Ubie is a health tech startup with around 120 employees. They provide medical facilities with workflow efficiency tools, including its AI-powered patient questionnaire service “Ubie AI Health Assistant” and AI symptom checker for consumers. The company has grown rapidly in the two years since 2019, with headcount growing by more than 4 times.
Unlike what you’d expect given the speed of their growth, Ubie does not have any internal recruitment staff. Instead, they managed to build an organization with more than 100 employees of which 70% were hired via referrals.
Why did Ubie jettison recruiting staff, and how have they achieved such growth? We interviewed Ms. Sonopy who works on organizational development at Ubie to learn more about the various methods that can be adopted, both by startups which want to strengthen their recruitment processes and by leadership who want to build a culture of referral hiring.
I’ve worked with Ubie, first as a contractor for about a year before fully joining the company around a year and a half ago. Prior to that, I was working in human resources at large and small tech companies.
I joined Ubie with the job title of “Culture Development” and helped to formulate, articulate, implement and propagate our work culture. This included ensuring that our culture was conveyed during our onboarding, introducing and running an OKR system, and moving our company into a more “holacracy”-based company style.
When I began freelancing with them in 2019, Ubie had less than 20 employees. From there, they grew to 40 employees by 2020 and to 100 employees by 2021. I guess you could say I joined Ubie as a full-time employee because I was dazzled by its tremendous potential... (laughs).
Ubie is a health tech startup, and healthcare is a huge market valued at more than 350 million USD (11% of GDP) in Japan and 3.9 trillion USD (19% of GDP) in the US. I decided to join the company because of the value in being involved in a pioneering business in Japan and because I strongly saw the growth potential in Ubie. Moreover, it was really interesting to be involved in an industry which has implications for the whole of humanity.
I was also very interested in how Ubie was organizationally structured. Back then, despite having only 20 employees, and maybe 40 if you include temporary staff, it seemed that Ubie stuck to their ideals. They never compromised on either recruitment or their culture, and simply worked with a sense of optimism that “ideals can be achieved.” The fact that this organizational mindset was so rare was also a reason for why I joined Ubie.
Ubie’s stance of not having a recruiting staff is another unique point. We even include “recruitment” in the job descriptions when we send out offer letters to the people in all cohorts.
At Ubie, we all believe the most precise way to recruit is to have employees recruit new staff members with similar job scopes and job experience. For example, our engineers take charge of recruiting other engineers. Similarly, we believe those who deeply understand B2B business will know the requirements to look out for when hiring someone else to handle B2B business.
Another reason is that we want all our employees to understand that recruitment is part of their job too. If we had specialized recruiting staff then sure, company recruitment matters would probably run more smoothly. But it would also make it easy for people to just rely on the recruiting staff to take the lead. I think this would gradually lead to recruitment being left to others.
It’s a given that founders of startups have to handle recruitment, but it’s also true that as the number of employees grows and tasks get divided, recruitment tends to get left to a separate team. Ubie’s bold decision to not appoint a recruiting staff means that when teams want new members, it’s up to them to do the work - nobody’s going to do it for them. I guess this gives the employees a heightened sense of ownership.
I also feel that this heightened sense of ownership of both the business and recruitment is the reason why 70% of the company’s 100 employees are referral hires. I get the sense that all of our employees enjoy contributing to recruitment, and that they propose tactics that a HR-led recruitment flow would be unlikely to come up with. Furthermore, because everyone assumes ownership, we have a wealth of hiring-related documentation.
This sense of ownership also has a positive impact on our recruitment branding. Nowadays, in HR spheres we often hear about the need to spotlight the people working in your company as part of company branding, and we too actively promote this. We started writing blog posts in an “Advent calendar” style last December, and actually managed to keep this effort up all the way to this June (smiles).
Since January, blog posts have only been released on weekdays. While strictly speaking there have been days without updates, the fact that someone writes an article almost everyday is something else we would not have been able to achieve without each team member having a sense of ownership.
Of course, there are also some negative aspects to “recruiting without recruiters.” It makes recruiting through headhunters or agents extremely difficult and they don’t really know who is the Point of Contact at Ubie. On that point, it is regrettable that from headhunters’/agents’ points of view, they probably had a negative experience dealing with our hiring practices.
