Referralboard
A Slack app that saves companies thousands in hiring costs
On January 6th, I entered Leaderboard into Pioneer - an online competition where people around the world enter their projects. Each week, participants vote on the projects they believe are making the most progress.
Leaderboard has steadily been moving up the ranks, but after 6 submissions, we've finally cracked the top 10!
Today we took our first (small) step in sharing Leaderboard with the world!
Before launching publicly, we wanted to get Leaderboard in the hands of early adopters. Launching on Betalist exposed Leaderboard to the first batch of people outside of MakeSpace.
In the 48 hours since being featured on Betalist we've had 125 people visit https://www.slackleaderboard.app and 6 people sign up for early access.
The concept experiment turned out to be a huge success!
Over the last 6 months, with our manual leaderboard program, we increased employee referrals 10x and saved a few thousand dollars on hiring costs.
Seeing the success, I decided it was worth taking the time to automate the program using software.
It took a few weeks, but we finally have a working v1 of Leaderboard the Slack app.
This MVP allows employees to submit referrals directly in Slack and immediately earn points on the leaderboard. Each week the app automatically posts the standings showing which employees have earned the most points.
In the next few weeks I'd like to add to the design and built out a website to showcase the product.
I have an hypothesis that we can increase employee referrals and decrease hiring costs using gamification.
I believe employees will submit more employee referrals if we set up a leaderboard where they can compete based on how many referrals they submit.
Before building a product, I want to validate the concept. Over the last few days I've worked with our recruiter to set up an experiment at MakeSpace.
We are beginning this experiment using a manual process whereby employees can send referrals to our recruiter to "earn a point". Each week we'll post standings in the form of a weekly leaderboard.
This experiment will be conducted completely manually.
I'm a Product Manager at MakeSpace - a full service storage technology company.
I joined right as we raised a $30M round of funding which immediately made hiring a focus for the entire team.
Employee referrals are well-known as the quickest and most cost effective way to hire, and yet I realized that we had never hired an engineering candidate through a referral.
This gave me the initial inkling for a concept like Leaderboard.
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