How Kunai Recruits Top Engineering Talent 3x Faster

Kunai helps Fortune 500 companies find and onboard the top 3% of talent from the US and around the world, and they do it three times faster.

The secret? Building a pool of pre-screened, fully-vetted engineering talent ready to join and effectively sharing candidate information with clients. However, none of this would be possible without Grain.

"Recruiting can't live without Grain at this point."

- Ruan Pethiyagoda, Chief Strategy Officer, Kunai Consulting.

We had the opportunity to speak with Ruan Pethiyagoda, Chief Strategy Officer, and Brianna Gonzalez, Technical Recruiter from Kunai, to learn more about how Grain helps their team recruit three times faster.

Candidate Information, Just a Search Away

Kunai's internal recruiters have a set of predefined questions they ask during interviews, which helps them gather essential information about the candidates. Brianna explains, "We gather information about their technical skills, years of experience, communication style, how they respond to questions, and more."

And, the interviews are recorded using Grain to capture all the information and make it accessible to other recruiters.

Even when a candidate is not a perfect fit for the current role, they might be suitable for another position. With Grain, the team can search and retrieve candidate information at a later time.

"Saving the interviews in Grain means a different Kunai recruiter can go in, search, watch the video, and decide if it makes sense to reach back to the candidate for the new role," explains Brianna.

Grain also helps the team maintain relationships with candidates. Typically, when a recruiter leaves, the relationships they built with potential candidates are lost. However, with Grain, it's easier to continue conversations and nurture those relationships.

Recruiters don't have to start from scratch or ask the same set of questions again. Brianna agrees, saying, "If we have Grain, we can go back in time and become part of the conversations. This  makes it easier for us to  develop relationships."

Interview Highlights, On-demand

After the interviews, the recruiter team needs to share the information with the hiring managers to make the final decision.

"Before Grain, recruiters would just write notes saying, 'Hey, here's what we think of this person.' When it came to exceptional moments, they’d say ‘you had to be there’," says Ruan. Today, the team can share a video clip to let  hiring managers see for themselves.

As Ruan puts it, "It's hard to communicate how somebody comes across in an interview, how they answer a question, how confidently they respond, especially when they talk about things they don't know. There is a confidence and humility in how senior technologists talk about what they don’t know that is critical to effective recruiting and almost impossible to reduce to writing." 

With Grain, the recruiting team can just clip and share a highlight capturing these exact moments, and hiring managers can see how candidates physically and emotionally responded to a tough question, without relying on others having to editorialize or make subjective judgments.

Automating Admin Work

Brianna and other recruiters face a common challenge: they need to take notes to capture essential information while fully engaging in conversations with candidates.

"It's hard to be present in a conversation and take notes," says Brianna. And for technical recruiters at Kunai, it's even harder.

Recruiters are expected to accurately capture details about technical projects, programming languages, and frameworks while staying present in the interviews and asking insightful follow-up questions.

The solution? Focus solely on the conversation and let Grain AI handle the admin work.👇

With Grain AI, recruiters can automatically get a summary and key points with timestamps ready to review and share.

"It's awesome having artificial intelligence help you pick out the most important pieces from the call. We're humans, and we think a certain way, and we may have some bias. But Grain AI doesn't. It summarizes the conversation’s contents objectively."

- Brianna Gonzalez, Technical Recruiter, Kunai Consulting.

Improve Your Hiring Process

Grain has now become an indispensable part of the hiring process at Kunai. "The expectation is every interview should be recorded using Grain," says Brianna.

It helps recruiters stay present in their meetings, save and access candidates' information, and collaborate with stakeholders. If you are hiring, add Grain to your interviews and see the impact for yourself.