Forge: Supercharged sourcing for senior roles

Forge is a marketplace for private company stock. Compared to a decade ago, companies now wait longer to IPO, making a solution like Forge’s increasingly in demand. With Forge, employees can sell a portion of their shares without having to wait years to take advantage of their company’s success. Forge also allows private and institutional investors to invest in top pre-IPO companies that they wouldn't have access to otherwise.

In early 2019, Forge raised an $85M Series B and continued to grow rapidly. Their San Francisco headquarters soon grew to about 60 people.

To support their growth, Forge had aggressive hiring goals. They wanted to lay a strong foundation by filling some senior roles, including a Senior Product Manager and Staff Backend Engineer.

Great senior candidates weren’t applying to Forge’s open roles

At Forge, like most other companies, high-quality senior candidates rarely apply online. Even if someone found Forge’s job listings and applied, it’s exceedingly rare that they would meet Forge’s high bar.

Forge needed to hire quickly, but they weren’t getting enough candidate flow from their traditional methods.

They began working with Dover to fill these critical positions.

Key #1: Extensive calibration with the hiring managers

When it comes to senior roles, every company has different expectations and needs. That’s why Dover takes the time to get calibrated with every team to ensure they’re connected with candidates they actually want to speak with.

To find out what was important to Forge, Dover’s partnerships manager, Anvisha, had two in-depth discussions with Forge’s head of engineering and head of product. Since Anvisha has experience as a product manager and engineer, she was able to closely understand everything from their Scala-based technical stack to their agile development process to help them develop their ideal candidate profiles.

Next, Dover shared sample candidates with Forge’s team over Slack to calibrate on the roles even further.

“As the sole recruiter on the team, I was spread really thin across a ton of hiring priorities. I was really excited that Dover took the sourcing piece off my plate so I could focus on speaking to great candidates.

Dover integrates with our Slack and our ATS, so communicating with them was really easy.”

Nicholas, Senior Recruiter

Key #2: Collaborating with the Talent team

Before contacting Dover, Forge’s head of people, Anne Mueller, and their senior recruiter, Nicholas Bruno, were the only two people managing Forge’s hiring process. Given their many responsibilities, spending a lot of time on sourcing and outreach wasn’t feasible.

Dover was able to take work off their plate while collaborating closely with them to make sure their priorities were always aligned. They communicated via a Slack channel and the Applicant Tracking System, Lever, so they were always on the same page.

Dover quickly reduced drop-off in Forge’s pipeline by recommending that they start the interview process with a hiring manager pitch call instead of a coding interview. The new process ended up working better for senior candidates.

Nicholas and Dover collaborated to seamlessly hand off candidates — including identifying which should be funneled directly to the hiring manager and which should go through a recruiter screen.

Result: 11 interested candidates per week, 2 hires in 2 months

By working closely with Forge’s talent team, Dover quickly helped them reach their hiring goals.

Dover generated great candidate flow and Forge averaged 11 new interested candidates per week. Within a month, Forge had onsite interviews with candidates Dover had sourced.

Forge’s first hire was a staff backend engineer with over a decade of experience whose enthusiasm, relevant skill set, and experience were a perfect fit for the team. Soon after, they hired a senior product manager who had 7 years of experience, including in FinTech.

Dover enabled Forge's recruiting team to focus on connecting with candidates and holding meaningful conversations, rather than having to build a candidate pipeline. As a result, Nicholas and Anne were able to move candidates through their interview process faster, decreasing their time to hire.