Most hiring today follows one of two models: WFH and location agnostic, or centralized and in-office.
By investing in centralized regional hiring and a WFH model, we generated hundreds of applications with less than $100 in ad spend, achieved over a 95% offer acceptance rate, and reduced time to proficiency to under 30 days while ramping a team of over 50 full-time support reps. Our savings so far is over $100,000 compared to a standard operation. Here's how going deep instead of wide worked for us.
The traditional work from home model indexes on width. The benefit of hiring at-home employees across all 50 states is the huge, diverse talent pool. The challenge is simple: competition. Every work from home employer is competing with every other work from home employer.
The traditional in-office model indexes on, well, tradition. Everything we know about managing in-office teams is tested and proven over time. The challenge is morale. There's a real cost of commuting and additional implied costs to the time away from home.
Choosing to exclude the vast majority of qualified candidates is scary. But just like any startup knows how important it is to have a narrow ICP, employers benefit from thinking about how to re-size a market to be a big player, regardless of size.
The model comes down to two attributes:
- Limit hiring to one market. In our case, a 3-county region of Southern Oregon.
- Permanent work-from-home.
The local component lets us build community, match our employment benefits to the needs and wants of the local population, and build network effects like an employer brand.
The work from home component allows us to differentiate from other healthcare employers, who are based out of clinics, practices, and hospitals.
Tactically, look at the difference in marketing strategies for open roles:
| National | Single-Market |
|---|---|
| Job Boards | Job Boards |
| Social Media - National | Social Media - Local |
| Advertising - High CPM, Competitive | Local colleges & trade schools |
| Community Events & Organizations | |
| Local Media (Newspaper, TV, Radio) | |
| Advertising - Low CPM, Less Competition |
Most employers — including us — will get all the applications they need from broad-based job posting. So why bother doing anything differently?
Here are the benefits to us so far:
- >50% referral rate (referred employees see 3x the tenure of cold applicants in support roles)
- $100 total recruitment and job marketing budget
- 100% training graduation rate
- <30-day ramp to proficiency, due to experience and enthusiasm from employees
Put simply, our model of being a local WFH employer saved us at least $100,000 while launching the company, and that's based on the low-end estimates from the Society of Human Resource Management for hard costs from opening a requisition to completing onboarding.
Since we're an outsourcing company, those savings are delivered to our clients as value through more direct spending in productive resources and cost reduction.
Our employees benefit from more efficient spending, too. Front-line employees drive support org outcomes. Investing a higher percentage into outcomes turns cost into investment. Lower attrition rates require smaller recruiting teams, which means two things: more funds available to provide wages, benefits, and perks to front-line staff, and the talent that used to go into recruiting can now be developed into roles that are more impactful — process improvement, AI/automation management, training, and more.
Isn't this all just over-explaining something that already exists? Don't plenty of companies hire in their HQ location but have staff work predominantly from home? Not really. There are two models that make up the overwhelming majority of strategies: "come to the office" or "work from anywhere."
We're making a very strong case that a third option has all the strengths of each and fewer of the weaknesses.