Dealing with and developing a positive relationship with headhunters/agents also takes certain skills and expertise. It’s not something that we can realistically expect all of our employees to have. Ubie is weak when it comes to these kinds of centralized recruitment.
Given that our employees are the main players in recruitment, we put a lot of effort in training and “Verbalizing” things. This “Verbalization” - or putting things into words - means creating documents which dig a few levels deeper than normal recruitment JDs and building operational flows which even those new joiners can handle. At Ubie, we have a wealth of materials to ensure that our interviews are structured.
Ubie has an interview assessment criterion called “Ubieness.” This includes, for example, “zero-based thinking.” To our employees, we first verbalize what this “zero-based thinking” is, before conveying why it is so important to us.
After which, we explain the kind of organization Ubie wants to become by applying “zero-based thinking”, and the risks of what might happen if we don’t. “The ability to unlearn” and “flexibility of thinking” are also listed as elements of “zero-based thinking”, and we explain each of these too.
Based on the above, we document how to assess talent. There are three main criteria for what we look out for, and we document how one may ask questions and specific phrases in order to assess these points. Some of the readers may interview with Ubie, so please forgive me for not going into more detail (chuckles).
We also document questions that allow an interviewer to dig deeper. We’ve put together a guide that instructs interviewers to “Ask one question, and proceed to the next if certain information is obtained. Otherwise, try rephrasing and repeating the question.” We’ve also subsequently outlined the various grading criteria and how to score interviewees in them. However, interviews are best done with some wiggle room in interviews, so it’s important for our interviewers to understand the background behind the framework of our questions.
Moving on to how we actually conduct interviews though, we always have at least two interviewers. The aim is to have people learn by sitting in at interviews with more experienced interviewers, and by having interviewers give feedback to each other. We also always record interviews after making sure that we obtain permission from candidates.
The content of Interviews naturally tend to be in blackbox. It can be difficult when reviewing an interview to discern what happened, how the candidate responded and how that led to the final assessment. That’s precisely why it is important to have secondary or final interviewers review videos of previous interviews so they can discuss better ways to ask questions or provide a different assessment of the candidate.
Recording interviews offer obvious benefits to Ubie, but they can also be beneficial to candidates by ensuring they won’t be judged on the biased views of any specific interviewer.
One point is that, since we want all employees to serve as interviewers, we do not focus very much on “interviewer types.” Although questions about a specific job scope are handled by the people in that field, we implement a sort of lottery system on Slack to choose interviewers.
Considering this, I would say that Ubie is an organization that breaks down human resource functions so everyone can pitch in to contribute.
Anyone intending to establish a recruiting system without specialized recruiters like Ubie must first try to break down the types of functions full-time recruiting staff members perform and how having a specialist in them affects these functions. This is because without a specialized recruitment team, these decomposed functions must be apportioned to all employees.
I think “recruiting staff functions” can be represented using the following pyramid.
At the base is a mindset of taking responsibility for and having ownership in recruitment. Basic skills are then built upon this foundation. These include recruitment marketing and project management in terms of involving others in the company. On top of these basic skills, there are recruitment-specific skills, such as understanding market trends, running and improving scouting campaigns, and how to write job descriptions.
Next, think about how these three functions can be delegated.
Firstly, on the mindset. We think that absence of a recruiting staff can be turned into a strength. So, we cover this by fostering a strong sense of ownership with regards to recruitment.
Next, the basic skills. We actually leave this to staff who are good at their original jobs. To begin with, we believe that recruitment is simply a combination of marketing and sales. In fact, the basis of recruitment - formulating the messages we send out, pinpointing the kind of people we’d like to attract and we want them to think of us - are fundamentally the same concepts as for marketing. Another point is that the processes of selecting recruitment media, and choosing our recruitment tactics are similar to how a marketer would analyze their funnel numbers.
I actually think there is a big overlap between BtoB marketing and recruitment. I and other members of Ubie study general marketing techniques and work to incorporate them into how we recruit. And just like how we market our SaaS services, on our recruitment website, we try very hard to optimize our button placements and forms, and use HubSpot to visualize the pipeline etc.
Just like in marketing, getting someone to know of you does not automatically mean that they will “buy”. We cannot expect a candidate who just got to know us to immediately apply and join our company. We have to guide them through leaving an impression, nurturing them as prospects and then moving them to converting - or in other words applying to a job with us. This framework of treating your recruitment as a funnel is very close to how marketing works.
