### Overview

  1. The Four Stakeholders of Recruiting Operations
  2. Introducing the Hero Index Framework (HERO = Hiring Efficiency Results and Outcomes)
 3. Using The HERO Index for Strategic Business Impact

### Transcript
*Note: transcript is auto-generated, there may be typos.*

**Will Ducey:** Okay. Running Rec Ops as a system, evergreen metrics for strategic alignment and continuous improvement. My name is Will Ducey, and for the past three years I've been the head of recruiting operations at Kraken. And last Monday I took the leap and now I am the first head of recruiting operations at Ashby.

**[00:01:00] Will Ducey:** What a way to start your second week. Today I'm gonna talk to you about the stakeholders of recruiting operations. I'm going to introduce you to the Hero index. And then we're gonna get really nerdy and really into the data, and I'm gonna talk to how, talk to you about how to set this up. What if we could align all of our stakeholders on the right metrics?

**Will Ducey:** What if we could move recruiting into a true strategic business function? Have any of you lived through the pain of seeing your recruiting colleagues, your friends, impacted by layoffs? I have. It's one of the hardest things I've lived through people who care deeply about our mission. People who convinced others to join that mission one day were told they were no longer needed.

**Will Ducey:** This experience has shaped all of us. It's why I care so much about getting the narrative right today. I'm inviting you to join me. Let's build something bigger. By the end of my short talk, I hope you'll be inspired to build with me. We can't focus on just one stakeholder. We can't focus on just one metric.

**[00:02:00] Will Ducey:** We have to understand the whole system, how it comes together, and how it builds something better. We all track metrics, right? Time to hire, candid NPS hires per recruiter, but how do they interact? What happens if we focus on one and forget all the others? What if we could bucket our metrics in a way that shows our true business value?

**Will Ducey:** Has anybody received these questions over Slack or email on a late Friday afternoon and you're thinking, what in the heck? How am I gonna respond to this? It gives me, yeah, a big gulp in my throat. It's really important that we can control the narrative, that we can bring metrics and that everybody understands them, right?

**Will Ducey:** If the chief people officer comes to you and asks one of these questions, it's very hard for you to understand the context. Maybe they went to a SHRM website and pulled terrible industry data. Uh, this is a way for us to drive this, and that's what I'm hoping to talk to you today about the stakeholders of recruiting operations.

**[00:03:00] Will Ducey:** I see four main buckets of this, and I'm gonna jump in here. So we've got the recruiters. Uh, hiring managers, candidates in the business. The next thing I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about is the drivers for each of these buckets, and then from there we'll craft metrics that go with these drivers. So the first thing, uh, recruiters, they wanna spend time with the right candidates and they want the tooling, processes, and infrastructure in place to do just that.

**Will Ducey:** Hiring managers want a deep recruiting partnership and they want a high ROI of the time they're spending with candidates. Candidates want a transparent and fair assessment process and consistent pacing throughout and the business, high quality hiring done in the most cost efficient way. So now that we understand the drivers for these four stakeholders, we're gonna talk a little bit more why about why I think evergreen metrics are super important.

**[00:04:00] Will Ducey:** No matter what stage of hiring your company is in, whether it's hypergrowth or in retraction mode, we should not shift which metrics matter to us. We're in hyper growth, hypergrowth mode. It's all about the speed of hiring. How fast can we get people in? And then in retraction mode, you're thinking about cost reductions while finding one person to fill five roles.

**Will Ducey:** We should embrace metrics that always matter to our stakeholders. Now I'm gonna introduce you to the Hero Index. Hero stands for Hiring Efficiency Results and Outcomes. Thank you. Chat, GPT. That was a, a great brainstorm I had with you. So we already talked about the drivers. I'm gonna translate those drivers now into three metrics for each of these buckets that we can use to show the full picture for this hero index.

**Will Ducey:** Recruiters. We obviously care about their satisfaction with our recruiting processes, so I ask them an NPS question, how likely they are to recommend our recruiting process to other organizations. It's a key metric for us candidate quality that's really about the focus on the top of funnel. And then hiring efficiency is about how hard our recruiters are having to work to get a single hire.

**[00:6:00] Will Ducey:** Hiring managers, we deeply care about their satisfaction and then how many candidates we're sending to them to get to a single offer. And then how many business interview hours per hire for each candidate candidates, their satisfaction, the time to hire, and the offer acceptance rate. If we're being transparent at the early stage all the way through our job descriptions, through the talent screen, all the way to offer, we should see a very high offer acceptance rate.

**Will Ducey:** In the business, they care about cost per hiring point. Again, going back to hypergrowth or retraction mode, we can't compare an entry level person with a VP level hire, which is why I think it's important to keep costs in perspective with the scale that you're growing. Quality of hire extremely important.

