The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Recruiting Teams

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Old below (landing page)

You need a systematized approach to identify, sell, and close the best candidates.

Coda helps teams gain an edge winning top talent.

The best recruiting teams are both aggressive and consistent about building a strong pipeline, with an emphasis on passive candidate outreach. They collaborate closely with hiring managers to research and map out the talent market, identify leading candidates, reach out, and pitch them. They don’t throw a job post online and just see what comes inbound.

They also build a sales-oriented recruiting culture, methodically training every recruiter and hiring manager along the way to be a phenomenal spokesperson of the company. After all, the best talent is often not looking for a job, and your recruiting team needs to convince those candidates that they’d be crazy not to consider this job.

Key Templates:

Centralized Offer Tracker

Closing Team Checklist

Pitch Certifier: tktk on the importance of building a great pitch doc and certifying everyone on how to pitch the company.

Compelling Recruiting Collateral: tktk on recruiting teams needing to have autonomy to create beautiful, polished content that highlights specifics on why the job/team are compelling. Assume your fluffy, marketing career pages won’t stand out. Ex. our design page, find other startups jobs page in coda as an example.

Sourcing Jam Template

Coda Offer Model

Make the right hiring decisions with comprehensive role kickoffs and evaluation processes that drive meaningful signal.

TKTK Sub bullet

Every hiring process is filled with a series of small but critical go or no-go decisions, from vetting resumes to evaluating interview performance. It will culminate in a hiring manager or panel trying to parse through a series of green and red signals at the end to make a final call.

Unfortunately, interviewing is a very imperfect science and humans are universally poor judges of talent. In fact, it’s common for many interviewers to make their conclusion about a person within the first 30 seconds to 1 minute of meeting them, and then spend the rest of the interview finding ways to confirm their views rather than challenge it. One of the best resources on this topic is Malcom Gladwell’s book,

Talking to Strangers⁠

The sound strategy to counter these traps is simple, though.

First, fill your interview process with work sample tests, or homework and interviews that simulate real-world examples of the problems they’ll be solving. TKTK Examples from 2-3 companies.

Next, pay closer to attention to interview signals that are truly predictive, such as references, work-sample tests, or a consistent track record of success in prior roles, and under-emphasize signals (both positive and negative), such as more traditional 1-1 interviewing loops.

Lastly, weight your signals appropriately. Most recruiting teams tend to weight signals sequentially. for example, if two candidates apply, one with a very strong resume, and another that barely met criteria, and after both candidates interview, the interview data is slightly in favor of the candidate with the weaker resume, avoid the trap of looking at the most recent data. Instead, look at all of the data together, and weight the data based on what is most significant.

Key Templates:

Role kickoff template

Interview test from another company that they’re willing to share, published as a coda doc

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Neutral Court⁠

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Home Court⁠

- build a Coda doc

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Leadership prompt⁠

- coda

Reference template - running great ref checks

Stack ranking template to make better hiring decisions. >> should this be running an effective roundup?

Kill the busywork and manual updates with a centralized tracker.

Teams rely on automated recruiting hubs that act as single-sources-of truth and allow for more async decision making.

The most proactive recruiting teams realize the steep cost of manual updates and busywork. To counter this, they create scalable tools, like pipeline trackers that run on auto-pilot, and automate as many parts of their recruiting process as possible. This allows them to invest those cycles elsewhere, like being more strategic with their hiring partners, spending additional time selling high-value candidates, and proactively building the strongest pipeline.

Keep track of all the candidates that you have in process so your team can manage and stay on top of the hiring pipeline. You don’t have to gather and update this information manually from your ATS, email, docs, slack, etc. Instead use a centralized tracker that will integrate with your team’s tools and bring it all into one place, giving you all the live details you need to manage multiple roles. Our team connects Greenhouse and Google Calendar to a Coda doc to pull in a view of open applications, current stage, interviews, and notes for any roles that we are hiring for - and use this to inform how things are going. This will allow for data and analysis on what part of the funnel requires tweaking, where blockers might be occurring, and give your team a live time update on the status of scheduling and scheduled interviews.

Key Templates

Lightweight ATS - for teams starting out, ditch the spreadsheets, keep everyone on one page.

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@Harry Dannenbaum⁠

- add the AI template from the contest

Simple Pipeline tracker (assume no ATS integration) > what’s a great pipeline meeting look like without an integration

Candidate Interview Guides - prep your candidates for success in the most scalable way possible

Greenhouse sync >

Candidate Pipeline Tracker Template⁠

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Old Below (sourcing & selling)

Coda plays a vital role in empowering recruiting teams to effectively sell their company's vision and close the deal.

