Recruiting

aronow.io

Astronomer

Attentive

Aven

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Boulevard

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Brigit

Calm

Census

Clever

CloudTrucks

Coder is a remote infrastructure development platform that makes working with code easier than ever. Coder enables everyone from industry rookies to experts to develop code faster than ever before, using templatized starting points and ultra-secure workspaces.

Coder

Cohere

Cointracker

Color

Costanoa Ventures

Decimal

Deel is payroll for modern business. No matter where you're hiring, Deel helps customers run payroll, supporting 150+ countries with hundreds of worldwide experts. Deel helps their customers know that hiring, paying, and managing stayed compliant and easy in their all-in-one platform.

Deel

Deepnote

Deliveroo

Dune

Duolingo

EightSleep is more than a mattress company - it's a suite of products devoted to sleep fitness. Their goal is to make sure that your sleep is as high-performing as you are, helping you meet and exceed the bar for excellence in your waking life. Athletes and scientists alike love their range of highly customizable sleep tech because it helps them live healthier.

EightSleep

Figma

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FullStory

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Linear

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Marqeta

Modern Treasury

Monte Carlo is a Series D data observability company helping its customers accelerate the adoption of data to eliminate downtime. 

Monte Carlo

Notion

Opendoor

Plato

PostHog

PostHog is an open source analytics platform. Their product is used by product, engineering, and marketing teams to understand user behavior, including product analytics, session recording, user paths, a/b testing, heatmaps, and more. The suite, founded through Y Combinator in 2020, has since been installed by over 10,000 companies.

Pragma Platform

Pulley

Ramp

Readme

Replit

Scratchpad

Sift

Snyk

Sourcegraph

Stytch

Talentful

Treasury Prime

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VanMoof

Veev

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WeTransfer

Zippin

Culture

Engineering

Product

Chris Lee

With new legislation going into effect across multiple US jurisdictions (Colorado, California, Washington, and others), more and more companies are now obligated to post salary ranges on at least some of their jobs. This trend is expected to continue.

![pay transparency](/images/pay-transparency-chart.png)

_Source: Meghana Reddy / Alamere_ 

At Ashby, we’ve been developing a set of features to help companies be compliant and, if they so chose, improve their recruitment marketing by including compensation on job posts with a varying degree of transparency.  
  
As we’ve been speaking to our customers and other folks in the industry, we’ve been getting a lot of interesting questions around best practices. This post sums up our thoughts — and touches on a few key elements of Ashby’s new pay transparency feature. We hope it’s helpful!  

## How transparent should you be?

The approaches we’re seeing largely fall into two camps. Companies are either focusing primarily on being compliant or they are using this chance to change how they handle compensation throughout the hiring process. We’ll explore both approaches.

### Approach 1: Compliance only

As most regulations go, it’s relatively easy to meet the baseline requirements. We’re seeing some companies choose the path of minimal change and focus entirely on compliance.  
  
**The easiest way to comply is:**  

-   Post salary ranges only on job postings that require it (because you are hiring in a jurisdiction that mandates it)
-   Post ranges only on the job postings in the jurisdictions that require it
-   Post large salary ranges

Ashby now allows our customers to add compensation tiers to their job posts. An approach that focuses only on compliance may end up looking like this:  
  
![sample compensation bands](/images/sample-compensation-bands.png)  
  
While this minimal approach is totally acceptable, there are some downsides to it:  

-   If more companies share complete and more meaningful compensation data, it may make your organization look bad in comparison.
-   Very broad compensation ranges can make conversations with candidates tricky; many will assume they should be ranked at the higher end of the range, even if the evaluation during the interview process doesn’t support that.

As a result we’re seeing more companies using this regulation as an opportunity to bring salary data to all of their job posts in a way that is designed to improve candidate experience and the overall hiring process.  

### Approach 2: Sharing compensation data to improve the hiring process

An alternative approach is to start advertising compensation on your roles more generally, giving you the opportunity to share your compensation philosophy publicly. We are seeing more and more companies take this tactic and go beyond pure compliance.  
  
The main downside to this approach is that it takes a lot of work internally. Especially for larger organizations, being able to publish compensation data _externally_ may take a lot of _internal_ pre-work. If compensation bands were not shared internally up until now, that will likely have to be done concurrently with posting compensation data on jobs.  
  
That said, if you’ve been considering formalizing your compensation bands, now is a great time to prioritize that initiative.  

## Different ways to present your compensation data

Independent of your level of transparency, you will also need to decide _how_ you want to represent your compensation data. We’re seeing companies take a number of different approaches — we’ll explore different options and their tradeoffs below.  

