Hotjar has come a long way since it’s early beginnings and has quickly gained worldwide traction, becoming a real leader in the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) space. Founded by David Darmanin and Erik Näslund back in 2014, Hotjar is a tool that helps companies and marketers understand online behavior on mobile and desktop websites. With measurement and analytics at the core of their business, Hotjar aims to help companies quantify customer behavior and optimize online conversions.
Since it’s launch, Hotjar has grown rapidly- from zero to €15 million Annual Recurring Revenue in just under four years. Today their user base consists of about 210,000 companies with Hotjar installed on just over 670,000 websites. And the team? From just the co-founders to 80 people spread across the world.
Working as a true modern tech company, their team is agile, growing, constantly learning, and… completely remote. Yes, that’s right 100% remote. Hotjar co-founders decided early on that they would hire only remote teams, hosting their team twice a year in their headquarters in Malta. Hiring for 100% remote work has not always been easy, especially when it comes to conducting a completely remote hiring process. “It’s just very difficult to find sometimes the match of specifically what you’re looking for in the people who are applying,” Hotjar co-founder Darmanin revealed. Without properly filtering candidates, interviewing can become a time-consuming process.
Getting to know your candidates during the hiring process is critical to hiring a remote team, which is why Hotjar hires with Recruitee. “If you are employing for remote [work], you need to employ self-driven people or people who are very ambitious,” Darmanin says. Cultural fit sometimes can be harder to identify than matching candidates with the right skills. As a fully remote team, Hotjar looks for candidates who are great communicators and always open to learning. But with the hiring process completely online, these qualities can be difficult to assess.
Recruitee helps Hotjar in filtering candidates at early stages with features like customizable questionnaires and follow-up surveys to send to applicants. The Hotjar team has designed their own questionnaires to assess candidate qualities prior to offering interviews. For Hotjar, finding the right matches is essential, “It starts with the survey, then we have all the email [response] automated from Recruitee. We love that.”
Lean, iterative improvements are at the heart of Hotjar’s values and hiring strategy, which is why they’re constantly refining their recruitment process with Recruitee. “We’re crazy and obsessed with our hiring process, and Recruitee caters exactly to what we need – optimize the shortest way to the best candidates,” Darmanin shared.
An easy-to-use platform makes experimentation easier: “Excellent ATS, bringing Trello’s user interface to candidate pipelines. The workflow is clean, simple, and fast.” Hotjar experiments with various steps in the recruitment process including questionnaires designed for cultural fit and structured interviews conducted by team members.
By truly embracing what Darmanin calls, “performance recruitment,” Hotjar continues to grow in both team size and revenue.
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