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Swile formerly Lunchr, is a French startup founded in 2016 by Loïc Soubeyrand. The company offers a Mastercard smart card that allows you to dematerialise meal tickets and pay at all payment terminals.
In addition to meal vouchers, the offer has been extended to include employee benefits. Swile is also developing an application, which is intended to offer employees a number of features to improve their daily life in the company.
After several successive fundraisings €11 million (2019), €30 million (2020), €70 million (2021), €200 million (2022) Swile has grown rapidly from 50 to over 500 employees in less than 3 years.
Faced with these challenges of hyper-growth, Swile's recruitment teams have put in place a powerful strategy to recruit.
Widely convinced of the benefits of employee referral in such a period of growth, Swile wanted to rely on employee referral as a strategic pillar for their recruitment.
Any identified needs?
Julien Maillot, Hiring Tech Manager at Swile, looks back on the implementation of Trusty, their employee referral solution since 2 years now.
After an experience as a generalist recruiter at Coca-Cola and a first role as a tech recruiter in the scale-up Kapten (formerly Chauffeur Privé), Julien was recruited as the first tech recruiter at Swile. One year later, he is now Hiring Tech Manager, and manages a team of 5 tech recruiters.
Julien has always been very sensitive to employee referral.
"For me, a company should have at least 20% of its recruitment coming from employee referrals."
However, he was often confronted with obstacles that were difficult to overcome without tools:
Julien himself had taken the initiative to build a whole "home-made" process when he was at Kapten. When he arrived at Swile he discovered Trusty, and immediately felt the difference:
"I very quickly saw the difference of having experts come up with a solution to increase the employee referral tenfold versus my homegrown solution that I was tinkering with and for which I was the only one who really understood what was going on."
Trusty, as well as being a simple tool integrated with internal tools, has freed up a considerable amount of time for processing, centralizing, tracking and running our employee referral program efficiently.
"Trusty is a HUGE time saver! For recruiters everything is centralized in our ATS and for employees everything is within their preferred tool, Slack. The Swilers finally have access to our jobs in 2 clicks from their Slack, they can refer profiles in less than 10 seconds and then have an automated follow-up of their candidates on their Slack. In short, on the recruitment side, we receive much more qualified candidates and this represents a significant time saving in our sourcing activities"
No need to keep track of recruiters, keep referrers informed or even run the employee referral program. Trusty does it on autopilot.
"Before I had too much to do by hand. Naturally, there were many more mistakes and oversights, even with much smaller volumes. When an employee refers, he or she puts his or her "credibility" on the line. If the follow-up is not up to his expectations, the mistake will be paid dearly in the long run..."
Before the referrals and more generally the inbound strategy topic was pushed to management in 2019, the situation was as follow:
"Before Trusty, the employee referral channel was managed informally. There we no real processes in place, which did not make it easy for employees to get involved and made their work considerably heavier. It was almost impossible to centralize referrals sent in all directions (verbally, on slack, paper CV, email, sms ...) and to ensure an efficient follow-up."
Even though it is always complex to set up a new tool, the Trusty teams provided seamless support during the first weeks of the launch and throughout the contract:
"It's always tricky to implement a completely new process. It is difficult to assess the performance of this kind of solution before testing it, especially as we had very little data on this channel. Nevertheless, we have had excellent feedback from our employees who have been very quick to pick up the system. Clearly, the Slack, the Lever integration and the support and investment of Trusty's operational teams were decisive in our choice."
Over the past year, Trusty allowed us to hire between 3 and 8 people every month thanks to employee referral. Our sales teams are the big winners, with almost 35 new recruits.
On the Tech side, Trusty was the most qualitative channel for candidates with a 16% conversion rate on referrals.
Not surprising in a context of talent war where these profiles are very difficult to reach. Employees are undoubtedly the most effective and fastest way to attract, hire and keep them with us.
<span>"Over the course of a year, we have received more than 500 referrals. That's huge! [...] almost 50 people have been hired via Trusty this year, which is really significant. [...]</span><br><span>On the tech side, the conversion is impressive, 16% of the referred candidates were hired. Employee referral with Trusty remains by far our most qualitative source of candidates saving us precious sourcing time."</span>
