When Scheduling Data Leads Somewhere Unexpected

RecOps Lightning Talk — September 9, 2026

Abby Weinreich (00:00)

Do we have any Sherlock Holmes fans in the audience? Woo-hoo. Okay, good. Well, I am. I'm a big fan of Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC version. But did you know that as rec ops professionals, we also get to act like detectives, especially when we're using data to dig into process efficiencies? So I'm going to be talking today about what we've called the data detective's toolkit, which is based on this idea that a red metric isn't a verdict, and data alone does not always tell us the full story.

We need to find our main culprits, but also watch out for the accomplices, the other contributing factors that contribute to our data. I'll be talking about six key investigations today that contribute to data, and within each one, we'll be talking about the clues, what are the pieces of evidence, what are we seeing from the team, the hard evidence, what is the data telling us, and also the solve.

So what can you do right now to mitigate, and what is the lesson for next time? So we're going to be talking about the case of the climbing time to hire in our sales department. So time to hire was at an all-time high, and it was steadily increasing, which led to a lot of frustrations with our hiring manager, also the candidate experience.

And that led to a lot of fingers being pointed at our TA team and the recruiters. So this led us to question, well, what is really going on here? What else could be affecting our time to hire? We need to get to know all of our persons of interest. Each of these stakeholders, of course, plays a really key role in our hiring processes, but in ways that are not always super obvious from the data.

So as part of our investigations, we'll be exploring how each of these might be contributing to the data. Our first question is, is the slowdown even real? So for clues, again, we'll be checking for things that are not visible in the data, so maybe there's some Slack conversations with context, maybe it's something like we've just come out of the summer vacation period and a lot of folks aren't available, things like that that are a sensible reason why we're seeing a slowdown.

Hard evidence, of course, we're talking about time to hire here. But it is worth mentioning that a singular spike isn't necessarily a cause for concern, but a continuous increase definitely is. Keep an eye out for that. And so to solve is to confirm that you have a case before investigating any further.

And for next time, log context on every role, wherever that is for you, if that's Slack, somewhere in Ashby, whatever that is, so that whenever spikes do happen, everybody has the context available to them. So we have our case confirmed, so I can go over to my evidence board, which means we can move on to our next investigation, which is did the time to interview even exist for our interviewers?

So the clues here might be seeing things like if there are a lot of public holidays or company events like retreats, things like that. Even contextual clues, if it's a sales role and it's the end of the quarter, a lot of sales folks are not available. They don't want to interview around that time.

Just again, that kind of contextual evidence. So for metrics, we want to have a look at interviewer capacity, how many interviewers is each person doing, but also doing some calendar sleuthing to see if anyone else is going to be out of office, attending client meetings, things like that, to help indicate if the time to interview just wasn't there. So for the solve is to expand your pool, get some extra interviewers involved to help ease the load.

And for next time, build those backups at intake so you are prepared when people are not available to interview. But also get a bit creative. If maybe your hiring manager is going to be away for a couple of weeks, maybe there's a take-home assignment that you can bring up in the process so that you don't have to stall your interview processes.

So we have found our first accomplice. This was definitely a factor for us. We saw a lot of folks that were away at client sites and out of office and things, but it wasn't the primary cause. So we'll pin that to our evidence board. So we'll move on to the next investigation, which is, is this a new role, without any solid benchmarks?

So, for clues, hopefully you know if you have not hired for this role before. But not having any benchmarks makes it really hard to know what a normal time to hire looks like. And the same could be said as well if you're hiring for a really niche role or even a senior role in a vertical that you've hired before.

Senior candidates usually can't move forward as quickly as we might like. For evidence, having a look at open roles over time to see if the same roles are open week on week with very little movement could kind of indicate if there is something larger going on here. So for the solve here, we found it super helpful to spend a lot of time at the top of the funnel with the hiring manager, so a lot of alignment on profiles, who's coming in through the process, and also setting expectations on what the timeline is looking like as you go.

And for next time, conduct retros after every new role if you're not doing this already. It'll help you build a benchmark for the role you've just hired for, but also put you in a much better position to make a timeline suggestion the next time a new role comes along. This wasn't an issue for us because we were hiring for a more established sales executive role, but it is something worth considering.

So we've ruled this one out, so now we'll move on to, is the process built to flow within your ATS? So for clues, we actually found that candidates were jumping through stages totally out of order, which broke our data. So we tend to look a lot at pass-through rates over time. We actually couldn't do that in this case.

