EMEA Talent Trends: Inside the Data Shaping Hiring Today

Ben Hubbard (00:00): Hi, Ashby One. I'm Ben, and I help lead our EMEA customer success team. It's great to see so many of our customers in the audience today. In this session, we're going to dig into Ashby's proprietary data. Today's Talent Trends report is extra special for two reasons. One, we're debuting data from our very first EMEA-specific Talent Trends report, which focuses on trends in this region.

And two, we have a printed report here for every member of the audience, which focuses on everything that we'll be covering in today's chat. As we read through some of this report today, I'm joined by two incredible talent leaders. They'll share how these trends are showing up in their teams and in their work.

Let's meet them now. First, we have Amanda, who leads talent acquisition at DeepL, one of Europe's leading AI companies. During her fifteen-year career in talent, she's helped build high-performing teams at Salesforce, Uber, and now DeepL, and is passionate about how great hiring enables both organizations and people to do their best work.

Amanda is endlessly curious, and these days says her three young children are her greatest teachers.

Amanda Johnson (01:13): Thank you.

Ben Hubbard (01:14): Célia is a director of talent acquisition at Moss, which is the finance AI platform for Europe's mid-sized businesses. There, she leads TA teams across five European locations. Over the past three years, she scaled hiring to 120 roles a year and rebuilt the company's interview and KPI framework from the ground up.

Before Moss, she spent six years at Amazon in London driving large-scale technical hiring and recruiting operations across EMEA. Let's give them a hand.

So today, we have three topics to cover. First up, we're going to look at the volume paradox. Then we're going to look at screening load and candidate experience, and finally looking at time to hire holding steady. So first up, the volume paradox. Everyone's seeing more candidates in the funnel, but as we all know, more isn't always showing up as easier for talent teams.

You'll see this mapped out in the recruiter capacity section of the report in front of you. Right, let's get to the data. So first up, applications per hire in EMEA doubled over the five-year period from 2021 to 2026. A 101% increase, and we saw Benji talk about this in the earlier session.

Next up, even with rising application volume, EMEA recruiters are getting more done. Hires per recruiter per quarter has fluctuated over the past three years, anywhere from roughly 3.8 to 4.8 hires per recruiter per quarter. And finally, go-to-market roles look similar across regions.

170 applications per hire in EMEA versus 235 in the Americas. But technical roles diverge sharply, 250 in EMEA versus 610 in the Americas. So far, the story is consistent. EMEA recruiting teams are facing more incoming volume, screening more candidates, and making more hires per recruiter than they were a few years ago, largely absorbing that load without it becoming unmanageable and without growing teams.

Célia, a few months ago, you and the team at Moss pulled your interview data apart. What did you find?

Célia Sauthier (03:30): So we found similar trends. Top of funnel had increased dramatically. We had twice the number of applications per recruiter, 30% more sourcing, 40% more referrals. So top of funnel looked a lot larger than the previous few quarters.

And so we were expecting to see more hires naturally, but that didn't happen. And so it left us really puzzled to what was happening. And so we had to kind of go into every kind of stage and interviews and understand kind of what was happening. And so we started looking at the first stage.

Okay, that's looking good. Second stage, third stage, and we arrived to final stage, and that's where things were breaking. Instead of what was before 75, 80% pass rates, it dropped to 50%, and that was within kind of a few months, a quarter. And that is a very dramatic change.

So we were like, "What is going on in these final interviews?" They're usually with our founders or C-suite, and so it's a relatively cohesive group of interviewers. And we're like, "Are they going rogue? Are they asking questions that we haven't aligned?" So we put all the feedback into Claude, and what came out of that is essentially a lot more mentions around AI fluency, which weren't the case a few months before, even a quarter before.

So they were mentioning things like not up to par with the expectations on this role on kind of AI use. And then there were a lot more references to concrete feedback around ways of working or culture that were quite different to what we had always aligned with them. So what essentially happened is that group of stakeholders went on their own journey of really strengthening and solidifying kind of what they were expecting on AI and on the DNA and the culture at Moss, and they had not brought the rest of the organization.

So we were aligning with hiring managers, running the search, and then two, three weeks in, the candidates are meeting the final interviewers and the C-suite and founders. And we realize very late in the process that we've kind of been misaligned, been looking for something that they're not essentially on board with, and a lot of wasted time and energy.

Ben Hubbard (05:58): Interesting. And that AI fluency gap, how are you going about closing that? Obviously, founders know what they're looking for.

Célia Sauthier (06:05): Yes.

Ben Hubbard (06:05): How are you empowering the team to kind of close that gap?

