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🏢 How is Dover Different from an Agency?
ℹ️ How Dover compares to an Agency/RPO:
Before deciding whether to use Dover or an agency, you should determine whether you want to build more top-of-the-funnel through in-house outbound or through an external vendor. If you are in a hurry, why not do them all? If you are cost conscious, why don’t you scale up your in-house efforts?
If in-house recruiting takes up too much work and you’re looking to build a repeatable process to make hires, then we recommend you invest time into putting together processes and tools that will set you up for success. We’ve built Dover specifically for in-house teams to scale their recruiting workflow.
ℹ️ How Dover helps an in-house team:
Dover is used by a wide range of companies — from seed-stage startups to companies like Bill.com. Hiring a recruiter vs buying Dover isn’t an either-or proposition since one is a person and the other is a tool.
A recruiter brings recruiting experience, market insights, and dedicated focus to your recruiting tasks. Dover is the tool through which hiring teams scale their recruiting strategy.
Since you can use Dover to scale your operational recruiting tasks, you (or your team members) should expect to spend more time iterating on recruiting strategies, talking/vetting candidates, and coaching hiring team members. All will lead to a better experience for all (especially the candidates) and better close rate.
❓ I’m looking at other agencies, and I want something more managed. Does Dover do that for me?
Dover is not an agency. We’ve built a platform that allows you to be more effective at all aspects of recruiting. You can use Dover to accelerate your sourcing and candidate scheduling efforts.
If you are looking for additional human help, you can consider Dover Interviewer and Concierge services.
Dover Interviewer is a group of dedicated, expert interviewers who can conduct first-round phone screens on your company’s behalf. Dover Interviewer is completely white-labeled, and you have full control over the questions that Dover Interviewers ask so that your candidates have the best experience possible.
Dover Concierge is designed to give hiring managers a more bespoke and high-touch experience using Dover. Hiring teams can leverage this service to get support on operational tasks or build recruiting best practices through regular check-ins.
If you are deciding between software vs. agency, you should consider a few factors:
Whether you are making a one-off hire: Agencies are great for one-off or executive-level hires since you can start and stop anytime. However, we often hear that companies miss their goal timelines to hire because 1) agency candidates are shopped around to many companies, and 2) an agency is just one channel to recruit from (there are several). If you just have one-specific hire and don’t want to build a repeatable recruiting process yet, you can try Dover’s Flex Plan because you can start/stop at any time, and you’re only paying for your sourcing efforts (interested candidates).
Whether a contingency model or a subscription model aligns better with your goals: Agencies have many clients and are incentivized to sell candidates to the highest bidder, as they make a percentage of a candidate’s first-year salary (anywhere in the 15-30% range). They also have a limited roster of candidates who they are trying to sell, and they’re not incentivized to find the best-fit candidates for you or your company.
Whether you have enough time to do recruiting work: Agencies typically only help with finding candidates — you will still need to handle the rest of the process. If you want to reduce the amount of work and still make hires consistently, then I’d recommend purchasing software that helps you move faster. Finding the right candidates is only half the battle — creating a great experience for candidates is equally important to give yourself the best chance to close them effectively. We’ve found that there are many operational tasks involved in this process, and Dover’s Candidate Management suite is the best option to prevent candidate dropoff.
❓ I already have a Sourcing team/agencies. Why do I need another tool that makes me do the Sourcing myself?
Our product is used by companies ranging from seed-stage startups to Bill.com, where recruiters use our product as well.
By using Dover, you and your in-house team can focus more on the sourcing strategy and less on the operational burden (like sending follow-ups or doing all scheduling back and forth). This should improve the productivity of your team and get you closer to your goal.
❓ What if Sourcing doesn’t work for me? How do I know it’ll work?
Dover ensures you have everything you need to succeed. The product offers full control over outreach strategy and integrates with your email to create the best candidate experience. Dover’s Sourcing Suite also offers A/B testing functionality to help you experiment and create the best campaign possible.
