Every other week, we share Ruff Notes - a newsletter featuring product updates, news from our community, and a curated list of tech and recruiting articles that we handpick from around the web.
Company rankings are by far the most popular segment of Ruff Notes with the lion’s share of clicks and shares. Over the last few years we’ve ranked dozens of companies that gave our candidates a great interview experience. Let’s talk about how and why.
Underdog.io's mission is to support candidates and companies by providing the tools and information that they need to make informed decisions about where to work and whom to hire. We simplify connections between candidates and companies by building technology that encourages human conversations, minimizes recruiter spam, and curates cohorts of companies and candidates that share similar values.
Our commitment to humanizing the hiring process presented a clear challenge: how do we reward companies with great recruiting processes and incentivize other companies to reform their processes to meet candidate needs?
Company rankings allow us to publicly reward companies who prioritize the emotional experience of our candidates by sharing their success.
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Our company rankings are based on two main criteria:
The connections between candidates and companies are entirely dependent on how often hiring managers and in-house recruiters on the platform reach out to candidates. Because of the importance of company outreach, we give priority (and higher rankings) to companies engaging in more conversations.
Additionally, the candidate experience is at the core of how we operate. Every week we invite all active candidates to take a survey and tell us about their experiences with companies on the platform. Companies that have made an especially positive impact on the candidate experience are typically mentioned at least once in the survey responses. We exclusively rank companies who have been called out by candidates in these surveys.
In order to maintain equity and spread the love, we also limit how often companies are shared to once every six weeks.
We created a scoring system based on the criteria above and share companies who rank in the top 3 of all companies. Most highly ranked companies initiate more than 5 conversations a week, and earn multiple positive candidate mentions. Ties are broken with a manual review of company outreach messages.
Ruff Notes is sent to 22,000+ candidates, hiring managers and in-house recruiters across the Underdog.io network. We maintain an average 51% open rate and 3% click rate. Company rankings command the hero position on the page consequently drawing the majority of clicks on each newsletter. In the last year alone, company rankings have sent over 6000+ unique visitors to the companies that have been ranked in our top 3. Underdog.io candidates also rely on the social proof of company rankings to gauge their receptiveness to company outreach.
Basically, our company rankings are free and easy publicity to benefit your team’s recruiting efforts and marketing goals.
This one’s easy. Use the platform and maintain a positive candidate experience. The more candidates your team speaks to and leaves a positive impact on, the higher your chances of both securing the right hire and getting ranked in our top 3.
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