**Will Ducey:** And then we also need to care about if we are delivering the right hires exactly when the business needs them. Okay, hero index. Everybody still with me? Okay, cool. Let's talk about how to set this up. There is gonna be a ton of numbers, ton of data. Don't worry about checking the math, understanding it.

**[00:07:00] Will Ducey:** Within the next two weeks, I'll probably share a spreadsheet with you and a blog post to go with it. So if you're interested in how to build this in your organization, you can. Okay. The first thing to note in, in version one on the left side of your screen, we have a hundred percentage points to allocate across each of these stakeholder buckets.

**Will Ducey:** So the simplest version is giving each bucket 25%. If you wanted to adjust that and say the business is the most important, you can give them 40% and then the recruiters 30% knowing if you have a happy recruiters, the hiring managers and candidates are gonna be taken care of still with me. Okay, so there's the four buckets.

**Will Ducey:** We're gonna jump into the candidate bucket because those are the metrics that I think you'll all understand the easiest. All right. In the candidate bucket, again, you can do the same thing. So we already allocated 25 percentage points. I divided each of the three metrics by three, which gives us that fun eight number.

**Will Ducey:** If you wanted to do offer acceptance rate at 15, you could, and then give the other buckets 5%. The next thing you need to do is look at the minimum and the maximum. The minimum is sort of the worst case scenario for that specific goal. So in the time to hire, that's a hundred days and the maximum would be 20 days, which is the goal.

**[00:08:00] Will Ducey:** In the next slide, 45 days is the actual time to hire achieved, and I'll show you that right now. Okay. A lot of numbers, a lot of data. Just pay attention to me. This formula is in the spreadsheet, so you can see this is a quarter over quarter basis. We move from 12% to 14%, and the change quarter over quarter was 2%.

**Will Ducey:** The time to hire moved up six percentage points, so we got closer to the maximum there. And in general, we know the candidate bucket got better candidates should be objectively and subjectively happier with how we performed in, in the recruiting organization.

**Will Ducey:** This is the full picture, the biggest thing to note. So this hero index, what we're, what we've essentially created here is a percentage, if a hundred percent is the goal, which means we hit every single one of our target metrics, then we should see a hundred percent number there. You can see there's green, there's red.

**[00:09:00] Will Ducey:** It's important that we're not always gonna see green. We may not even move the needle a ton, but on a quarterly basis, we can go to our stakeholders and they can see the full picture of everything that we're impacting. We're not just focused on the business, we're not just focused on the hiring manager.

**Will Ducey:** We have the complete picture here. We can now design projects and initiatives designed to influence these metrics. If cost is really important to the business, we have to be able to understand the trade-off decisions that they're making across the other buckets. I am gonna jump into the hiring manager bucket.

**Will Ducey:** This one's a fun one. These bottom two are very objective metrics. The candidate or the hiring manager, NPS, more subjective, so we can go to them and say, objectively, we provided better business results. Why are you unhappy? We can get qualitative feedback and then figure out how we can influence them through additional projects.

**Will Ducey:** And then my favorite one, finance. Everybody loved finance. They're giving you more budget every year. Okay, cool. Well, we can objectively say, Hey, we're delivering better business value. We're giving you better quality of hire, and we're delivering candidates exactly when the business needs them. Yes, it's costing us more.

**[00:10:00] Will Ducey:** Maybe our costs are going up, maybe we're investing in great tools. I didn't even plan that one. So this gives us a great way to look at the business in all of our stakeholder buckets and drive things forward. I don't like uncertainty. Uh, uncertainty about whether my colleagues and I are gonna be in our roles tomorrow.

**Will Ducey:** This hero index can change that. It gives us something clear to aim for, something we can measure, improve, and build upon. I believe we can take more control of our future together. We can shape how the business sees us. I invite you to help me create the next version of this. Let's work to elevate recruiting for all of us.

**Will Ducey:** We know we are a strategic business function. Let's prove it. Let's use data and metrics to make it undeniable. Thank you.

### Key Takeaways

- The HERO Index Framework: A systematic approach to measuring Hiring Efficiency Results and Outcomes across four stakeholder groups
- Stakeholder Alignment: How to balance the needs of recruiters, hiring managers, candidates, and the business through unified metrics
- Evergreen Metrics: Why consistent measurement matters regardless of company growth phase (hypergrowth vs. retraction)
- Strategic Positioning: Using data to demonstrate recruiting's business value and protect against layoffs
- Practical Implementation: Step-by-step guidance for building and calculating the HERO Index in your organization

Will Ducey, Head of Recruiting Ops at Ashby, introduces the HERO Index framework for aligning recruiting metrics with stakeholder needs. Learn how to prove the strategic value of TA with evergreen metrics that drive clarity, impact, and continuous improvement.

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