Célia Sauthier (06:08): Yeah. So because this happened really fast, we also had to think about ways to tackle this change with people, but also processes.

And so the first thing we did was, we need to bring the hiring managers kind of up to speed here. And so we kind of created a common language and framework around AI fluency. We said, "Okay, there's three kind of categories or three buckets that each role falls into. Either it's an AI adopter, it's AI driver, or AI builder."

And then for each kind of bucket, there's a common set of expectations, there's the kind of interview questions we ask, and kind of a bit of a scoring rubric. And then we kind of brought the managers to essentially a training session and kind of really bringing them on board to say, "Okay, all roles are going to fit one of these.

"Now you have to decide where they fit. And then this is how we help you kind of use a common language." The other thing that we really had to do is look at the process. How do we bring that alignment way early, versus discovering it three weeks in? And so we always run a kickoff, and that kickoff is usually, you sit down with your manager and you ask them a lot of questions, and they don't always come very well prepared or they kind of are doing this discovery with you.

And so we said, "Okay, we need to make sure that they can have that constructive conversation and that there's a lot more clarity up front." So we're actually now kind of designing a kickoff that's going to run on Claude, and that is also going to be able to design kind of qualification criteria to say, "This is clear enough to go," like, "You can go and work with the TA team," or, "This is actually not clear enough.

"We need to pause and figure out what we need here before we start running." And also kind of an alignment gate where we make sure that the C-suite sponsor has kind of reviewed the brief and kind of signed off, and then we're ready to go.

Ben Hubbard (08:12): It's really interesting, so I'm seeing that in a lot of customers at the moment, that kind of AI gap coming where a cohort of interviewers know what they're looking for and the rest of the team doesn't.

Thank you. Amanda, your inbound has basically doubled since you joined DeepL. What's behind that?

Amanda Johnson (08:27): Yeah, it's really in line with what you're seeing in the data at DeepL as well. And besides candidates now having the ability to mass apply using AI, which impacts everyone, not just us, there's just a couple things that have been happening at DeepL over the past couple of years.

And so the first is this AI gravitational pull. A lot of candidates we're seeing are migrating out of traditional SaaS towards AI companies, so that's great for the top of our funnel. However, that same buzz is bringing every great AI company to London and some of our other hubs, so the competition for the top of the funnel is getting much harder.

So it really cuts both ways. And then the second thing is that our footprint has changed over the past couple of years, so our inbound has changed. So when I joined, two and a half years ago, we were mostly hiring remote and mostly based in Germany, and since then we've really expanded our offices across London, Amsterdam, other German hubs, Tokyo, Austin, and we've opened two new offices in New York and San Francisco most recently.

And so that has also attracted talent from different markets, and also our employer brand has increased since then too.

Ben Hubbard (09:39): And how are your team managing this volume day to day?

Amanda Johnson (09:43): Yeah. So there's a couple things. We've made some efficiency gains for sure, but we've also kind of leaned into some more strategic decisions around that.

And so the question we really ask ourselves is, where can a recruiter's hour of time add the most value? And so that came to our channel decision and how we try to optimize the different channels that we hire from. And so inbound for us has always been a good channel. We hire, like 40% of our hires come from inbound.

Referrals have also stayed really steady around 20, 30%. But where the big gap was was sourcing. When I first joined, our hires were, like, less than 10% from the sourced channel. And so that was a decision that we made to lean into the channels that had the best return, basically.

So while inbound is good, it's the least efficient channel. It takes the most time, especially now that inbound has doubled. And sourcing and referrals give us that extra time back. And so we have shifted the team's energy to really focus on those two. And like I said, because sourcing was a little bit more of the gap, we've really invested into our sourcing channel.

And in the past two and a half years now, we've moved to more like 30 to 40% of our hires coming from sourcing, so like four times growth.

Ben Hubbard (11:03): Nice. And you mentioned at the start of that answer about efficiency gains. Is there anything you can add there?

Amanda Johnson (11:08): Yeah. So the energy shift was very helpful, but we couldn't have gotten those hours back for more sourcing without some efficiency gains.

Our team is making use of the screening questionnaires that are built in Ashby just to filter out candidates really early on that may not be a good fit based on location or right to work in certain countries. And then of course, the AI-assisted application review that helps us surface applications or candidates that are most likely to be a good fit for the roles that we have open.

Ben Hubbard (11:40): Awesome. Thank you. So Amanda, you're kind of leaning more into sourcing, while Célia, I know your team are using referrals a lot more. I'd love to hear from both of you, do you see a difference in either time to hire or quality of hire for sourced candidates versus other channels?

Célia Sauthier (11:55): For time to hire, there's not a big difference for us across referrals, sourced, inbound, and internals.

