SeedLegals

The context

“The way the recruiting industry works is for the most part misaligned with the way London’s startups actually want to grow and their team and change.”

Who are SeedLegals?

“SeedLegals is the fastest way to close your next funding round, build your team, incentivize them with share options, and manage your cap tables. So basically it’s a one-stop platform for everything you need to get investment and grow and scale your company on the legal side. We’re now about 150 people and growing rapidly, and loved by 35,000 plus UK companies and also growing internationally.”

We asked Anthony Rose, CEO & Cofounder, the following:

What specific hiring challenges were SeedLegals facing before finding Move?

“Hiring people is always difficult. How do you find people? How do you interview them? How do you make sure you’ve got a pipeline of great people and the cost structure.

But I’ve always really disliked the pay per hire model for two reasons.

Number one, it’s really expensive.

And number two more fundamentally, I think it encourages the wrong way of working.

In the London startup scene, there’s no such thing as hiring for life. So why would you enter an arrangement that makes it really expensive when people change jobs?

What I like instead is the concept or the mission and you hire people for a mission. And when the mission ends, maybe you can find another mission within the company, and if not great, you go your own ways.

But if you have a recruiting fee that essentially penalizes that model, that doesn’t align with the way that I think companies want to grow. All of the services we use at SeedLegals generally use a SaaS model. You pay somebody in amount per month and you use a service and why shouldn’t it be the same for recruiting?

“I love the RaaS (Recruiting as a Service) model that we have with Move. It lets me hire huge numbers of people at a fixed known cost and has transformed the way we’ve grown our business.”

I’ve hired 52 people from kick-off until the present. Had I had a pay-per-hire model, the bills would’ve been insane and would’ve prohibited the number of hires we’ve made. The Move model is transformative.

What may have happened if you hadn’t identified a solution?

“Had we not found a RaaS model for hiring, we would have experienced a lot more friction. The stakes for each hire would’ve been prohibitively high, which would’ve meant more interviews, and more pain for the candidates and hiring managers because it could cost you so dearly in terms of fees to get it wrong. So I think we’d have ended up with a damper on our growth from not having a model that made it really easy to hire.”

How does the SeedLegals software help with time to close?

“The SeedLegals platform is insanely awesome at helping you grow your business. You can create employment contracts in minutes which is important when you’re trying to close a gold-star candidate in London. I’ve seen how painful it is to go from a wonderful final conversation with a candidate to a contract with other companies, often with lawyers involved. But with SeedLegals, it takes three minutes to create a new employment agreement – and you can include an expiry date. I will do this at 2 PM and the person will sign it by, you know, 11 AM the next day. And that’s how we roll. And I just cannot imagine running a growing company in any other way.”

On creating a pipeline

“We also have a wonderful team view section. So you can put your team members in teams, and you can see your upcoming starters. I would go at least once a day to our platform to see who the upcoming starters are so that I know when to buy computers for them when to set them up with email and Slack and so on.”

“But more than that, it’s really the other side of the pipeline. So you might have an ATS for candidates, but the SeedLegals platform allows you to create a pipeline of incoming employees – which is great for when you’re scaling and don’t want to be in space of hiring on panic.”

What Anthony likes most about working with Move

“I very much like the team. I know that often with recruiters, you get a senior person who gives you a very nice pitch and then they pass you on to others in your team and you never hear from them ever again. But with Move, we saw it was a family, essentially.”

“We also like the business model. For example, we created a Slack channel, so it feels like we’re actually working together. And that’s one of the other key things, which is because of the zero cost-per-hire model. It means that I can give any number of my team leads who are looking to hire access to our joint Slack channel. The result is traction and it’s so much easier. The way we work together is just refreshingly different.”

40

Hires made

26

Days average time to hire

140500

£ Savings

Hear it from Hiring Managers, Fabrice and Kerstin

Fabrice is the VP of Marketing for SeedLegals and also heads up their data function. Kerstin is Head of SEO and Content. Together, they are responsible for generating and converting qualified traffic to SeedLegals.

They’ve been very focused on building out their Marketing team and together with Move, have hired a team of 6 across various roles.

When Fabrice was hired, he had to start building the team from the ground up.

“When I joined, we were in the trenches and it was a challenging situation. The company was growing really fast and other functions aside from marketing were growing exceptionally quickly, so we had a bit of catching up to do. The mandate to Move was to get to a headcount of 10 by the end of the year, and we’d started in June. An added complexity was that we were hiring for a variety of specialist roles.

“The ask was complex. It wasn’t like building a sales or a CX team. Building a marketing team involves building different sub-functions within the team such as CRM or SEO or PPC.”

Kerstin was equally as challenged with building out a Content team and relied on Move to help her hire a Content Distribution Manager as well as Content Marketing Assistant.

What is the best thing about working with Move?

Fabrice and Kerstin both mentioned that the Move team is flexible in their approach and very friendly.

Fabrice commented, “Sometimes we completely change our process and they have absolutely no problem with that. The Move team is always happy to find what the best angle is, the best messaging and they’re just always happy to experiment alongside us.”

Kerstin added, “The Move team felt like almost internal. Like almost as they were part of our team because they were always very responsive, had easy communication over Slack, with very short response times, and then also very open to feedback. So we had regular check-in calls, which was really helpful. And then if priorities changed, that was something we could easily pick up because we evaluate our process and look at how we approach people. We share the messages that were sent out to collaborate to see if there was anything that could be improved because it is a very challenging market at the moment and it’s tough to hire.”

“I really enjoy the fact that the Move team is always super nice and they are very responsive too. It makes the task at hand much easier by having a team of people you can rely on. Sometimes we need some stats on the markets, or sometimes some stats on a specific role. If we’re struggling a little bit, sometimes we might need them to jump on the call to brainstorm if something is not going according to plan and we’ll think together about what we can do to change the process and optimize it. Move is our trusted partner that we can rely on.” – Fabrice Renucci, VP Marketing at SeedLegals

On what makes for successful hiring in a post-pandemic world

Fabrice commented, “What has worked really well has been the flexible approach of SeedLegals combined with how flexible Move is. On the SeedLegals side, we have quite a flexible approach to recruitment and to employee success. We allow employees to work from the office or from home. And we’re seeing that in a post COVID world, it’s really a key that can unlock a lot of talent. I’ve certainly seen it. I’ve worked with Move on more than 15 roles now. If you are flexible and also partner up with a recruitment agency that is flexible, then you’re going to be successful.”

I love the RaaS model that we have with move. It lets me hire huge numbers of people at a fixed known cost and has transformed the way we’ve grown our business.