Covey vs Dover: A Recruiter's Review

👋 Hi, I’m Grace a startup Lead Recruiter with over 5 years hiring technical teams in the Bay Area.

I’ve founded my own career coaching business and love staying up to date with new recruiting trends. My goal in this article is to share my experiences with the aim of helping other recruiters find better ways of hiring especially in the start-up space. 💪

🔎 Sourcing Woes 

For context, for the past few months, I’ve been taking on a lot of new roles and responsibilities and it was getting increasingly difficult to find time to source candidates for my hard-to-fill roles; like early-stage engineers, product managers, and executive roles. At times, I would have time to do bursts of sourcing and then after a few weeks the funnel would run dry up (which is not ideal), so I really wanted to find a better way to find top candidates for Zeal. 

With the current AI trend, I started geeking out about its applications... When I was looking for new sourcing vendors I was inching towards trying out AI recruiting tools as they promised great results – and this was a very attractive offer as the solo recruiter for my company. 

The two roles I wanted to try out were two in-office roles for an early-stage Engineer and a Senior Product Manager with a payments background.

These were particularly tricky roles for me to source since they were in-person and since we are a startup it’s not just the core technical skills we source for, but also startup experience and strong cultural alignment.

After several weeks of research, I narrowed in on two AI recruiting vendors I wanted to try out - Covey and Dover. 

🥸 Setting the Stage

These are the two AI-sourcing tools I tried out: 

🔺Covey Scout 

🔺Dover Sourcing Autopilot 

The onboarding process was different for each tool.

For Covey, I filled out an intake form that outlined a list of questions about the role we were trying to fill, and then afterward I met with a personalized Customer Success Rep who asked additional questions so that Covey could ensure they had the right profile details. Then we would have weekly check-ins to review alignment with the candidates the AI tool was sourcing and what we wanted to change or adjust.

For Dover, I input my credit card information and then had access to their platform where I filled in some basic information (similar to LinkedIn Recruiter boolean search). Dover was very self-serve where you had options to review profiles before the AI tool emails were sent out, but it was recommended that we put it on auto-source to save time. 

💨 Speed is Everything 

For me, speed is everything, I want to see results and to see them quickly. 

Dover gave me phone calls and results within a few days of using the platform whereas Covey took about 1 week to see candidates scheduled. 

💎 Quality over Quantity 

In recruiting, sometimes I forget that it’s not just about the volume of phone calls and the number of candidates in the funnel but rather finding the right fit and that one candidate is what we are all aiming to achieve for our companies. 

Dover: I found that after a few weeks, I noticed that I was having trouble refining the profile and many of the candidates who were interested were candidates that had already applied online or were very clearly not the right fit; even with several changes to the profile, the tool just couldn't pick up the right profiles.

Covey: While Covey took an extra week to see candidates, once the candidates did arrive - they were more aligned with the target profile than Dover’s candidates. 

🦄 My Personal Experience

Price

• Covey has a credit-based system that allows you to determine how and when you want to use the AI on a monthly basis based on what's needed from the business.
• Dover has a pay-per-candidate model, at first this was an attractive model on our start-up budget, but in the end, we paid more for Dover than Covey. 

Support 

• Covey has an embedded Customer Success Rep who helped us navigate the onboarding and literally took most of the work out of sourcing - which was awesome!
• Dover is more self-serve, I did work directly with their PM for this AI Recruiting Tool, and they provided support, but I felt that I was just relaying bugs and challenges I had with the self-serve platform rather than getting better-refined profiles from this support model.

🤔Concluding Thoughts 

Within one month of using Covey, we were able to hire an early-stage Engineer who had worked at one of our direct competitors and was a great culture match! 

While testing out these two AI-sourcing platforms; Covey and Dover, there is a clear winner in my mind from onboarding to getting on-sites with candidates in a shorter amount of time, to overall lower cost per hire, and customer support – Covey is the clear winner. 

If you are working in Talent and Recruiting these days I would highly recommend you check out Covey’s Scout, not only because the AI tools work, but you’ll have a partnership with a great organization, with people who truly care about their clients and it really shows, I can’t recommend them enough. Also, if you've tried any other AI Sourcing Tools - hit me up; I’d love to learn more about your experiences.