We Ditched The CVs

Toggl’s controversial hiring strategy

Freedom is one of the core company values at Toggl and employees are given an unparalleled degree of autonomy and flexibility. Such organizations are still rare so it naturally caught my attention. I follow my new found rabbit hole and realize that the main product of Toggl is…a time tracking tool. What a dichotomy! I just had to speak to Dajana - the head of HR at Toggl. 

Turns out they have way more curiosities in store than this one seeming contradiction:

• Toggl was fully remote before it was a thing (since 2014). Despite the common belief that culture suffers with remote setup, they are broadly recognized for their culture, both by the employees and by external bodies. 

• They don’t tell their teams how or when to work (yes, despite the whole time tracking thing - it’s used for personal productivity, not for surveillance). 

• Performance is measured purely by outcomes - how and during which hours these are achieved is up to each employee. 

• They don’t use CVs and they pay people to try working with them. 

And it all seems to work - Toggl has been steadily growing and profitable as a fully bootstrapped company, making over 20m ARR. Average employee stays at the company for almost 4 years, with an overall retention rate of 86%.

In this article we’ll unpack the hiring process, which is deemed controversial both by candidates and other companies.

(If you can’t constrain yourself to just one slice of the cake, you can listen to the full interview here.)

“We don’t care what school you went to”

Toggle has ditched the CVs a while back. The premise is simple: you either can or you cannot do the tasks required. The school you went to or the company you worked for before are not important. So the first step of their hiring process is a 20 minute task-based test tailored to the specific role the candidate applies for. 

How do they know that the test is actually done by that person and not by some AI agent? - you might be asking yourself (I certainly did). 

Short answer is - they don’t. 

Of course, there are some technological guardrails in place but ultimately you can’t be 100% sure. 

“But that’s why we have other steps in the process” - says Dajana. 

On another hand, if I consider the amount of “creative writing” I have seen in CVs, fraud potential doesn’t seem much greater in this system. While there’s clearly a huge opportunity for bias reduction, inclusivity and efficiency gains.

Fun fact: some of the current Toggl employees have applied “for fun”, just because they were curious about the test.  

Next stage in the process is a video interview. This step is yet another part of the hiring that gets mixed feelings - understandably candidates would much prefer talking to a human rather than recording their answers in a video. But with 3000 to 5000 applications per role and 10-15% conversion rate after the test, meeting everyone live is just not feasible for a  small TA team. 

If you “pass” the video part, there does come a very traditional person to person interview. About 30% of applicants would typically do well there and move on to the next - the most controversial, and the most important - part of the interview process. 

Let’s date before we marry 

The final step of the hiring process at Toggl is a paid one week trial. This “dating before getting married” approach is quite common for companies with high autonomy-high ownership cultures. I first heard of it from Haluk Can - the founder of Latro (you can listen to his story here). This doesn’t only allow the company to “test” the candidate but it also allows the candidate to see if company’s ways of working would really be the right match for them. Candidates are given a lot of information, they meet not only their potential future team but also other employees, they get to experience the working environment and show how they approach problems in action. Ca. 50 people from Toggl join such test weeks. About 50% of the candidates get hired after the trial. 

“It’s very time consuming, but it’s one step we will never remove from our hiring process. We are pretty sure we would have made many hiring mistakes without it.” - Dajana 

For me personally it sounded like one of those genius ideas that immediately felt like common sense. I really couldn’t understand what people found controversial about it. The main argument I heard was that if the candidate is currently employed, they would need to organise their time off. - True, but then the alternative would be to quit their job and potentially find out in a month or two that it wasn’t really a match….  

It is doubtlessly an expensive process on the employer side - but then so are bad hires. 

(I’m very open to hearing more arguments on this - slide into my mailbox)

In companies where employees are given both freedom and responsibility, getting the right people in becomes even more crucial than in more traditional, process & control driven organisations.

This is how Dajana is solving it in Toggl. How are you thinking about it in yours?