Since your sourcing strategy heavily influences your outcome, we want to highlight a few factors that could limit the potential of your sourcing strategy:
1️⃣ The role is extremely niche (if there are fewer than 100 people in the world exist that would even be eligible). In those cases, you’re better off doing a high-touch approach, such as offering to take them out to dinner, since your hit rate needs to be really high.
2️⃣ When the job has a bad job-market fit (e.g., paying 2x below market rates, offering an uncommon career path, etc.), it could be harder to attract talent
❓ What is Dover responsible for vs. what am I responsible for?
We’ve found that in most successful companies, Hiring Managers (HMs) assume responsibility for the hire since they are ultimately making the hire/no-hire decision.
The reason that most HMs don’t want to be hands-on in recruiting is that it’s tedious and they have other work they’re responsible for.
There’s a lot of operational work to do—sending hundreds of emails, never dropping the ball, staying organized with a ton of candidates in your process, going back and forth trying to schedule interviews, etc.
With Dover, HMs spend zero time on those operational parts of recruiting. The product offers full visibility and control over all those operational pieces.
❓ How many interviews can we expect per week, per role?
Dover gives you all the tools needed to control and optimize your top-of-funnel.
We’ve built a platform so that you can achieve your goals:
Sourcing Suite: You can use Dover’s platform to craft your search strategy and send outreach to qualified candidates
Candidate Management Suite: You can use Dover’s platform to make sure all candidates get the scheduling process that you create. This ensures that you can minimize drop-offs.
Platform: You can use Dover to post on job boards and review top applicants
❓ How many candidates will I get each week? Can you guarantee a certain number of new emails sent per week?
Our Sourcing product lets you search and reach out to as many candidates as you want. To help you have the most success, Dover’s sourcing suite will also provide you with resources that will help you get the most out of your strategy. For example:
1️⃣ You can leverage our auto-drafted campaign content to quickly create an outreach copy that’s uniquely yours.
2️⃣ You can leverage the A/B testing feature to learn what copy works best for you all
3️⃣ Just like any other outreach, your email client (e.g., Gmail) monitors for robotic behaviors. To prevent email lockouts, our product would recommend a daily email threshold of 200 outreaches per week, but you can bypass that limit if you feel comfortable.
We have also put together a set of best practices on email outreach to help make sure that you don’t trigger spam filters when you’re hiring at scale. Dover follows this best practice guide for all email domains managed by Dover.
❓ How do you guarantee that your candidates are good? How do I know I can trust you if there are no guarantees about candidate quality? What proportion of your customers get hires?
While companies like Bill.com, Benchling, Scale, and more used Dover to do the work to recruit top talents, companies are ultimately in charge of their recruiting outcome. Dover makes sure that you have the best tech to do the best work.
Our product shows you an extensive list of candidates, but Dover doesn’t have “our candidates” - Dover is the workflow automation layer that sits on top of candidate sources like LinkedIn, Github, and basically, anywhere else candidates exist. Sadly there’s no secret warehouse of candidates anywhere. You can use Dover to configure your search criteria as broadly or as narrowly as you like, so the right candidates are contacted for each role.
We’ve found that successful outbound sourcing is really about two core things:
1️⃣ Sending high-quality, personalized messaging to a solid number of candidates
2️⃣ Iterating on your pitch and search strategies
Dover is built from the ground up specifically to enable you to do these two things efficiently.
❓ What types of hires do you specialize in?
Dover is agnostic across different roles. You have full access to the publicly available data that Dover has put together, and you can use that to explore and find people who could be a good fit. What’s more important is choosing the right channel and strategy for recruiting this particular role, and Dover allows you to work across several different channels to attract the right candidates.
As you source candidates, you have control over whom to contact.
❓ What’s Dover's expected time to hire?
It would be hard to share comparable numbers since they are highly dependent on the company size, role type, salary range, how you use the product, and other factors.
Dover has reporting built-in that monitors the health of your search and suggests ways you can constantly improve. For example, Dover will automatically flag if you have interest rates that are below the benchmark.
Another example is that Dover’s reporting will highlight what candidates say when they say no, so you can iteratively improve your outreach and pitch over time.