We were actually flagged by our coordination team, so shout out to Nina, who's sitting over there, who told us, "Hey, actually candidates are moving to final, they're moving back to the hiring manager stage. We don't really know what's going on." Not only is that really difficult for your coordination team or whoever's scheduling your interviews, but it breaks your data, so for our immediate solve is to reorder those stages so that at least your candidates are moving in a linear fashion and you've got some kind of data that you can rely on.

And for next time, really recommend to spend the time to standardize those scorecards and rubrics at the top of the interview process so that all of your interviewers can be really confident in what you're assessing, when it's being assessed, so that hopefully you can avoid having to move candidates through the process out of order.

All right, and we have found our next accomplice for our investigation. So coming back to the evidence board, we can now do our penultimate investigation, which is, can the team actually keep up? So for clues, you might have noticed on an earlier slide, at the peak of all this, our sales recruiter had 11 open roles with no hiring manager overlap, so truly 11 different roles.

Also seeing things like maybe missing feedback SLAs, which indicates that there was maybe a capacity issue. And we were also hearing a lot of, "Everything's a priority. This role's a priority." And as we all know, if everything's a priority, then nothing is. So for the data, having a look at, again, interviewer load per person, and kind of making a determination for you and your org whether that is feasible for any one recruiter or interviewer to be involved with, and that might look a little different depending on what your volume looks like.

So it's something to talk about with your teams. And so for the solve is to triage, redistribute, get some extra recruiters or interviewers involved to help ease that capacity and that interviewer fatigue. And for next time, set some realistic expectations for both recruiters and interviewers how many roles they can have at any given time.

But also, if this is available to you, use tooling to stretch capacity. So if you're using Ashby Notetaker, BrightHire, or even Zoom Transcripts to allow your busiest interviewers and stakeholders to review clips rather than having to sit in interviews live to free up capacity, but it also hopefully means you can move candidates through the process quicker because you're not having to juggle as many calendars.

So we can definitely mark this one as an accomplice. So now we'll move on to our final investigation, which is does everybody agree on what good looks like? So clues here, we're seeing a lot of, or rather a lack of, clear direction on what the team was looking for and misalignment there. Maybe even some key stakeholders coming into the conversation a little bit too late and having a lot of misalignment.

For hard data, talking about one of my favorite metrics, which is time at stage data, not just where a candidate's spending the most time, but really digging into where within those, that stage or those stages is the stall happening. Is it the scheduling side? Is it the lead time between when you schedule and when the interview actually takes place?

Or is it when you're waiting for feedback? This is extremely, extremely valuable to know where to actually focus your fixes rather than shooting in the dark there. And we had some anecdotal feedback from our coordinators, that the decisions about whether to move forward were kind of being defaulted to other stakeholders who hadn't met the candidate yet, which isn't ideal.

That is not what we want to be seeing. So we've got our pretend hiring manager tagging our pretend VP to get a go, no-go decision, and that's not something we want to be seeing at a hiring manager stage. So for the solve, it was to make sure we got those decision-makers and the hiring team in a room together to really align on the profiles that are coming through the pipeline.

What are we actually looking for? Because clearly they were not on the same page. And for next time, make sure you're having those calibration sessions early on. For us, this happened way too late, about two months into the process. So, that would've saved us all a lot more time if we had done this from the beginning.

But this is why rubrics really matter and alignment is so important, because aligned process means a higher bar of candidates in your process, which saves everybody time. So we determined that this was probably our main culprit. So now if we go back to the evidence board, we can take a look at our entire investigation and come to a verdict, which is that conflicting kind of feedback was the primary culprit.

Our hiring manager was handing decisions over to the VP of the department, and those opinions, as I mentioned, were just not aligning. However, nearly every one of these investigations contributed in some way to the slowdown. So that hopefully your takeaway from this is that it wasn't just the recruiter's fault.

There were a lot of contributing factors that we wouldn't have uncovered without these investigations, and that's why this is so valuable because you can't solve a problem that you haven't properly diagnosed. You need to find the real pain points and fix the issues at their root. Now, I want to leave you with some final advice for any detective.

The first is to talk to your team. Get that anecdotal evidence and context, so the data's not going to show you. Keep a consistent eye on your data so that you can catch spikes early before they snowball. And the third is to build trust with your stakeholders. That partnership and human connection is super, super valuable, and it makes it a whole lot easier when things start to go wrong to say, "Hey, this isn't just our team's fault."

And really, come to kind of a conclusion and find a solution together. And with that, we can consider this case closed.