First of all, can you tell us a bit about Intercom?
Intercom is the leading Customer Communications Platform that helps businesses engage and support customers through personalised, messenger-based experiences. We have offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Chicago and Sydney as well as remote roles across the globe.
How did you hear about Gradguide?
I heard about Gradguide as both Mark Hughes and Dave Martin are former Intercom employees so I’ve been following the Gradguide story from the very beginning.
When I moved into a leadership role last year I was keen to work with Gradguide to help support the growth of our SDR team. On the back of the initial success we had with my team, we have also been using them to find entry level talent in other departments, specifically for Customer Support Specialists and Customer Support Engineers.
What attracted you to Gradguide initially?
As an early customer we were set up on a Freemium Plan. We hired two very strong candidates Lauren Hughes and Sean Gallagher who quickly made an impact. Lauren was promoted within six months and Sean has already progressed to a Team Lead position. This gave us proof of concept which made the decision to move onto a bigger plan for the remainder of the year a no-brainer.
What benefits have you seen from using Gradguide?
Gradguide has helped us drastically improve the speed and quality with which we hire into our Sales Development and Customer Support teams. Not only do we constantly have a pipeline of high quality talent to choose from at any given time, having some of our employees volunteer as mentors means we can identify early on whether they will be a good cultural fit for Intercom which is absolutely crucial for us.
Additionally, Gradguide enables some of our Individual Contributors (ICs) to cut their teeth managing people at an early stage in their career in a relatively low-risk environment. Many of our employees mentoring with Gradguide have aspirations of moving into leadership roles and there’s no doubt in my mind that their experience mentoring graduates will stand to them.
How do you see the future relationship between Intercom and Gradguide progressing?
We are excited at the upcoming launch of the Gradguide platform where we’ll easily be able to save candidates we like and add them to our applicant tracking system, making an already pretty seamless process even easier. As well as that, over the coming months we are planning to organise a company open day, run assessment centres and take another booth at the upcoming virtual career fair in February after the success of last September’s event.