How HatchWorks Reduced LinkedIn Recruiter Spend By 61% and Time-to-Fill by 40% with hireEZ's Recruitment CRM

Over his double-decade career in Talent Acquisition, Trent Cotton has helped numerous enterprise organizations improve recruiting and business performance. Since 2018, hireEZ has been his go-to talent acquisition software platform to help him do so.
No matter where Trent went, he brought hireEZ along with him. In fact, he once told a CHRO, “You'll have to take it out of my cold dead hands,” when asked about removing hireEZ from his tech stack. Trent does not mince words, and his raw honesty makes him a unique industry trailblazer who demands excellence from himself, his team, and his technology.
Yet, changing team processes, individual recruiter behavior, and technology spend at a new organization is no easy feat for any leader. Here's how Trent made HatchWorks into a high-performance recruiting function supported by hireEZ.
High-Performance Recruiting Powered by hireEZ
As the Author of High-Performance Recruiting and VP of Talent and Culture at Hatchworks, Trent's role spans everything from “leader to recruiter to performance coach (and everything in between).”
His team leverages hireEZ's recruitment CRM platform for technical recruiting. The most common roles filled include:

Data Engineer 

Cloud Engineer

DevOps Engineer 

QAs Developer

Full-stack Developer

Front-end Developer

Back-end Developer

Before we dive into how HatchWorks leverages hireEZ, let's look at their team's challenges and the changes that led to success.
Challenges Using LinkedIn Recruiter
Unreliable LinkedIn Data
Unreliable data made it difficult to track success on LinkedIn. Trent explains, “Data integrity is important to me, and I don't trust LinkedIn's data. For example, we were doing a contract review, and a person once told me they influenced 165 hires on LinkedIn. That was 100 more hires than we made.'”
Role Backlog

When Trent took over his team, there was a backlog of 40 roles with an average time-to-fill of 60 days. There were a few factors that contributed to this backlog.

The first was an inefficiency in the search process. Trent explains, “Most of the time, the team ran the same searches through LinkedIn.” Since his team members didn't build pipelines for recurring roles, a recruiter would start a new search each time looking for talent.

Other contributing factors to this backlog included a lack of documentation and standardization of the recruiting process across the recruiting cycle. Those were all areas Trent was looking to fix.

Increasing LinkedIn Costs

On top of issues with LinkedIn data integrity and performance, rising costs became hard to ignore.

Trent explained, “LinkedIn increased our price by 34%. At that price, you would think their search ability would be top-notch. To me, there was no real value there.”

Unreliable data made it difficult to track success on LinkedIn. Trent explains, “Data integrity is important to me, and I don't trust LinkedIn's data. For example, we were doing a contract review, and a person once told me they influenced 165 hires on LinkedIn. That was 100 more hires than we made.'”

When Trent took over his team, there was a backlog of 40 roles with an average time-to-fill of 60 days. There were a few factors that contributed to this backlog.

The first was an inefficiency in the search process. Trent explains, “Most of the time, the team ran the same searches through LinkedIn.” Since his team members didn't build pipelines for recurring roles, a recruiter would start a new search each time looking for talent.

Other contributing factors to this backlog included a lack of documentation and standardization of the recruiting process across the recruiting cycle. Those were all areas Trent was looking to fix.

On top of issues with LinkedIn data integrity and performance, rising costs became hard to ignore.

Trent explained, “LinkedIn increased our price by 34%. At that price, you would think their search ability would be top-notch. To me, there was no real value there.”

Building Data-Driven Recruiting Strategies with EZ Insights
With a priority on data-driven recruiting, Trent’s team began using EZ Insights to build their recruiting strategies by understanding the talent market.
Trent explained, “Every intake call starts with me sharing my screen and running through Insights. It allows me to show the talent market, including skills and pay scales. When super specific qualifications or requests come in, I can return to my team and amend expectations when a strategy clearly won’t work based on the market.”
Sourcing and Engagement with hireEZ’s Recruitment CRM
With a recruiting strategy set from Insights, Trent’s team then starts sourcing and outreach in hireEZ. He explained, “I’ve always used hireEZ as a recruitment CRM, and that was one of the things I fell in love with.”
Once Trent established standards for his team’s recruiting process, his team filled 93% of the 40-role backlog in just two months. As a result, his time to fill decreased by 65% from 60 to 21 days total.
Trent added that by leveraging hireEZ’s email sequence campaigns, “my team’s engagement metrics and response time from candidates were much better on hireEZ than on LinkedIn.”
Reliable Recruiting Data and Reducing Time-To-Fill by 40%
hireEZ provided reliable reporting capabilities that helped Trent spotlight success and improve recruiting performance.
Trent explained, “I like being able to look at my team on hireEZ and see who was getting higher response rates, who was using the platform, how they were using it, and if it affected their hire rate. With LinkedIn, you can’t really do that or get that information. We’d then use hireEZ data to sell the platform to other recruiters saying, ‘You can make hires from other places than LinkedIn.’”
True to his word, Trent showed how hireEZ helped him hire faster than LinkedIn. Trent explained, “I had a recruiter reluctant to use hireEZ and asked him, ‘How’s LinkedIn working for you? You haven’t filled a job in 4 weeks.’ I took two of his jobs, used hireEZ, and filled them in two weeks.”
On average across the year, Trent’s team has been able to reduce time-to-fill by 40%.
A Strong Partnership For Years to Come
Trent and the HatchWorks recruiting team truly inspire us. Their dedication to excellence is second to none, and they ensure we are accountable for helping them perform at their best. We cannot wait to see our partnership grow stronger as the years go on.
About HatchWorks
HatchWorks is the US-based Nearshore software development partner combining local, high-touch service with the affordability and scale of Nearshore outsourcing. Built from the ground up, their Latin American teams have a 98.5% retention rate, ensuring no project disruptions for clients. Their proven Built Right Method increases speed to value and reduces cost throughout the software development lifecycle so clients achieve desired outcome faster.
About hireEZ
For nearly a decade, hireEZ has delivered global recruiting teams greater access to candidates with the world's first AI Sourcing solution. Today, hireEZ is the only recruitment CRM platform built for recruiters by recruiters. Empowered with industry-leading sourcing, analytics, and automation, hireEZ delivers talent so recruitment teams can successfully drive acquisition. For more information, visit hireez.com.
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