Case Study / Flagship Pioneering

Take the Guesswork Out of Hiring
A Crosschq Customer Case Study
<48 Hours
83% of reference reports are completed in under 2 days.
450+ Hours
Saved by TA team by using Crosschq instead of manual reference check process.
35%
Of references opt-in to talent pool for other open at Flagship Pioneering.
The Goal
Flagship Pioneering need to speed things up, but they were unwilling to sacrifice speed for quality when it comes to hiring. A key step in Flagship’s hiring process is reference checking, which was becoming to cumbersome, time-consuming a process for their talent acquisition team with little value in the information they were getting back. They needed a way to reduce their time-to-offer and get a more robust data set on candidates to better inform their hiring decisions, particularly for more junior-level roles where Flagship was seeing higher turnover.
The Challenge
Flagship Pioneering’s hiring managers were manually conducting reference checks; emails to get call times set up, having the calls, compiling feedback, etc. There also was no centralized place where everyone on the hiring team could consistently add their feedback. This was causing delays in getting offers to candidates, and they data Flagship was getting wasn’t adding value to their hiring process or helping inform a candidate’s potential manager on the type of employee they’d be adding to their team.
The Solution
Enter Crosschq. Flagship Pioneering enabled Crosschq360, the industry leading automated digital reference checking solution as well as CrosschqRecruit, which turns references into active candidates for Flagship’s other open roles. Crosschq360 allowed Flagship’s TA team to gather impactful candidate insights centered on their behavior and attributes, strengths and weaknesses, as well as soft and role-specific skills, all with the touch of a button. This didn’t replace the phone call, but rather the data collected by Crosschq360 informs them and other touchpoints in their hiring process.
The Outcome
Crosschq has saved Flagship Pioneering a significant amount of time. Not only are offers getting to candidates faster, but the TA team has been freed up to work on more strategic initiatives. With Crosschq candidate data now stored in an accessible repository, it’s not only helping Flagship hire better but also providing invaluable data to hiring managers to assist with onboarding while ramping up new hire’s performance. And CrosschqRecruit has added validated, cost-effective candidates to Flagsihp’s talent pool saving them more time and potentially thousands of dollars in sourcing costs.

“Crosschq has fit seamlessly into our current workflow and we are getting some great data that informs onboarding a new hire as well.”
Emily Gransky
Director, Talent Acquisition & Operations at Flagship Pioneering
About Flagship Pioneering
Download Case in PDF formatFlagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and sustainability.
Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique, hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $30 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship is backed by >$3 billion of aggregate capital commitments, of which over $1.5 billion has been deployed toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside >$10 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions.
The current Flagship ecosystem includes Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Moderna Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), and Syros Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SYRS).