tool that we have,” she said. “Our engineering recruiters are using it for 100% of their sourcing.”

Unlike the early stages of the company, when Rula was a little known Los Angeles-based startup and couldn’t generate the necessary volume of candidates, Natalie is seeing plenty of talent at the top of the funnel. In addition, she can define the underrepresented groups that matter most to her at an admin level and automatically prioritize qualified candidates into diverse talent pools.

“I would say one of the blessings that we have right now is that it’s a hot market and we have a very attractive company,” she said. “Inbound for a lot of our teams is crazy high, but the quality is there.”

Precision searches powered by 3D data

Findem helps Rula to identify talent and quickly narrow the pool to candidates who will be most likely to find a high-growth tech startup appealing.

Thanks to Findem’s 3D data and attribute-based searching, the team can define the precise characteristics of the talent that is required and Findem’s algorithms do the rest. 

Rula can hone in on experience like the size and funding stage of previous employers, whether they were part of the engineering team through a successful exit, and even optimize the talent pool for diversity.

Within seconds, Findem retrieves well-matched candidates that tick all the boxes and deliver a balanced slate of candidates to the hiring manager. The Findem process is transparent and dynamic – enabling the Rula team to continually refine attributes and refresh the shortlist.

“The search functionality is still just insane,” Natalie said. “And it’ll be 1,000% better than any search tool out there.”

Recruiter efficiency and ease of use

Natalie’s engineering recruiting team has found success by including layoff lists in their search

“We always try to get in front of people who are not employed today,” she said. “Our goal would be to keep people employed versus shuffling talent around.”

Findem has layoff lists built into search, which Natalie calls a “gamechanger.” By targeting talent that matches her team’s qualifications and is actively seeking work, Natalie’s recruiters are making the talent pool that much smaller and more targeted.

“It’s the ability of my recruiters to spend their time wisely and create bandwidth,” Natalie said. “The fact that they don’t have to spend a disproportionate amount of their time sorting through candidates at the top of the funnel or managing candidates halfway through the process is huge.”

Once Natalie’s team finds qualified candidates, Findem automatically reaches out to highly targeted talent and delivers interested, interview-ready candidates straight to Rula’s recruiters. Since the candidates are already well matched to the open roles, the Rula team is able to close them quickly.

“Engineering hiring is difficult,” Natalie said. “Every candidate has 4-5 offers and Findem allows us to be more effective in getting to a ‘yes’.”

Saving costs on sourcing

“I was able to hold off on hiring a sourcer for a very long time because my team could source very efficiently using Findem,” Natalie said.

Findem’s integration with Ashby is creating even more time and cost-savings for Natalie’s recruiting teams, giving them access to data and analytics they couldn’t easily leverage before.

The outcome

Within just 4 weeks of deploying Findem, Rula doubled the size of their engineering team. They were able to hire 4x faster than before. This immediate success was the catalyst for the company achieving its growth goals. 

With Findem at the center of the talent stack, the time-to-fill open positions now averages 4 weeks from start to finish. This results in an incredible 70-80% acceleration. Recruiters have more confidence that they will be able to achieve their goals and offer hiring managers top talent to grow their teams. 

Findem has turned things around for the Rula recruiting team and delivered the volume and quality of candidates they sought. Plus, Findem is driving gender balance on the engineering team, boosting the response rate from female candidates from 5% to 28%. 

With Findem matching talent to critical roles, Rula will have more resources to match caregivers to those in need. A lot more people will sleep better at night now that Rula has a technology partner in Findem.