How Colonies Cut Hiring Times from 45 to 28 Days with Teamtailor

Founded seven years ago, Colonies has always sought to reconcile tech and real estate.

Their mission? Facilitate access to housing while dusting off rental real estate through turnkey co-living solutions.

What sets them apart is that they have integrated the entire value chain: they search for properties for their investors, then their teams take care of the architecture, design, and construction, all the way through to delivery.

They then take charge of marketing and management. Today, the company employs around 100 people.

We met Romain Delebecque, Chief People Officer at Colonies. Before joining the Colonies a year and a half ago, he held similar positions at American start ups. He has always supported companies in these structuring phases, where choosing the right tools and processes are essential to business growth.

Understandably, efficiency is Romain's priority, as demonstrated by his experience with Teamtailor.

Choosing an ATS

In the beginning, like many companies, Colonies's main problem was that they didn't have a tool dedicated to hiring.

Not only was it difficult in terms of employer brand visibility and their ability to attract talent, but also in managing the candidate experience. Everything was done manually. The reason for their search for a dedicated ATS solution was a particular period when they knew that their recruitment needs would increase drastically. As such, they felt the need for a tool that would enable them to accelerate their hiring processes without having to hire a recruiter to manage only the administrative part.

Thankfully, Romain was familiar with candidate management solutions. He looked into several of them, Teamtailor included. He turned to Teamtailor because it was a solution that best matched their needs as a growing company. There are a lot of tools out there that were either too cumbersome or too costly.

With Teamtailor, Romain only needed a few minutes to show hiring managers the essential functions, and that was all it took to make them autonomous in their work. This is one of the things he appreciates most, even today. Colonies didn't want to have to call in an army of experts to explain how things worked. This is a huge advantage in terms of internal adoption of the solution.

The multi-diffusion aspect was very important for Colonies. Outbound requires a lot of resources that the company didn't necessarily have. Nevertheless, they had a real need for visibility. They appreciate the fact that Teamtailor is integrated with a wide variety of free and paid job platforms to achieve this visibility.

The ability to create a quality career site very easily was a real relief for them. When it's this easy, it's rarely this qualitative. This showcase quickly bore fruit, and they decided to concentrate solely on it, brining Colonies a level of employer brand visibility they've never experienced before.

Onboarding in Record Time

Romain is no stranger to the world of ATS, and had warned us from the outset that he wanted to get things up and running quickly. He and his team took 24 hours to configure everything they needed to get started, with Teamtailor's Success and Support teams on hand to answer any questions they had to ensure a successful implementation. In just 4 days, Colonies was ready!

The company has a team of three HR people, with the number of hiring managers rising to 25 at full hiring speed. So, there are quite a number of people using Teamtailor day-to-day, and they're happy about it. These teams had never worked with other platforms before, but they've noticed a real difference in the way recruitment is carried out.

For Romain, it's really the all-round aspect of Teamtailor that makes it such an interesting tool. In recruitment, there are a lot of partners to manage, internal and external. It's very practical to be able to track and collaborate with them all in a single tool. If a tool doesn't save him time, he's not interested. The time recovered thanks to Teamtailor is now allocated to spend more time with the candidates and investing in their hiring experience. That's the whole point of this business.

Features first

What Romain likes best about Teamtailor is that it's very intuitive and welcoming. This may seem strange to those who have never tested it, but there's something particularly positive about Teamtailor. The functionalities make the tool incredibly user-friendly.

The collaborative aspect is also very important. As we said, there's no need for training, things just happen naturally - simply because the tool works well. There's no need for endless e-mail exchanges, and no more loss of information since all communications are centralized in Teamtailor.

One of Colonies' biggest successes has been the attractiveness of their career site. According to their analytics, they have weeks with over 3,000 visits, even though they only offer a maximum of ten jobs at any given time.

They have also observed very high conversion rates during certain periods. Last year, they received 3,000 applications in the space of 4 months! They doubled their conversion rate with much less effort than before. In terms of hiring funnels and time-to-hire KPIs, that's great news! Plus, with a very active talent pool, Colonies doesn't have to look too far to find top talent.

In terms of recruitment processes, the tool has enabled them to “re-professionalize” their practices by developing interview kits and scorecards. They've had these in the past, but they were rarely used, and without a centralized tool, it was easy to lose track of notes and candidate answers.

If he had to choose his favorite feature, it would logically be the Smart Triggers automations.

It's what saves them the most time and has really changed their daily lives. The time spent managing email exchanges with no added value is now used to spend time with candidates. What's more, with this feature, he no longer has any delays in recruitment.

In terms of functionalities, Romain also highlighted the ability to make appointments from within the tool, thanks to the integration of everyone's diaries. Being able to do this as a team to organize interviews is particularly practical.