Always Friday built an enterprise-grade hiring process before hiring a single HR person

Gianluca Sordano, co-founder and CEO of Always Friday, spends roughly 30% of his working week on hiring. When the company was founded in 2024, that time disappeared into a fragmented tangle of tools: Notion for drafting roles, LinkedIn for posting, university portals for sourcing, and a custom-built career page that required the CTO to update. What started as a fix for job posting gradually became the operating system for all of Always Friday’s hiring: one place to manage every hire, a structured process their whole team could use, and up to 80% of their recruiting admin time back.

The Challenge: Four disconnected tools and no shared process

Always Friday is an AI-native corporate events agency based in Italy, and it is growing fast. The company went from two people to twenty-two in under a year, with a pre-seed round already closed with local investors. For Gianluca, finding the right people is not a background task. It is where roughly a third of his week goes.

Italy’s startup ecosystem grew by 32% in 2024, and Milan has emerged as a genuine hub for engineering and AI talent. That momentum is real, but it cuts both ways. The same ecosystem growth that makes it easier to attract ambitious candidates means Always Friday is competing against bigger, better-known players for the same engineers. Winning that competition requires more than a good job description. It requires a process.

The process Gianluca had when he started hiring in May 2025 was not built for it.

Hiring scattered across four disconnected tools. Every open role required touching multiple platforms in sequence. A job posting would start in Notion, get copied manually to LinkedIn, pushed separately to university portals, and then updated on a custom career page that required the CTO to make any change. Each platform had its own inbox, its own interface, and its own candidate list. There was no single view of who had applied, where they were in the process, or what needed to happen next.

LinkedIn’s free tier forced painful prioritisation. LinkedIn capped free job postings at one active role at a time. For a startup hiring across engineering, sales, and operations simultaneously, that meant constantly choosing which role got visibility and which did not. Posting more meant paying significantly more, which was not an option at early stage.

Candidate communications handled entirely by hand. When a promising candidate came through, Gianluca would export their contact details, switch to his email client, and write individual messages from scratch. Scheduling an interview meant a further round of back-and-forth. Rejection emails were inconsistent or skipped entirely. Neither outcome was good for candidates, or for the kind of employer brand a growing startup needs to protect.

No shared process across the founding team. As the team grew, more people needed to be involved in hiring decisions. Without a central system, sharing candidate information meant forwarding CVs by email, discussing candidates in Slack threads, and relying on memory for where each person was in the process. There was no structure, no consistency, and no audit trail.

“Join didn’t just improve our hiring process, it transformed it entirely. Both in terms of structure and visibility.”

The Solution: From job-posting fix to hiring operating system

Gianluca found Join in May 2025 while searching for a better way to manage job postings. The free trial was the entry point: the ability to publish multiple roles at once, without the LinkedIn premium cost, was the immediate draw. But what happened next was less expected.

“We gave Join a chance and never looked back,” said Gianluca. What began as a tool for job posting gradually became the operating system for all of Always Friday’s hiring.

One place for every candidate, every channel

The first shift was consolidation. With multiposting pushing roles across multiple job boards at once, and the applicant tracking system collecting every application in one place, Gianluca had a single view of all candidates for the first time, regardless of where they had applied. Candidates from LinkedIn, university portals, and organic boards all flowed into one view. For the first time, Gianluca could see the full picture without switching between platforms.

He also introduced knockout questions that cut the noise on engineering roles: setting Italian language proficiency as a mandatory criterion triggered auto-rejection for candidates who did not meet it, removing a large volume of irrelevant applications before they required any manual review. The team focused on the people worth pursuing.

Automated communications replaced manual email chains

Before Join, moving a candidate forward meant drafting a new message from scratch. Rejecting someone meant the same effort, or more often, silence. With Join’s email templates and messaging tools, Gianluca built a library of messages for every moment in the process: confirming an application had been received, moving someone forward, turning someone down, and inviting candidates to interview. Once set up, every team member could send the right message at the right moment with a single click.

“From candidate communications to interview scheduling, I now do everything in Join. It saves me up to 80% of the time I used to spend on recruiting,” said Gianluca.

Interview scheduling moved inside the tool

Rather than coordinating interview times across email and calendar, every interview is now booked directly through Join. Gianluca was an early adopter of the scheduling feature and describes it as central to how the team operates. In the time since adopting Join, the team has scheduled 77 interviews this way. For a 22-person startup with no HR function, that is a meaningful workflow handled entirely in one place.

A shared process, not a solo system

Hiring at Always Friday is no longer a one-person operation. Seven team members now have access to the account, each with a defined role: hiring managers who own the job posting, interviewers who review CVs and cover letters, and founders who keep oversight of all active pipelines without managing every detail. Gianluca set up the templates and interview frameworks once. Everyone else inherited the structure. Onboarding a new team member to Join took under a day.

The Results: A process that rivals companies ten times their size

Since signing up, Always Friday runs every hire through a single structured process. The chaos of four disconnected tools has been replaced by one system the whole team uses and trusts.

Up to 80% less time spent on recruiting admin. By Gianluca’s estimate, consolidating candidate sourcing, communications, and interview scheduling into one tool has cut the time spent on lower-value recruiting tasks by up to 80%. That time has been returned to product, sales, and strategy at a stage where every hour counts.

77 interviews scheduled directly in Join. From the first weeks of using the platform, interview scheduling became a core part of the workflow. Every interview is now booked and tracked inside Join, removing the back-and-forth that used to happen across email and calendar. That figure is a lifetime, cumulative total rather than a recent-period count, and it is still a clear signal of embedded, daily use.

First non-referral engineering hires through Join. Always Friday’s most recent AI engineer and full-stack engineer were not referrals. They found the company, applied through the Join-hosted career page, and went through a fully managed pipeline from first contact to offer. “I’m particularly proud of our last two engineering hires. They weren’t referrals. They found us through Join. That means the process is actually working,” said Gianluca.

A hiring process that rivals companies ten times their size. Candidates receive timely communications at every step. Hiring managers work from a shared, up-to-date pipeline. Decisions are made with full visibility rather than fragmented instinct. “In most startups, hiring is chaotic. Join lets us operate like a proper HR team, even at our size,” said Gianluca. The whole founding team now recognises hiring as Always Friday’s most structured internal process, more consistent than almost anything else in the business.

“Join gave us the structure to manage candidates properly, something we simply couldn’t do before.”

Always Friday is preparing for international expansion, with Germany, Spain, and the UK on the roadmap for the next 18 months, followed by the US. Gianluca plans to use Join across each of those markets, posting roles locally through multiposting and managing international pipelines through the same system. The target is 100 people by the end of 2027. The process is already in place.