How Banquet Health hires hard-to-fill roles in record time on Paraform
Banquet Health had a problem most growing startups face: they needed strong engineers, but their recruiting process was eating up too much time and delivering subpar results. They'd tried three different recruiting agencies. Some provided higher-quality candidates than others, but none were delivering 100% of what Banquet Health was looking for.
Then they found Paraform. The results were clear:
- 2 senior full-stack engineers hired, in 27 and 31 days
- 8 hours saved per week (that’s 100 hours over 3 months of using the platform)
- 4x increase in quality candidates after using Paraform
Nivi Jayasekar, Banquet Health’s CTO and co-founder, tells us what happened and how Paraform became their go-to recruiting solution.[Headshot of Nivi]
Sourcing for a challenging candidate profile
Banquet Health wasn't looking for just any engineers. They needed people with modern tech stack experience (TypeScript, React, Node; languages more common to earlier-stage companies), who had also successfully scaled startups or worked for larger organizations.
What made it even trickier was that the team wasn’t running standard Leetcode tests, but evaluating practical engineering skills during interviews.
Banquet Health’s unique requirements made it challenging for Nivi to find promising candidates – she realized recruiters outside of Paraform weren’t able to quickly iterate based on her feedback.
Finding a Goldilocks solution in Paraform
The key difference with Paraform wasn't just better recruiters or technology but how the platform combined both. Nivi could work with multiple specialized recruiters on a role at once and found that the platform’s features made communication, alignment, and feedback easier. When candidates weren't quite right, Banquet could instantly tell the entire recruiting team why by submitting candidate feedback or posting announcements on the activity feed. And recruiters actually listened and adjusted. Each round of candidates got better.“It really sped up the overall hiring process.” Nivi notes.
"We were able to refine the quality of the candidates that we were interviewing rapidly. During the last month the scale skyrocketed, and we were getting lots more ideal candidates, faster."
And just as importantly, Nivi got more of her time back.
"I could monitor the process without being in every call. Resume scanning and intro calls are the most time-consuming parts but often have the lowest return. Working with Paraform to have someone else own that, gave me greater peace of mind."
This matters because most recruiting processes fail in predictable ways:
- The hiring manager becomes the bottleneck
- Feedback gets lost between different recruiters
- The process drags on (and on, and on) while urgent work piles up
Paraform solved these by letting Banquet Health set up their role requirements once, share important info with all recruiters, and then monitor progress without having to join every call.
The best of both worlds in recruiting
Banquet didn't have to choose between high-touch, personalized service and automated processes that work at scale. They got both. When they needed 1:1 human interaction, they had Slack access to their recruiting team. When they needed to operate at scale, Nivi could calibrate and review resumes in bulk, and update many recruiters at once via the messaging system. The recruiters would then quickly adjust their search based on Nivi’s feedback.
Even tracking candidates started to feel fun instead of like a chore – Nivi could see exactly how many candidates were in each stage of the funnel at one glance, and immediately pull up any candidate’s information.
“Scale and automation were the most important things I could get out of Paraform, and they fed into each other. Paraform was already providing more quality candidates than other agencies – the automation just helped us scale up even faster.”
Real results without the trade-offs
Banquet Health did more than hire two engineers. They found a recruiting flow that actually works for their team, without breaking everything else:
Feels like a custom-tailored process
“Working with multiple recruiters on Paraform felt more like a custom process, as opposed to hiring one agency. Seems counterintuitive, right? But the platform makes it super easy to send feedback, get aligned, and refine our approach over time.”
Tech improves the experience for the humans on either side
“Paraform helped us figure out what information is useful to share with recruiters. I like how we can record intake calls so any new recruiter joining the search can immediately get the context they need to help us. And the Slack integration made collaboration much more convenient.”
Flexible communication
Nivi can interface with recruiters depending on her own needs and bandwidth.
“We send calibration announcements on a weekly or biweekly basis, instead of messaging everyone separately. But I always hop on a 1:1 call with a recruiter when we’re almost ready to make an offer, to get insights the recruiter collected throughout the interview process. It helps us structure and deliver the offer in the most compelling way possible to candidates.”
Nivi will continue using Paraform to fill roles at Banquet Health, and expects recruitment to become even easier with time.
“During our three months on Paraform, we saw multiple new features come out, like the email templates for different stages. We started using these frequently, and based on what I observed, I trust that the platform will continuously improve to provide more benefits to our team.”
Most startups end up choosing between doing recruiting well and doing their actual work. Banquet Health found they didn't have to make that trade-off. That's rarer than it should be.
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