A 100-Person Startup Got 10,000 Job Applications in 30 Days by Creating an Elite Employer Brand

That’s much higher than normal for companies on our platform, so I thought there might be a bug. I messaged Tremendous COO Kapil Kale to see if something was wrong, but he said there wasn’t. They really were seeing massive interest in their open roles.

What made this even more remarkable is that Tremendous had been struggling to attract candidates when Kale joined the company in 2020. Five years later, very little has changed from the outside. Tremendous doesn’t have external investors, so there wasn’t a big funding round that caught the public’s attention, and there haven’t been any stories in the press about their revenue growth.

So how did Tremendous do it? By creating a unique, compelling employer brand and building their website around it.

“What we realized was that we were pitching all these people, but no one had any idea who we were and what we stood for,” Kale told me. “That was the problem that we set out to solve.”

I recently interviewed Kale for Wellfound’s Why Work Here series to learn how Tremendous became a magnet for job applications. What he told me can be replicated by any startup no matter its size, funding level, or public profile.

These are the five most important steps Tremendous took to supercharge their recruiting results:

They hired a recruiter

The first thing Tremendous did was find a way to reach out to more candidates. A great employer brand is more effective when paired with consistent, targeted outreach.

Hiring a recruiter solved Tremendous’ “top-of-funnel problem,” Kale told me.

With that foundation in place, the company started working on its pitch.

They published an employee handbook

Every startup needs a great website. Even if it doesn’t get many visitors, most of them will be potential customers or employees, and they’re going to view the quality of your website as a reflection of your company’s competence and potential.

One of the strongest recruiting tools on Tremendous’ website is an employee handbook that tells potential hires exactly what it’s like to work for them. The handbook covers just about anything a candidate might want to know, from the company’s mission and benefits package to its performance-review process and the importance it places on writing skills.

Many companies’ careers pages look so similar that it’s hard to tell them apart. What makes Tremendous’ handbook so effective is that it outlines a specific, differentiated value proposition. To create a great employer brand, you need to be clear on what sets you apart from other companies, especially the parts that are divisive.

The breadth and depth of Tremendous’ handbook might make the idea of writing your own seem intimidating, but you don’t need to have everything you want to say mapped out ahead of time. Kale said the decision to write a handbook helped the company define its selling points, rather than the other way around.

“We didn’t have any of this, so it was a month-and-a-half of thinking really hard about what those things were,” Kale told me.

They went fully remote

I believe hiring remotely is the best way to develop an edge in the talent market, and Tremendous is one of the many startups I’ve spoken to that have benefited from it.

Hiring remotely “makes our candidate pool 50-100 times larger than a startup that is only hiring locally in Chicago,” Kale told me.

Expanding their candidate pool made it easier for Tremendous to hire engineers with standout resumes, including a group of early Carta employees based in Brazil.

Remote hiring is the most powerful advantage in the hiring market, and it’s one our data shows most startups aren’t taking advantage of.

They raised salaries

Tremendous decided it would rather have a smaller workforce of highly productive, relatively senior employees than a larger group of 50th-percentile performers. As a result, the company bumped up salaries for new engineering hires to the top of the market, often around the 90th percentile, to make itself more attractive to top candidates.

That wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it helped the company grow its workforce with an emphasis on quality over quantity.

“This felt quite uncomfortable,” Kale told me. “What that also meant was we were able to attract people to the company who would otherwise be going to mid-to-late-stage tech.”

You don’t have to pay at the top of the market to build a great team (we generally recommend paying around the 75th percentile for engineering roles, though you may want to go higher or lower depending on how widespread the skill set you’re looking for is), but, like hiring remotely, raising salaries can dramatically increase the size of your hiring pool.

They limited meetings

Tremendous’ low-meeting culture is the first thing they mention on their careers page, and for good reason. Research has shown that companies with fewer meetings tend to have happier employees.

Meeting bloat has become a major problem in the corporate world. Many employees find it frustrating to have their focus constantly interrupted by meetings that run long and accomplish little. By prioritizing documentation over meetings, Tremendous gives employees more time to do work that matters.

“Our low-meeting culture gives space for autonomy and deep thinking,” one Tremendous employee said in a testimonial on the company’s careers page.

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