How the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation Powers Mission-Driven Hiring with Lever

SGFF’s Story

Centralizing the hiring process to power explosive growth

A mission-driven organization deeply committed to values of community, growth, and inclusion, Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation (SGFF) wanted to build a hiring process that reflects those same principles. At first, it was admittedly hard to decide whether they should continue hiring the scrappy way or invest in a recruiting software. But once SGFF’s Head of Product and People Operations Raena Saddler saw how Lever could elevate their hiring success in every way, there was no longer any debate. “Before Lever, teams were running their own recruiting processes and starting from scratch anytime we opened up a new role. Lever allows us to make sure candidates are having similar, supportive experiences across the organization,” says Raena. “It also enables our hiring managers to move faster, drawing on a standardized hiring process and sourcing from existing pools of candidates.” Now, every interviewer and candidate benefits from a better hiring experience.

To empower every interviewer, SGFF knew they had to craft a more consistent recruiting process. First objective on the to-do list? Consolidating the different systems they were using to track candidate information. Between folders, email inboxes, and LinkedIn postings, Raena recalls, “We didn’t have a consistent way of coordinating with each other in the hiring process.” In Lever, SGFF can centralize all candidate information and communications in one location – increasing team-wide hiring efficiency and transparency.

As a result, they can also hold each other accountable to asking each candidate a similar set of questions. Ultimately, this helps the team compare candidates fairly and disregard biases that creep in, furthering their commitment to diversity and inclusion. For this reason and many others, the team is proud to have expanded to over 50 percent people of color.

Using Lever, the team can also comprehensively assess and consistently engage each candidate throughout the interview process. This improved candidate experience was instrumental in helping the team grow by 50 percent in three months. “Candidates should feel great about interacting with our team regardless of the hiring outcome,” says Raena. “Lever creates a smooth process for both our team and our candidates.”

Lever’s seamless Gmail integration allows the hiring team to quickly submit notes and feedback – speeding up the candidate’s interview experience by several days, and reducing time spent debriefing on each part of the hiring process. Raena has experienced this evolution firsthand. “Lever has significantly reduced the amount of time it takes for us to screen candidates. Before we started using Lever, we were a small team managing hiring through our individual email inboxes,” reflects Raena. “Since investing in Lever, our time to look through resumes has been significantly reduced and we’re able to review a large number of applications in a much shorter period of time.”