If you’d like to see how others have benefited from using Dover’s product, you can check out our case studies.
❓ Do you share our candidates with other customers?
No, your data is stored just for your access. You won’t have access to other customers’ databases, and the same applies to them.
💽 How does Dover Compare to Other Recruiting Products?
❓ How is Dover different from other sourcing tools?
Dover’s Sourcing Suite is unique in that our product can be as manual or automated as you like. We have a sourcing extension that enables you to source candidate by candidate. We also have an automated sourcing configuration that will take your search and outreach campaign configuration and execute sourcing at scale for you.
Dover’s sourcing also ties in with our scheduling functionality so that you can give candidates a great experience!
❓ How is Dover different from other scheduling tools?
Our end-to-end scheduling features are built on top of the same database as our other features. What that means is that you don’t have to worry about integrations, and candidates will get the best experience when you also leverage other Dover features or services.
Scheduling tools and your ATS’s native scheduling feature are not as automated as Dover in terms of candidate communication, so you will have to do more work to maintain the candidate pipeline. Our end-to-end scheduling feature can go full-auto once you configure it at the start of a search.
This way, you can focus on talking and vetting the candidate, and trust that all of your candidates will get the coordination experience that you’ve designed.
❓ How does Dover compare to my ATS?
Dover has basic ATS functions, but we’re not an ATS. We’ve built a recruiting workflow tool that enables you to start recruiting at scale within an hour of setting up. Applicant Tracking Systems only help you track candidate statuses.
While many customers use our basic ATS functions, we also have customers with dedicated ATSs. That’s why we have bi-directional integrations with Lever and Greenhouse.
❓ I’m concerned that Dover will be reaching out to candidates I haven’t personally vetted, and I’m worried that rejecting candidates after sending outreach will negatively impact our brand.
Dover exposes search and automation configurations so that you are in full control. In addition to setting your search configuration when you start a job, you can always access the search configuration and adjust the type of people you are looking for. You can also control how automated the outreaches are.
For example, you can turn off the automation and review the list of matching candidates and select who to send outreach to. If you prefer to source directly on LinkedIn, we also have a sourcing extension that will keep your workflow efficient.
❓ How does Dover send white-labeled outreach? Do you need an email alias for our domain?
To make sure we’re white-labeled and we have a good email reputation, Dover will create and maintain a new domain that’s exclusive to your company (for example, dovercareer.com). We’ve done this for 200+ paying customers, including Scale, Stripe, and more.
🌐 How is Dover Different from a Source?
❓ Where does Dover get its data?
Dover Sourcing Suite aggregates publicly available data from all across the web so you can focus on crafting your search strategies.
❓ How often does Dover refresh its data?
Dover refreshes its database in real-time and updates profiles that have changes.
❓ What makes Dover's candidates unique?
Dover doesn’t have “our candidates” — what we do have is an extensive database that combines publicly available data so that you have an extensive view of the world.
❓ How does Dover handle diversity?
Dover has a search feature that allows you to filter the database for Underrepresented Minorities (URM) and female candidates. Our product can identify URM and female candidates based on our trained machine learning.
You can leverage this feature to craft a search strategy that’s tailored to your DE&I targets.
❓ How does Dover compare to LinkedIn? Why can’t I just use LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is just one of the many databases that our data comes from. Dover sits on top of all the candidate sources so that you have a more comprehensive view of the market.
Additionally, if you want to reach candidates via email, LinkedIn alone won’t do that for you.
❓ How do you compare to Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent)?
Wellfound job board is a great place to post your job description if you want to get more applications. Dover is not a job board, but our platform can aggregate all of your applicants and sort them based on your search criteria.
❓ How do you compare to Triplebyte / Wellfound-Curated?
Triplebyte & Wellfound-Curated work like an agency in that they gather candidates actively looking to switch to a job, and Triplebyte & Wellfound-Curated connect them with many companies, including yours.
On the other hand, Dover is a tool used by your in-house team to find qualified and interested candidates in the market. You’re able to reach a larger audience, find candidates who are interested in your opportunity, and not pay a large outcome fee to an agency.