See how Klaviyo collected 200 referrals in their first 6 months. 

Introduction - About Klaviyo

Based in Boston, the mecca of B2B SaaS software, Klaviyo is propelling thousands of e-commerce companies into the modern age of e-commerce marketing. 

The founders Andrew Bialecki from Harvard and Ed Hallen from MIT, started Klaviyo with a mission to make it simple for businesses to provide a unique, 1:1 experience for each individual customer. 

Revolutionizing marketing especially with email is no easy task - there are thousands of email services, not to mention giants of the industry like Mailchimp and SendGrid. 

Klaviyo has a secret weapon when it comes to beating the crowd. Their crazy high bar for talent, combined with their adoption of People Ops and Talent Technology to streamline and automate every single piece of manual work away.

"We have a really high bar for hiring here at Klaviyo. Not as many people make it to even an on-site here. We take a really holistic approach to how we evaluate candidates. 

We’re looking not just for culture fit and technical fit, but whether they are able to come in and elevate our team.”

The challenge: Raising the bar while scaling

From just 2 to over 125 people in just 3 short years, Klaviyo is growing incredibly fast. They’ve managed to more than double their year-over-year growth with no signs of slowing. 

Competing for talent with not only the titans moving into (quite literally) their neighborhood like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, but also with other fast growing upstarts like Toast, Salsify, ezCater, and Drift, makes this even more challenging.

What makes Klaviyo a standout performer in hiring, is their ability to maintain this growth while being uncompromising on their unusually high bar for quality talent. 

This makes recruiting at Klaviyo particularly challenging, because speed and quality can often be opposing forces. Competing on both at the same time is like walking a tightrope while juggling.

How Klaviyo approaches hiring, referrals, and technology

When you want to improve speed and quality of hiring at the same time, the only way to do it is by increasing efficiency.

When they started their growth trajectory, Klaviyo was using every possible avenue to get candidates in the door. But over time, they focused more and more on the best channels. That included referrals.

The Klaviyo team decided that they wanted to double down on referrals, their best source of hires. They already had an ATS and a $3,500 referral bonus - they even had a quarterly raffle for referring Software Engineers, which is ahead of the curve. But it still was not efficient or predictable. Anyone who has run a referral program manually knows that at the end of the day, it can be a ton of busywork that keeps the recruiting team focused on data entry rather than candidate sourcing and followup.

That’s why they decided to try Drafted.

“Referrals are always going to be the strongest bucket of people to tap into. It’s one less layer of vetting that you have to get through.”

"Before Drafted we had an email alias set up that was referrals@klaviyo.com and we would ask people to send it there. We thought it was the easiest way to have them send emails, but the big problem with that was no one would remember what the email was."

How Klaviyo uses Drafted

Drafted helps companies like Klaviyo scale referrals proactively, while streamlining processes and removing busywork, saving countless hours while delivering better results.

The most successful referral programs are built on strong participation and employee engagement. With Drafted, Klaviyo was looking for a solution that would not just automate busywork, but also keep employee engagement high and participation consistent.

Drafted helped improve results at Klaviyo across multiple dimensions. Here are the primary use cases for how the Klaviyo team used Drafted to solve problems.

“The weekly email is a good reminder to look at the open positions and look at the people featured in the email and see if anyone matches up. The suggestions are great!”

Before Drafted, the Klaviyo team had to manually upload resumes and type in notes after talking to an employee about a referral. Drafted saves on average 5 minutes per candidate in data entry, which translates to almost an hour per job posting when it comes to referrals.

Drafted Slack integration:

Slack (and other team collaboration tools) are fast becoming the hub of communication. People *already* talk about referrals on Slack, and it’s not uncommon for someone to slack a resume to a recruiter.

When Klaviyo wanted to engage everyone in referrals weekly, Slack was one of the best places to do it. With the Drafted Slack integration, every employee at Klaviyo gets 1 suggestion per week about a hidden referral they could be making.

If an employee decides it’s a good idea, it’s a 1-click referral right in Slack, and they never have to sign into the ATS or Drafted to do it. Drafted takes care of the magic and syncing all the data.

“We have a Drafted Slackbot integration. I’ve used it many times cause it only notifies me during the day. It’s kind of fun and very interactive.”

Julie Lungaro, Senior Product Designer

Klaviyo

Drafted sends timely reminders and suggestions right in Slack, resulting in higher participation and employee engagement

Drafted Gmail integration:

Sometimes the best connections are people that you exchange emails with. Drafted enables recruiters to discover people they’ve previously emailed that might be a good fit for one of the open positions.

Second, the Drafted email template and Gmail integration allows recruiters to send customized, personalized introduction emails with 1-click, saving hours of time and getting higher response rates.

By the Numbers

ROI on Drafted at Klaviyo

Hiring the right team is the #1 priority for any business - and referrals are one of the top sources of high quality hires.  test

By adopting Drafted as part of their technology stack, Klaviyo was able to keep the quality bar high, double their referral program results, and save time for the recruiting team all in one go.

“We’ve had over 200 referrals through Drafted.  

Which translates to 3.9 referrals per employee and 10 referrals per job which are some really great numbers. It’s a lot higher than we were getting before.”