Homerun has taken the pain out of hiring new staff at TNW

Hiring new members of staff here at TNW used to be a painfully slow process. It involved setting up online forms, pulling together spreadsheets and generally being inefficient. We recently started testing a new service called Homerun, and I can safely say that I now actually enjoy the process of choosing new staff.

Once you’ve got your account set up, Homerun lets you create a new job vacancy with a few clicks. You can customize the fields applicants have to fill in, and add role-specific questions if you like. Once the vacancy is published, you advertise the job however you see fit, pointing anyone interested to the Homerun-hosted application form.

LinkedIn integration makes it easy for applicants to add the time-consuming stuff like education and work histories without them having to upload a resumé. In fact, the interface advises you not to even give the option for uploading a resumé when you create the job, in the name of making assessment an easier and faster experience.

Once it’s time to rank the applicants, multiple team members can give each one a rating out of five and add comments. A leaderboard is created that you can work from to send out rejection letters (template-based, or individually composed if you prefer, right from the interface) and progress your favorites to the interview stage. You can’t actually conduct interviews via Homerun but once that’s done, you can mark applicants as having been given a job offer and, finally, hired.

Homerun is the product of Netherlands-based Thomas Moes and Willem Roosmalen, who discovered the pain points of the recruitment process while running a jobs board for the creative sector. It’s aimed at small-to-medium-sized businesses (think of it as a more lightweight alternative to Greenhouse) and after a free four-week trial costs €19 (around $21) per job listing per month – in other words, it’s very cheap.

➤ Homerun