Paraform

Harmonic’s team recently tripled their hiring speed, going from 1 hire/quarter to 1 hire/month. They also 6x-ed their quality candidate pipeline. All without paying an upfront retainer. How? By partnering with Paraform. Harmonic’s investors and customers make up all the household VC names you can think of. They’re scaling fast, and needed exceptional engineers to match that growth. Soham Kamat, Harmonic’s Head of Business Operations, knew what the company needed to build. He just needed to find the right talent to build it. Last quarter, Soham made a bet with Harmonic’s head of sales. Could the company generate $1 million in net new sales by the end of the quarter? Or could Soham hire 4 engineers first? The loser would buy the winning team a Michelin-starred dinner. Can you really hire as quickly as you scale? Turns out, you can. Harmonic hired 4 new engineers last quarter – with Paraform recruiters Clint Tankersley, Ryan Poole, and Nick Kimball helping land 3 of those 4 roles – AND secured $1M in net new sales. Congrats to Soham, Max, and the team on both milestones! To learn more about Harmonic’s story, check out the link in comments.

🥳 We hosted a Carnegie Mellon University alumn event at the Paraform office! It was great to reconnect with old friends and make new ones! Thank you Miranda Nover, Kevin F., and Namrata Banerjee for being amazing co-hosts! Shoutout Kishan Patel and CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship for helping this happen. If you’re a CMU alum (or not 🙂) interested in startups - let’s chat! We’re hiring across the board at Paraform. Lunch or Dinner on us - email me at jeff@paraform.com

This recruiter made an additional $24k on Paraform this month while working his full-time agency job. And he didn’t need to pull nights and weekends to do it. Nick Kimball filled a Staff AI/ML Engineer role at Harmonic this month, logging on to Paraform in between his long-term roles to source talent for interesting companies (it’s his favorite part of the job.) For the Harmonic role, Nick submitted just 2 candidates. And one ended up being an ideal fit. While many recruiters build a full-time career on Paraform, or use it to scale their agencies, recruiters like Nick can use the platform to earn while doing what they love, in their own time, without sacrificing their current job. To learn more about Nick’s story, check out the link in comments.

🚢 Introducing: Suggested role requirements & questions to help you speed up role setup on Paraform. The auto-generated role requirements and screening questions are based on: • Past successful, similar roles • Similar positions at your company View these suggestions whenever you add role requirements or recruiter questions, from the role dashboard under ‘Role setup’. Add the suggested requirements or questions directly, or edit as needed. This feature can help you quickly create more comprehensive job listings and improve candidate screening based on similar successful roles.

"I was wrong about Paraform,” a recruiter told us after his third placement, making $76k this month. Here’s why: While it’s easier than ever to ‘spray and pray’ with candidates, David Gold takes a ‘slow and hard’ approach. He wants to dig deep and build relationships with candidates. He’s extremely deliberate about the people he submits to each role. He’s not going after as many placements as possible — he’s going after aligned placements that lead to long-term success. It's not fast. It's not easy. But it works. So when Paraform came along, promising speed and efficiency, he was skeptical. How could his high-touch method work on a fast-paced platform? Turns out, it works even better on Paraform, because the platform connects him to clients he’d be best suited to help. He’s placed 3 roles so far. His "slow" approach actually gives him a head start — when a role opens, he’s ready with deeply vetted candidates who are a great match. Technology won’t replace recruiters — it’ll make them better. David proves this. To learn how, read our blog post linked in comments!

Are you working with both Paraform and non-Paraform recruiters? 🚢 You can now add external recruiters to your role dashboard on Paraform: • View all recruiter activity in one place. • Maintain existing payment structures with external partners. • Easily invite both internal and Paraform recruiters the same way. To add both Paraform and external recruiters to a role, click ‘Add recruiters’ from the recruiter tab of your role dashboard, or ‘Add’ > ‘Recruiters’ from the top right of your nav bar. This release makes it easier to manage all your hiring partners from a single, centralized dashboard.

Why Palantir Technologies alumni are great at founding impactful companies: • They've solved hard problems at scale. • They know how to build products enterprises & governments actually use. • They've seen firsthand how data can transform industries. We’ve posted about ex-Palantir founders before, but here are even more that can call themselves part of the ‘Palantir Mafia’: Alex Arjun Dhillon is building the future of content intelligence at Outtake. Outtake is automating cybersecurity & legal workflows for some of the world's most recognizable organizations by tackling gritty problems in identity, authenticity, and multi-modal AI. Anneli Scopazzi founded Boulevard Recruiting. After scaling teams at Palantir and Figma, she's partnering with both startups and VCs to build out early teams. John Doyle founded Cape, a privacy-first mobile network with secure 5G/4G coverage nationwide. The mobile carrier also blocks hackers and spam. Youssef Rizk and Dimitris Nikolaou were colleagues at Palantir. They went on to found Wondercraft (YC22), an AI-powered audio creation studio for brands and creative teams. Mihir P.  founded Overstand Labs (YC24), a cross-selling platform for enterprise companies. Their AI product has perfect awareness of all your product features and customers, to ensure no revenue is left on the table. Steve Heitkam co-founded Hence Technologies to help companies manage legal risks from geopolitics. Hence helps firms establish efficient legal processes that support smarter decision-making over time. Nick Noone co-founded Peregrine, a platform providing real-time data integration and visualization to help public safety agencies make better decisions. Shaun Springer co-founded Archetype Labs to transform how businesses build custom software. They help companies create tailored software with their AI-driven, no-code tool without the steep cost of custom solutions.

75% of the candidates Sachin submitted on Paraform have been interviewed. He thinks getting candidates interested is half the equation. Here’s how he does it: After expanding his recruiting agency to the US, Sachin noticed a pattern. The best US candidates all care about the same things. It’s probably not what you think: 1️⃣ Don't just pitch the role. Pitch the vision. The vision can matter more than job descriptions. Where will this company be in 5 years? The best candidates are being bombarded by recruiters day in, day out, so recruiters have make sure the company they’re representing really stands out. 2️⃣ Talk numbers (and not just comp.) Top talent cares about goals and traction — share the funding stage, revenue targets, and other metrics they’re trying to grow or hit. 3️⃣ Fit, growth, and impact can trump cash. Though salary is important, candidates often care more about progression opportunities and finding the right culture fit. Know the company culture because you’re their spokesperson. Top candidates can read a job description themselves to figure out what they’ll do. They want to know how far they’ll go if they join a company. Share these 3 things with candidates before they talk to a company and watch the response rates rise!

This recruiter stopped doing business development. As a result, he 10x-ed his client base. It may seem like something isn’t adding up here. But that’s because Sachin Bagri, founder of Leap Room, found a way to connect with companies hiring in his niche at scale. Sachin is on Paraform. He was one of our earliest users — he signed up before we raised funding, when it was just Jeff and I. He joined to see if he could get a few clients to grow his business. Today, he’s working on 15-20 roles each week on Paraform. And 75% of his candidates getting interviews — his candidate-focused approach is clearly working well. Sachin now spends all his time on what he loves most: connecting with the best talent and helping them level up in their careers. “Paraform is solving one part of the equation for recruiters, so we can focus on what we’re best at: finding great candidates. We immediately have access to more roles and can get more people hired.” To learn more about Sachin and his story, check out our blog post: https://lnkd.in/gYAxA84S

🎉 Sachin Bagri