BigHat Biosciences is Accelerating Therapeutic Development by Fast-Capturing Skilled Candidates

BigHat Biosciences has been in business since 2019. When they found Talent Gleam, they realized that (1) inbound recruiting was too slow to meet their needs, and (2) their outbound strategy needed some work.

“It’s one thing if you’re trying to hire a software engineer,” says Eddie. “But it’s harder to find more specialized roles, such as a liquid handling automation engineer.” Most are already employed—and if they do start shopping for a new employer, it’s usually through word of mouth.

Eddie and the rest of the leadership team realized that the tools they thought they needed weren’t truly the best fit.

“Other recruiting solutions we looked at focused a lot on what we thought we wanted, which was a deep LinkedIn integration and managing outbound campaigns. After about five minutes of talking with Talent Gleam, we realized that’s not what we want or need. We actually want a solution that helps us manage inbound interest and tracks the workflow.” -Eddie Abrams.

LinkedIn integrations aren’t as important to the candidates BigHat is hoping to hire as a compelling candidate experience. BigHat captures inbound interest in a variety of ways, but what is most important and common to all of them is an efficient, transparent, high-quality experience during the recruiting process.

Generating the right recruitment funnel was BigHat’s top priority, and Talent Gleam is helping them improve every aspect of the process—outbound and inbound.

Eddie is an engineer by trade, so he’s not vague or wishy-washy about the ways Talent Gleam has helped shore up BigHat’s recruitment process.

He points to three specific areas:

• Creating a Unified System: Before Talent Gleam, the executive team tracked emails, LinkedIn campaigns, and recruiter information manually. Now they can direct everyone to start with a single link in Talent Gleam, no matter where they advertise. Sending candidates and hiring managers alike to just one place has improved the experience on both sides, and helps BigHat get in touch with the best candidates with a speed that was impossible in the past.
• Time Savings: Eddie credits several of Talent Gleam’s features with impacting time savings, from candidate scorecards to interview question design. He and his colleagues on the executive team save hours a week on planning and scheduling alone, and the ball isn’t getting dropped for candidates who are mid-process. Before Talent Gleam, Eddie says, “The minutiae of the recruiting process itself took an absurd amount of time to get through, on the order of hours per week.” And after Talent Gleam? “Managing the experience for potential employees has all but dropped to essentially zero.” An executive administrator can help run recruitment workflows from one central location in Talent Gleam. “The time difference is pretty remarkable,” says a visibly relieved Eddie.
• Transparency: Eddie loves that he can see key reporting insights on everything from the diversity of BigHat’s candidate pool to how the company is performing (speed of campaign vs success rate, etc.). What he loves even more is the ability to track all communication and candidate information in one place. He no longer needs to deal with multiple inboxes or different files; just one source of truth. And for a career engineer like Eddie, that’s elegant design at work.

When Eddie started shopping for an ATS, he quickly narrowed his search to what he calls “more newfangled web-friendly software.” In other words, not the legacy software that he sees as bulky and stagnant.

“I talked to Tom (Talent Gleam’s CEO), and he had intriguing thoughts about his vision for where Talent Gleam is going,” says Eddie. “We bought into the vision as well as the product.”

Eddie calls Talent Gleam “a clear win” over the competition because it perfectly suits their needs—not just a customizable workflow and scorecard tools, but a more intentional recruitment strategy overall.

“Talent Gleam is there to help you achieve best practices for candidate evaluation,” Eddie told us. “Trying to drive toward objective metrics and experience-based, evidence-based interviewing is where we want to put our heavy focus.”

When we asked him why, Eddie summed it up perfectly: “That operational advantage is a big differentiator. We can hire people better than other people can hire people. We can know whether they’re going to be successful in our company better than others can. And every time we gain even a 10% advantage in all these different areas, we’re really going to optimize the degree to which we can capture good talent for a company like ours.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.