There are two ways to transfer technical skills.
The first is outsourcing. This can be easily done by having knowledgeable human resource professionals act as part-time advisors. There is also the use of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). I think that in particular, the technical skills part of recruitment functions is easy to break off and outsource to a third party.
The other way is having in-house members learn the skills. No matter what, engineers understand other engineers’ feelings best. We’ve had quite a few cases where while learning about recruitment, they suddenly have a spurt of creativity which led to us being able to hire other engineers. They’ve also proposed that we try showing that we understand how engineers think in our messaging.
“Ubie UberEats” is one example of a sort-of innovative measure that we’ve had. Given the COVID-19 situation right now, we can’t invite candidates to go have sushi dinners with us using Ubie’s money in the hope that they become referral hires. That being said, in the past, we had a lot of success, with engineers in particular, by eating sushi with them (smiling).
So we took action by sending redeemable UberEats coupons to candidates and inviting them to dine with us online. There are cases where this has actually led to casual interviews. This is not something that recruiters can easily come up with and the engineers themselves also enjoyed this innovative idea. I think this is a good example of thinking about ways to improve while demonstrating creativity.
I think it’s important for business leadership and employees not to have implicit expectations when recruiting, including during a startup’s infancy. Proper verbalization is very important, with or without specialized recruiters.
An example of having implicit expectations is when a CEO assumes that it’s only natural that employees will work hard on recruitment if they have a sense of ownership. After all, “I told them to do so during the last company-wide meeting, and they should have gotten the message by now”. This doesn’t work. They have to verbalize as much as possible what they expect of team members, what personnel requirements need to be recruited, how the company plans to recruit etc.
New members at Ubie tell us things like we’ve done a good job preparing documentation and putting things into words. But that’s because we’ve spent the last year focusing on those things. Documenting things has become especially important for us now given how our increased headcount, and how remote work has made it difficult for people to be automatically on the same page.
It’s also important for the top leadership to show that they themselves are committing to driving recruitment. In order to be able to say that employees with a sense of ownership will drive recruitment independently, leaders themselves must first set a good example. Side note but, I think that companies with many “craftsman-types” who only commit to their own job scope probably won’t be able to adopt a all-hands-on-board method of recruitment.
I’ve taken reference from several books when thinking about building organizations and recruitment. Many people probably have read “How Google Works” given how well it's known, but I too still re-read it once in a while. Ubie has several books it assigns employees to read, and this is one of them.
The book is full of food for thought. Like, for example, the point that while Google is famous for having good benefits, it attracts “smart creatives” not because of these benefits but because they want to work with their fellow and top-class “smart creatives”. Or, that while A-grade talent recruits A-grade talent, B-grade talent recruit C or D-grade talent.
Or, that it’s simple to double the number of your best performers. How? By simply having all of your employees bring in one outstanding person. I mean, some of these theories are kind of blatantly obvious (laughs). But I sometimes read it to reacquaint myself with the basics.
I mentioned at the beginning that idealism is important at Ubie, but honestly, we’re still always short of manpower and we’re all working very hard to recruit. But, based on our company’s situation, if your recruitment efforts aren’t going well, I don’t think it’s because there’s no recruiting staff.
Instead of blaming it on having no recruiting specialist, it is easier to find a solution if you can just break recruitment down a bit more and think about where there is room for improvement. Some of our employees sometimes tell me they want a talented recruiter to work on recruitment, and that’s okay as one of the ways that I mentioned before. However, just blaming recruitment issues on the fact there’s no recruiting staff is cheap logic and makes it hard for people to think of further solutions.
At times like these, I would be glad if you remember that we, Ubie, serve as an example of a company which grew to more than 100 employees, even without recruitment staff.
If you are interested in working with us at a fast-growing startup with such a culture, we would love to hear from you!
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Sonopy@Ubie Discovery
Joined Ubie in 2019 after working in engineer recruitment and organizational development at various large and small IT companies. Sonopy works on permeating the company culture, OKRs, “holacracy”-building and onboarding. Sonopy supports Ubie’s recruitment firstly as an individual player recruiting people, but also to form the foundations from which all employees in Ubie can participate in recruitment.