Enabling Every Persona on Your Team

Meena Rudmann, RecOps Consultant at Talent Nova:

Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here, and I'm going to jump right in to talk about the people that we support through our systems and how to better understand them when you hit enablement roadblocks. Every day at my door, there's a new request, an opinion, even a newly built tool, and behind each one of those requests is someone.

My advice is don't just meet the request, but meet the person. They might be the kind of person who needs to understand how all the gears work together before they can really explore a system. Or maybe they're someone who dives right in, makes a bit of a mess, and is coming to you for a bailout. Recently, I had a hiring manager come to me, thrilled to show me a headcount opening spreadsheet they created and maintained with AI.

Sounds exciting, except we spent a lot of time eliminating all of our headcount spreadsheets and bringing that information into the ATS. So my initial response was, "Why do we need another spreadsheet? We can already do all of this in Ashby." My name is Meena Rudmann, and I don't field tickets. I read adoption signals.

I stopped categorizing users as recruiters or HRBPs or hiring managers because the titles didn't fully uncover their needs. Their behaviors do, and the feelings and patterns that they show up with do. So I started creating some new personas, and these personas gave me insight into how to best move my stakeholders forward.

Has anyone here met the overbuilder persona yet? Someone who's so excited that they tend to go right around you? Stay tuned. I'm going to come back to this one. You can think about it like this. Everyone that's showing up at our door is at a fork, and they're going somewhere, whether it's with or without us.

Without, that person could stall or hold up the process for others. With the right support, they could become a true collaborator. And these personas, they can help you meet your stakeholders where they are in their adoption journey, and they can help you respond in more targeted ways. So let's see who is at our door today, shall we?

I wanted to introduce a few of these personas that I've worked with and see if they sound familiar to anyone else. So first up, we have the sleuth. The sleuth is someone who's filled with questions for you, brings up edge cases during new feature rollouts. This is someone who cares a lot about what they're doing, and they need to understand the why behind everything before they can really make it their own.

I partner with the sleuth by giving them the data and the impact surrounding changes, and I sign them up to be my first tester when we're rolling things out. Let's check out the change champion. This is someone who's enthusiastic and ready to help lead the charge. My advice is seek out and empower this person because if you can identify them early, they'll help you multiply enablement for others.

And then there's the holdout, someone who's not quite ready to let go of the old processes and tools yet. With support, though, I've actually seen these users become the biggest proponent of the new tech stack. Without it, they'll hold back change, and they'll potentially keep others from adoption as well.

I like to pair them with the change champion so they can get some social proof on the new tech stack. Has anyone here been ghosted after an implementation? No, just me? The ghost is someone who may not log into the new system after training, goes quiet when you ask how the rollout's going. I stop sending follow-ups, and instead try to build their confidence by putting them in the driver's seat of a real task.

And of course, our overbuilder, someone who's so excited to take part that they tend to build around rather than with the existing process. But this is actually someone who could be your best future systems partner if you can redirect their energy instead of shutting it down. So again, I'm still coming back to this one, I promise.

Once you start to map out these personas, though, you can see the potential they have to contribute to stronger enablement. Now, for anyone that needs a tip on how to take a moment and pause when these requests come in instead of responding to them immediately, I'm going to take us back to my primary school days and share a tip from fire safety week.

Stop, drop, and roll. Turns out it works just as well for recruiting fires. So someone comes to you with an issue. First, take a moment and notice their behaviors. Don't worry about the position or the title. Then go below the surface to understand what they're really trying to achieve. What's the actual goal here?

And finally, use that insight that you gained to roll them back into the systems instead of working around them. I'm going to share now what this looks like in action. When I started at SoSafe, TA was asked to help with headcount planning, and the current state was a web of spreadsheets coupled with monthly reconciliation meetings.

These were painful meetings, lots of finger-pointing, little clarity at the end of them. So I proposed using Ashby's headcount opening feature as a solution. But the signals I got back were not relief. Finance actually viewed a new tool as something that was complicated, one more place that they had to check data, and another item that they had to manage.

They didn't trust what the system could do for them. I had found our persona, the skeptic. Underneath all this, though, the actual problem wasn't the spreadsheets themselves or the meetings. There just was a lack of a single source of truth for everyone to work from. And since this persona didn't believe that the system could get them there, I had to give them proof.

So I ended up creating a demo in Ashby which highlighted the data quality, consistency, and ease of use of the tool, and then I watched the skeptic's guard drop in real time. It was amazing. We ended up rolling out the process with zero pushback, and the win wasn't the original report request, but we made Ashby the source of truth, we eliminated all of the spreadsheets, and we gave back the gift of time because we canceled all of those meetings.

We built trust in the tech stack. But wait, remember that spreadsheet I was telling you about at the beginning of the slides? I'm going to rewind to that now. When this overbuilder showed up at my door, he was proud and excited with this resurrected spreadsheet because AI was being used. It was definitely a moment to celebrate the initiative behind the building.

But we had to ask, was there actually a win here? Was this a more automated process? Did it improve things? Well, it didn't have permissions control, it required recruiters to manually review things, and it was pulling hiring teams out of the system. The goal was to build with AI, but also be as automated as possible, and things weren't aligning there.

So in this case, education was needed to redirect the overbuilder back into our tech stack. We went over why the spreadsheets were originally nixed and what Ashby could already do for us. But this was also an opportunity to really leverage the excitement for building. Together, we looked at the hiring process.

We looked at where's the most repetition showing up, where's the lowest quality, and we used that to then inform our AI experimentation while folding those wins back into our workflows. This resurrected spreadsheet is just one example of how recent building could create duplicate effort or maybe doesn't enhance a current state process.

That's of course going to happen with all the experimentation, but at a certain point, you need to make decisions on how to incorporate these new ideas into workflows. And if RecOps can be part of these discussions early, partner with the builders before they get too far, you can plug them into your current systems and workflows and create more lasting value.

So to wrap things up, enablement isn't one thing. Sometimes it's training, sometimes it's providing guardrails, sometimes it's just getting out of the way. But by identifying personas, it allows a more thoughtful response to the stakeholders you're working with for the long-term health of your systems.

Now, I have a take-home for everyone. I want you to think through the projects that you might be working on right now, maybe some of the training sessions that you're holding, and jot down the behaviors that you're seeing. Are people disengaged? Is anyone ghosting you after a go live? Think about where your stakeholders are in their journey, meet them there, and then redirect their energy back into your systems.

Thank you all.