How Shyfter scaled a 10-person team and filtered out fake applications

Shyfter is a Belgian HR-tech startup serving 600+ customers across shift-scheduling and workforce management. Founded in 2016 with a 10-person team, the company has the early-stage hiring problem inverted: too few real applicants and too many automated or fake ones.

The Challenge

The recruiting pipeline failed in two directions at once:

• Volume was low. Shyfter wasn’t getting enough applications to justify the cost of premium job boards — but without applications, premium spend wouldn’t fix the problem either.
• Quality of incoming applications was worse. A meaningful share of submissions were either automated bots or applicants applying to anything in the title. Filtering took the CEO’s time.

Both problems pointed at the same underlying issue: the channel mix was wrong, not the spend level.

The Solution

Shyfter moved to Join’s free tier. Multiposting expanded reach across 15+ boards immediately — including LinkedIn and Indeed — without any spend. Built-in screening questions filtered out the automated and fraudulent submissions before they hit the CEO’s review queue.

The cost calculus inverted: zero spend, more applications, fewer bad ones to filter.

The Results

• 10-15 qualified applications per day across the open roles.
• 4 hours per week saved on what used to be the manual triage step.
• Multiple confirmed hires including a Customer Success team member and a Frontend Developer — both via the free tier.
• Premium spend on major boards dropped sharply — once the free channel mix was working, paid placements were no longer the bottleneck.

The wider point Shyfter makes: when applicant quality is the problem, more spend is rarely the answer. A better channel mix and a screening filter at the entry point usually is.