Internals are a bit quicker. But there's no big difference really. I'd be interested in hearing kind of what Amanda's seeing. On quality of hire, there's a big difference. So we've been measuring this now for a year, so we have solid data. And essentially, no surprise, referrals is the highest, so strongest quality of hire across all channels.

The second one is actually inbound. And then the third one is sourced. The exception is for tech. It's inversed. It's first sourced and then inbound. But I was a bit surprised, I have to say, because there's a common kind of narrative to say, "We can't rely just on inbound because we need sourcing and we need sourced candidates."

So I was trying to think, what can explain this difference? And one thing I mentioned before is that we're not quite there in terms of how are we codifying our ways of working in our Moss DNA. And I think that could be an explanation as to the quality-of-hire difference.

Because it follows the pattern of those that are, I guess, closest to understanding kind of how Moss operates and our ways of working and the pace and intensity. Like referrals, they have an insider view. They kind of know what to expect. Inbound, they're applying because something resonated maybe in the job description or maybe they know the company, and then sourced, they're kind of cold approach, so they are probably the least likely to know what to expect.

So it could be an explanation why the quality of hire differs.

Ben Hubbard (13:34): Awesome. Thank you. Amanda?

Amanda Johnson (13:35): Yeah. So on the speed side, the intuitive thought that I came up with first was that sourced candidates would move the fastest, just because they skip the application review and go straight into the funnel.

However, we're seeing that our internal candidates actually move the fastest by far, like 12 days average time to hire. And then we see referrals next, then sourced, and then the kind of slowest time to hire channels are inbound and agency. And so speed, it's mixed. So sourcing didn't necessarily buy us speed, but it did really buy us reach, and that's what I mentioned in the last question, is that our footprint really changed.

So we needed access to new markets, new role profiles, and that was one of the reasons we really went all in on sourcing. And then on the quality piece, it's also mixed. So referral candidates have the strongest pass-through rates. And sourced candidates are right behind referrals, but we typically see they have stronger feedback that's coming through after the interviews.

And so again, for us, we're not really trying to go all in on just one channel. We really try to optimize for a healthy channel mix because every single channel buys you something different.

Ben Hubbard (14:50): Awesome. Thank you. And if anyone's curious to go deeper on quality of hire, we have a full session later today.

Cool. So we're going to move on to our next theme now, which connects two sections of the report, the screening load numbers from recruiter capacity and the candidate experience section right after it. So let's dive into the data first. First up, applications interviewed per hire climbed from 6.3 in 2021 to 13.3 in Q2 2026, with a notable acceleration over the past year. Meanwhile, candidate-facing metrics stayed flat.

Interview hours held between 2.4 and 2.9 since 2021, and interview events only ticked slightly from 3.6 to 3.9. And finally, early in 2021, EMEA candidates converted to offers at a meaningfully higher rate than American candidates. That gap, though, closed steadily through 2023 and 2024, and by '24, and the two regions were essentially indistinguishable at this point.

These days, EMEA candidates' early edge in interview odds disappears entirely by the time we get to offer stage. So we've got a bit of a mystery here. If candidates aren't spending more time interviewing, where did all the extra effort from talent teams go? Célia, you told me at one point only 5 to 7% of applicants in your funnel made it past that first application review.

What did you do when you saw that number?

Célia Sauthier (16:19): Yeah. I did a kind of quick mental maths, because I think when you see these numbers, it's a bit abstract. So I looked at the last six months. We had 30,000 applications. Less than 90 are passing that first stage, so it's about 200-plus hours that we're spending reviewing candidates that aren't a fit.

And when you put it into perspective and you put a timestamp on it, it lands very differently. I think to the point Amanda made, a lot of our work now is about creating focus, and focusing on the right channels and the right energy across these channels. And so I really had to focus on, how can I optimize this time?

Because we have a pie of time, and that pie was getting eaten up by applications. So we did two things. One is introduce friction in the application process. It's not something I would have done one or two years ago, but it's something that for us, we need to do. So we've added two, three questions to application forms, some open-ended, some kind of yes/no, multiple options, to test a little bit the motivation and also get a bit more signals upfront.

And then the second thing is we built a set of rules to auto-reject applications when they're clearly not a fit.

Ben Hubbard (17:47): So you mentioned auto-reject rules there.

Célia Sauthier (17:49): Yeah.

Ben Hubbard (17:50): Can you kind of talk me through what you're doing to make sure you're not filtering out someone who would be otherwise a great candidate?

Célia Sauthier (17:56): Yeah. I think it's a real tension, I think, also across many other stages, even a resume. The level of depth and detail you get from one application to another varies a lot. So you may miss out on a great candidate in that process as well. And recruiting is not a science.

