Circular

Collaboration is at the very core of what we do at Circular. Recommending candidates amongst recruiters is what got us started and we have been focusing more on fostering that community feeling. We launched recruiter profiles and our own reputation system as a first hint of what Circular is becoming.

Today we are going a step further and doubling down on creating the best recruiter community.

At Circular our core mission is helping recruiters and hiring managers improve candidate experience in their recruiting processes. You can invite and recommend remarkable talent you’ve met and, if they decide to join, we’ll start sending them interview request by top startup and tech companies.

We believe that improving your candidate experience is tightly tied to your employer branding and your ability to keep attracting top talent in a very competitive market. Additionally, candidate experience is the one metric that next-gen recruiters are using as their main KPI with their companies management.

However, measuring candidate experience is complex and brings its own challenges. At Circular, we want to fix that!

Build your profile here if you are already using Circular –or signup instead!–

Building two-sided marketplaces is particularly difficult because you have to find a value proposition and build a product for both sides –recruiters/hiring managers and candidates in the case of Circular–.

On the talent side, since Teo and myself have been product and tech candidates ourselves, it was easier. We had experienced what was broken with recruiting and started Circular with huge changes in the candidate experience right from the moment we defined the proof of concept: curated companies and offers, replacing job applications with interview offers, no messy CV uploads, moving communications to existing messaging channels, and a clear focus on a more humane and personal customer support. That positioned Circular early-on as a high NPS platform in an industry were satisfaction is, well, not-that-good. And we are just getting started.

Traditionally, many companies have had opaque salaries and compensations in their job offers. It’s very frustrating for both companies and candidates in recruiting processes. “How much should I be paid?” or“How much should I pay for this position?”are some of the questions we get asked a lot.

At Circular we ask all offers to provide a salary range, so, with hundred of startups using Circular, we have enough data to shed some light on the market. This post started out as an internal analysis, but we figured it would be useful to have it publicly available for candidates and recruiters.

Last week we officially launched Circular, where recruiting meets the circular economy. We are a private community where companies refer candidates they love but can’t hire. For people open to switch jobs, we provide access to curated opportunities in over 200 startups. Also no CV nor job applications, just lay back and wait for interview proposals. We just launched 4 months ago but startups like Spotahome, OnTruck, Cabify or Carto are already hiring through us.

We also want to make the hiring experience not suck. We figured we should start setting a good example out of our own recruiting process.

Since we’ve closed our first pre-seed funding round with 7r Ventures, we’re looking to add a Full Stack Engineer to the team that will help with coding and moving Circular forward with new features and a solid architecture.

Four months ago we launched The Hiring Circle from within Vernon, our consulting firm for startups, around the idea of scaling talent recommendation amongst a community of startups.

We have been following a very lean way of iterating on the product, the idea and the business, and we’ve been brutal about proving hypotheses and discarding features and paths that didn’t work, always with simplicity as the main moving force. We even re-used the Vernon brand, with its yellows and blacks.

Before the summer, in “The Hiring Circle, one month in”, we explained in detail the results of our first experiments and our first numbers. We also pledged to share our path to building the product and the business, so here we go.