56 roles, zero agency spend, 90% lower cost per hire: how Swiss Startup Association built a team with JOIN

Founded in 2020, Swiss Startup Association is Switzerland’s official national startup association. It advocates for better regulatory conditions, runs 150–170 events a year, and connects 1,900 members across all four language regions of the country. With just 11 full-time employees and no dedicated recruiter, the organisation has to be deliberate about every tool it adopts. Hiring is no exception.

A nonprofit with 1,900 members, a seven-person team, and zero recruiters

Raphael Tobler, President of Swiss Startup Association, wears many hats. Hiring is one of them. When the association needs to bring someone on, it’s Tobler — not an HR department — who posts the job, reviews applications, and manages the process from end to end.

That constraint shapes everything. There’s no tolerance for complexity, no budget for agency fees, and no time to spend managing multiple platforms. The tool has to work immediately and stay out of the way.

“A hiring tool has to run as quickly, simply, and uncomplicatedly as possible. That’s the whole point.”

Hiring from scratch: no budget, no recruiter, no room for chaos

Before JOIN, hiring at Swiss Startup Association ran into the same wall most small Swiss nonprofits face: the established job platforms were expensive and slow.

Traditional Swiss job portals charged 1,000–2,000 francs per posting — with no guaranteed results. For a lean organisation managing a careful budget, paying that upfront with no certainty of finding the right person was difficult to justify. And even when results arrived, they often didn’t.

Manual distribution across multiple portals consumed time nobody had. Each platform had its own login, its own form, its own quirks. Posting a single role meant repeating the same work across several sites, each eating into time better spent on candidates.

Thirty-day listing expirations disrupted ongoing recruitment. For roles that take longer to fill — or where the right person simply hasn’t applied yet — forced expiration meant reposting, re-paying, and restarting visibility from scratch.

Unqualified applications overwhelmed the review process. Without a way to filter early, every application needed a manual read. Leadership time spent sifting through unsuitable CVs is leadership time not spent on the work that actually matters.

How JOIN became the only hiring tool they’ll ever need

Tobler came to JOIN looking for something simpler and cheaper. He found a platform that handled the entire process — and kept improving.

Multiposting eliminated the platform-by-platform grind. Instead of logging in to four or five boards and filling out the same fields each time, Tobler posts once in JOIN and the listing goes live across relevant boards automatically. The first listing pulled in 189 applications within two weeks — with no paid promotion.

Job templates cut setup time to around ten minutes. Once a role structure exists in JOIN, new postings inherit it. For an organisation that hires across a range of functions, from events to partnerships to operations, having a solid template to build from means the heavy lifting is done once.

Pre-screening questions filter unsuitable candidates before anyone reads a CV. A few targeted questions at the application stage — about availability, relevant experience, or location — remove applications that don’t fit before they reach Tobler’s inbox. The volume stays manageable. The quality goes up.

The interface requires no training. For a team without a recruiter or an HR system, this matters. JOIN works the way it looks like it should work. Tobler was running a full hiring process without any onboarding.

“I wrote to the JOIN founder on LinkedIn just to tell him what an amazing platform this is. I’ve already recommended it to ten others.”

90% lower hiring costs. 56 roles posted. Every full-time hire made through JOIN.

Since adopting JOIN in 2020, Swiss Startup Association has posted 56 jobs and recruited every full-time team member through the platform — with zero agency spend.

Cost per hire dropped by 90%. Replacing four-figure job board fees with JOIN’s multiposting removed the biggest fixed cost in the hiring process. The budget saved goes back into the association’s actual work.

Every full-time hire has come through JOIN. Not some. All of them.

“I’m 100% certain that every single hire came through JOIN.”

189 applications on the first listing — within two weeks. The reach that JOIN’s multiposting unlocked from the very first role set the tone for everything that followed. Quality applications, early in the process, without paying a premium for placement.

For a lean team running 150+ events a year with no recruiter and a careful budget, JOIN has become infrastructure — quietly essential, completely dependable, and recommended without hesitation.