We're all trying to gather signals from resumes and interviews and so on. So I think it's a risk that is part of what we do. The way that we try to reduce that risk is, we ask questions, and we reject on the basis of answers that we would do if we were to hop on a call with a candidate and ask that same question and get a similar answer.

That would be a basis for us not progressing. So we try to be objective and clear in the way that we ask those questions and then reject candidates.

Ben Hubbard (18:51): Awesome. And Amanda, you mentioned to me that you've got a friend who's currently actively interviewing, but they're running into some really intensive pre-interview stages.

Can you tell me a bit more about that?

Amanda Johnson (19:02): Yeah. I have a couple friends that are interviewing for roles, and they're just mentioning to me that it's completely different than it was a year ago. The rounds are the same, however, what's asked upon the candidates up front is a lot more. So intense assessments.

Yeah, so they're just feeling like they're having to dedicate a bit more time upfront than they were in the past. And we're seeing that with the data too. So we see the round counts have stayed the same, but the weight within the rounds is really shifting.

Ben Hubbard (19:32): And can you kind of tell me how your team at DeepL are thinking about some of these assessments? What are you looking to add in there?

Amanda Johnson (19:38): Yeah. So for us, we typically start with who are we trying to hire, and then build the assessments backwards from there. And because DeepL, like many of the companies you all work for, changes every six months to every year, you also have to think about who are you trying to hire regularly.

And so in the past year, there's been two changes that we've seen that we've adjusted our hiring process to reflect that. And so the first one is our engineering profile has changed drastically over the last year. So we decided to retire our live coding round, which was in Google Docs, so it needed an update anyway, and move forward with an AI-assisted round within HackerRank.

And so what it was assessing for is quite different than it was before because the job has changed. So it's looking for how you prompt, how you validate those prompts, how you debug something that you haven't created yourself. And so that was a big shift for us, and one way that we just swapped a stage rather than adding a new stage.

And then the second example is, at the beginning of the year, we had a brand-new manifesto and set of principles about how we wanted to show up in work and a little bit around culture for this year. And so what we decided to do with that is that we retired our final kind of culture round and replaced it with a bar raiser round.

And so we built some attributes, so five, based on these principles that were set in place by our CEO and leadership team, and decided to assess these principles or attributes throughout the entire process and not just wait to the bar raiser, which exists, but assess a few at the recruiter screen, also hiring manager screen, and then the final round.

And the reason we did that is that we wanted to have this quality filter checked earlier on, one, to help us save time, but also save our candidates precious time. And so for both examples, again, the round count didn't change, but we really swapped out something that made sense for us now that maybe didn't make sense for us a year ago.

And so it didn't get longer. The process definitely got sharper, and any interview that you have has a cost. It's a lot of time to interview for both you and the candidate. So if it doesn't create a stronger signal, then we were thinking, let's just cut it or change it, so.

Ben Hubbard (21:55): Awesome. Thank you. And just on AI, we have multiple sessions today, including the final session on this stage.

So let's move on to our final topic. We're going to be looking to wrap up our time today with hiring velocity, the third section on our printed report. Time to hire has held in the 37 to 43 day range across EMEA since 2021, and half of all EMEA hires close within 35 days, just one day behind the Americas median of 34.

So with more applications and more screening, you'd expect time to hire to slip, but it actually hasn't. Amanda, you're sitting at 41 days versus a 45-day target. How did you land on that target?

Amanda Johnson (22:38): Yeah, we were deliberately ambitious, so when we set that target, we were trending more like 50, 60 days. So we've really brought that down in the past couple of years.

And how we set it, so a shout-out to Bennet. You already saw his name on the screen. I don't see him right now, so he's somewhere. Hi, Bennet. He helped us create that target, and what we did was we used industry benchmarking. He really connected with the RecOps community through Slack channels and other ways.

And we also used our current data to see where we were sitting. Combination of the two helped us set that target of 45 days.

Ben Hubbard (23:13): I love that you've made so much progress against it. I'm your CSM (customer success manager), so it's been really awesome kind of seeing that go through. I'd love though to kind of actually dive into what has actually moved the needle for your team against that goal?

Amanda Johnson (23:26): So it's a combination of things. One, part of setting that goal, we also put together our structured hiring process, and we mapped out what's the ideal time for each stage of the process and set SLAs (service-level agreements) around that. So keeping in line with structured hiring helps, for sure, setting the SLAs, and then using Ashby features like the reminders and whatnot.

And then, yeah, really investing in the hiring manager/interviewer training so everybody understands the value of moving quickly. All of those things have really helped, in addition to Ashby's automation, so.