Because of how easy it is to create beautiful, polished assets in Coda, recruiting teams no longer reliant on marketing teams to help create compelling recruiting collaterals. They can now independently build compelling pitch docs, interview guides, and more. These docs can include things like background information, company videos, product demos, and more. This elevates the company brand and wows candidates.

The best recruiting teams realized selling is a team sport. A candidate may end up interfacing with 10+ employees during a recruiting process, and it’s important for each one of those people to be exceptional evangelists of the company. The companies that did this best did not leave this to chance. Instead, they built content for their teams and then trained/certified their team members through practice sessions and role-playing. When everyone is on the same page and well-equipped, it fosters a unified and compelling front to prospective candidates.

Top recruiting teams also made sure not to leave any stone unturned when it came to closing candidates. When candidates received an offer, the best companies rolled out the red carpet. Top ideas included:

Having team members from around the company, leadership, and even board members send excited emails to the candidate

_____

____

Doing this for every candidate manually would have been cumbersome, but this Coda template made sure hiring teams could craft their ultimate closing strategy in a template, and manage it through an easy checklist when an offer was presented.

Lastly, top recruiting teams went the extra mile to make sure candidates were well-informed and knew how to properly understand and value the company’s offer. Offer models in Coda helped demystify the often complex compensation structures. By offering a clear and easily understandable way to think about their total compensation, candidates are equipped with all the information they need, presented in an accessible manner. This transparency not only fosters trust but also ensures that candidates can make informed decisions with confidence.

How to get started.

1. Elevate your recruiting brand with Coda.

First, ensure you have a strong company pitch deck. Coda docs are great for this because they allow you to create polished assets that are organized and easy to navigate. Here’s an example that includes company mission, team background, role information, etc.

Continue to further your recruiting brand by creating other compelling assets, such as team background, job descriptions, information guides, and more.

2. Certify your team to sell.

Yes, your recruiters are your front-line sellers to candidates, but it’s not enough to just train them. Ensure your full hiring panel is well-equipped to be a strong seller of the business.

3. Be obsessive when it comes to closing.

Work with your team to identify what types of activities will maximize your chance of getting a candidate to say yes. Then, use that as your blueprint for closing. This Offer Tracker ensures you take all your best shots, and teammates can collaborate on notes to make sure they are selling based on what the candidate cares about the most.

4. Transparency helps both sides win.

Make sure candidates are well-informed when making such an important decision.

Template Work List

Template Work List

Name

Link

Need

Notes

Who

Done

Hiring Sync Tracker (with no ats integration)

Ready to go

Open

Hiring Sync Tracker (GH)

Ready to go

Open

Headcount & Interview Balance Load Tracker

Ready to go

Open

Recruiter candidate tracker

Polish & Update

Open

Sourcing Jam

Polish & Update

Open

Role Kick Off

Ready to go

Open

Candidate Champion

Build

Open

Meet your Team (see ‘design @ coda’ for reference)

Ready to go

Open

Closing Team Checklist

Ready to go

Open

Reference Template

Ready to go

Open

Pitch Certifier (ramping a recruiter to pitch)

Polish & Update

Open

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Stack ranking template

⁠

to make better hiring decisions. >> should this be running an effective roundup?

Build

Open

Exercise template (Interview test from another company that they’re willing to share, published as a coda doc.) We currently have home court and neutral exercise templates.

Build

Open

Hiring Designers > Portfolio Reviews

Build

Open

Referral Program

Ready to go

Open

Passive Cand Outreach

Build

Open

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4 Reasons why the best recruiting teams use Coda.

Old below (landing page)

You need a systematized approach to identify, sell, and close the best candidates.

Coda helps teams gain an edge winning top talent.

Make the right hiring decisions with comprehensive role kickoffs and evaluation processes that drive meaningful signal.

TKTK Sub bullet

Key Templates:

Kill the busywork and manual updates with a centralized tracker.

Teams rely on automated recruiting hubs that act as single-sources-of truth and allow for more async decision making.

Key Templates

Old Below (sourcing & selling)

How to get started.

1. Elevate your recruiting brand with Coda.

2. Certify your team to sell.

3. Be obsessive when it comes to closing.

4. Transparency helps both sides win.