Little Black Book is a platform for discovering the best of one’s city. Allows users to browse through recommendations for the best restaurants, cafes, bars, events, and shops in their city. All the content is curated and created by local experts. Their idea is to push the right content at the right time and location to users.
The company has raised funding from IDG Ventures and others, and has a very strong user base and traction with more than a million users already.
A problem of mass resumes
We spoke to Dhruv Mathur, co-founder and product head at Little Black Book. According to Dhruv, the key challenges for him when it comes to hiring are first and foremost, attracting the right people who are a fit for his particular company and the work they do, and secondly, to find people with the right kind of skill. “Once these aspects are overcome,” says Dhruv, “then the pool of candidates actually coming in from which we shortlist and we speak with are usually a little bit more pre-qualified or better.”
Having tried various platforms in the past such as Naukri, Hirist and Hasjob, Dhruv is now primarily using Instahyre. The problem with other platforms, he explains, is the high noise compared to the signal.
Reaching the right people, fast
According to Dhruv, previously most of his time was spent in the initial stages of processing a candidate, explaining the company and role to them. On this front, Instahyre’s branding solutions have worked very well for Little Black Book. “One big differentiator is that Instahyre allows you to paint a picture of the company in a very accurate way and provides all the information upfront, leading to applications from candidates who are more excited about us,” says Dhruv.
Moreover, Instahyre’s recommendation algorithms allowed Dhruv to hone in on candidates with the required skill sets without the need to deal with larger numbers of irrelevant resumes. Elaborating on this, Dhruv says “from a comparison on skill set, we get a more targeted pool. The matching ability is better than other platforms, so we get a more likeable set of candidates. So people who have worked on specific languages as opposed to just being broadly frontend or backend developers.”
Hiring without the hassle
By providing recruiters with a holistic job search profile of a candidate, Instahyre is able to significantly reduce the time turnaround required to process a candidate. “With me being able to see key highlights up front of a possible candidate, it’s easy for me to quickly filter before downloading a resume and then figuring out, which is what I have to do no Naukri.”
Another aspect of Instahyre that has helped Little Black Book greatly is the ability to reach out to candidates with personalized messages, without the need to actually type the messages. Instahyre automatically generates highly engaging emails based on each candidate’s profile, leading to a 10x response rate as compared to platforms like LinkedIn.
At the end of the day, Little Black Book is able to reach out to a larger, more qualified pool of talent on Instahyre. “The support is also very proactive with the smaller issues or hacks that we need. So overall it's been a very good experience using it. For me it’s now second nature to just log on once a week do my work and be done with it and not be burdened which is nice as I don’t want to spend too much time on it,” says Dhruv.