Ben Hubbard (24:06): Amazing. Thank you. And Célia, you're holding at 35/36 days time to hire. How are you helping the team move fast?

Célia Sauthier (24:14): Yeah, so similar things to Amanda, like the structured stages, they're now all the same across the company. We have SLAs for each stage. If one interview needs to be added, it has to be within one of those stages. So we try to consolidate also finals into a chunkier set of interviews.

So we've worked on the process a lot. The tooling has been something we've worked a lot on. I mentioned before, auto-reject rules is a big one, of course, to kind of make sure you're reviewing kind of candidates quicker. The latest one we've been using is the reminders for candidates to book time, so we use automated scheduling.

But in the past, we had to chase candidates when they weren't getting back to us, and we weren't always the fastest to do that. So candidates would wait quite a long time before booking time, but now we have the automated reminders every 12 hours. We do three attempts, and then on the third one, we kind of say — it's like a soft breakup message.

It's like, "It's not the right time maybe for you. You found something else. It's all good. If things change, let us know. We're here." And then after that we just archive candidates, and that helps us prioritize those that are engaged and want to progress, and then those that aren't quite there yet, we kind of deprioritize.

Ben Hubbard (25:37): Amazing. Thank you. I love that, breakup messages. A good closure moment.

Célia Sauthier (25:41): One thing I will say is we've not done enough on hiring manager education, so we've taken the brunt of all of this on TA, but we need a lot more from our managers.

Ben Hubbard (25:51): Awesome. Thank you. So some of the biggest influencers on time to hire in the business are those stakeholders and hiring managers that we're working with.

To wrap us up, I'd love to hear from both of you: how are you enabling these stakeholders to hire well?

Amanda Johnson (26:05): Yeah, I can start with this one. I mentioned this a little bit before, but we have really invested in interviewer training and capacity this year. And the reason I mention that is, like you said, automation can help a lot, but it can only go so far if you have hiring teams that are committed.

So you can send twenty reminders, but if they're not listening to them or not paying attention to it, then it's not really going to help your case. And so one thing that we do is try to make it more of a leadership expectation. And for example, I recently brought our CEO along with me to present to all of our managers on a big hiring update.

This was the bar raiser one I spoke about. And when the rest of the leads can see the CEO speaking to this, they can understand how important it is. It's a little bit inspiring and motivating, and it becomes more something that's an expectation and not something that your recruiting partner or HR is asking you to do.

The second part I mentioned as well was this kind of investment in training. So this year we have revamped our, we call it our Interviewer Excellence Program. So it has an interviewer academy with three tiers now. We're trying to create a bit more of an interviewing community via Slack, and also trying to recognize our top interviewers, the hours that they put into it, the impact they've made by making these amazing hires.

So then that also goes a long way from this kind of commitment perspective. And the last thing I'll say on this is just also making sure you're trying to equip your own team. So having the training in for the interviewers is great, but making sure that your team also feels really confident and trained, and really confident in using Ashby and having the data at their fingertips.

And of course, setting the team up for success with having the right number of roles to work on, too. So something that also I've found that really impacts time to hire is not having too many roles to work on and having a good prioritization method. Like, 8 to 10 roles will close faster than 15 roles at a time.

So making sure that we just really focus on the team's success as well.

Célia Sauthier (28:09): Yeah, I would echo that as well. I think for us, we're not quite as structured yet on interviewer and manager education, but it's something we're actually working on now. And very much similar principles.

It's like showing, not telling. And leaning onto your really great managers or your leaders. They're already doing other great stuff, but showcasing that. So for example, we're thinking about running these sessions, and there'll be themes on these. On candidate engagement, it's like, can we spotlight that manager or the CEO that is cold calling candidates out of a busy day so that the expectation isn't kind of communicated by our team, but the managers are looking around each other and realizing that the other managers or the leaders are doing all these things and they're not, and creating a bit of an oh shit moment where they need to kind of realize that this is the new expectation.

And then running that into a manager onboarding. So just it becoming just part of their general onboarding and part of their first steps at Moss.

Ben Hubbard (29:17): I love that you both bring your CEO/founders in. That's a good tip for everyone. So yeah, I just wanted to say thank you both for joining and giving us your time today.

I hope that everyone here had something to take away, including bring your CEO along. Just quickly, you can subscribe to our Talent Trends Report, which you have physical copies of, but there's a QR code on screen now that will give you notifications when new Talent Trends Reports come out, and please feel free to follow along.

Enjoy the rest of Ashby One. Thank you very much.

Célia Sauthier (29:47): Thank you.