### Providing granular compensation vs. total compensation

Netflix is well known for its unique culture and compensation philosophy. They express compensation on job posts as “total compensation,” which consists of _salary_ + _bonus_ + _equity_ (with a wide range.) They also share their compensation philosophy. Here’s an excerpt from a job posting for a workplace management role at Netflix:  
  
![Netflix’s disclosure policy](/images/netflix-policy-exerpt.png)  
  
The alternative is to break out different components of your compensation, for example, cash vs. equity. The right approach mostly depends on your audience and how familiar they are with the standard compensation structure at your company. For instance, calling out equity compensation specifically may make sense when advertising jobs in markets where candidates are less familiar with receiving equity as part of their compensation package:  
  
![comp with equity](/images/compensation-with-equity.png)  
  
And for earlier stage startups it often makes sense to represent equity as a % of the company instead of a $ value, as shown below:  
  
![comp without equity](/images/compensation-sans-equity.png)  
  
If you’re using Ashby, our pay transparency feature allows you to structure this data whichever way you like. Here’s a quick preview:  
  
![compensation tiering in ashby](/images/ashby-compensation-tiering.png)  

### Tiering

For some roles, you may have multiple compensation tiers (most commonly based on seniority and/or location). You can either represent the entire compensation band as one wide tier, or you can share more granular tiers with candidates. Your approach will depend on how you organize jobs and job postings for your roles within your ATS.  
  
Here are a few different approaches:  

-   Create separate job posts for every tier, by location and/or seniority
-   Create separate job posts for locations, but tier by seniority within each post
-   Create separate job posts for seniority, but tier by location within each post

### Tiering by seniority

With this system, you organize job postings primarily by location, then show seniority tiers within the job post. For instance, you may have a job posting called “Customer Success Manager - US” with the following tiers:  
  
![compensation by seniority](/images/compensation-by-level.png)  
  

### Tiering by location

With this method, you have job posts organized by seniority of candidates. So you may have a job posting called “Senior Customer Success Manager.” Within that job post you then organize by location:  
  
![compensation by location](/images/compensation-by-location.png)  
  
If you are using location-based compensation and have some definition of different location tiers, we recommend including a guide in your job descriptions such that candidates know which compensation band would apply to them.  

## Placing on the job board overview

If you’re aiming to go beyond compliance, you may also want to advertise compensation at the job overview level on your job board. Ashby customers can choose if they want to only share compensation in the job post itself or also want to share it in the overview.  
  
![job board with compensation shown](/images/job-board-with-compensation.png)  
  
This approach will immediately make you stand out as a company that embraces salary transparency which, historically, has led to a higher rate of inbound applications.  

## Enforcing compliance

To ensure compliance with new regulations going forward, you should put a solid system in place. This will be a lot easier if you’re using an ATS, as you can configure job approvals which will allow your team to review any new job postings before they go live.  
  
Within Ashby’s pay transparency feature we even allow you to block jobs from being posted if they _don’t_ show compensation. You’re able to choose if compensation should be required on all job postings or only within specified locations.  
  
![compensation compliance data](/images/compensation-compliance.png)  

## In summary

The new regulations around salary transparency bring some extra work to recruiting teams. But they’re also a great chance to revisit your compensation and recruiting philosophy overall and implement some larger changes in how you and your candidates talk about compensation throughout the interview process.  
  
This change will have many results, one being closer collaboration between talent and people functions. We’re confident that that collaboration will be a huge benefit to everyone.  
  
We hope the guide above is helpful in getting answers to some of the easier tactical questions involved in this change.

The hiring landscape is changing this year, as new pay transparency regulations roll out throughout the US. Ashby is releasing a unique new feature to help you stay compliant - learn more here.

Salary Transparency | Practical Tips for Compliance and Recruitment Marketing

Willem Wijnans

I got into Recruitment because of candidate experience.

2007 – It was my first real job: HR data entry, crunching spreadsheets for the HR manager. At the time I heard a couple of engineering interviews. I’d done some coding and had dabbled in computer science enough to tell that they were asking them the wrong questions. So I offered to help them out with their next engineering interview. And just like that I was in technical recruiting.

I didn't know it back then, but I came to realize that many companies were really struggling with this exact problem. Enough that I was able to build my own brand around helping founders build their engineering teams.

If I could print something on every door of every office, it would be, “Even if we don't want to work with them, they should want to work with us.” That’s the core of candidate experience, and you can create that feeling.

## A Great Experience Is One Where A Rejected Candidate Still Recommends Your Company To Others

The more I've progressed in my career, the more teams I led, the more elements of recruitment I became responsible for, the more I care about the overall experience of that pipeline. My own experience showed me that how you’re treated as an applicant is often a very good impression of how you’ll be treated as a team member, which has led me to relentlessly prioritize experience.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of prioritizing the people you know you can hire, and letting everyone else drop. But that’s only a short-term win. Someone who isn’t a fit for one role might be a great fit for another. If you’ve made them feel unimportant or overlooked, they won’t want to come back, they will call you out (sometimes on LinkedIn and Glassdoor), and it’s very unlikely they will ever buy your product.

A good candidate experience is one where a candidate feels seen and heard. A great candidate experience is one where a rejected candidate still recommends your company to others.

## Speed, attention, and preparation are the best places to improve an experience

Non-recruiters have a misconception that recruitment doesn’t take time. But it’s one of the most time-consuming tasks because it involves people. Potential recruits aren’t computers that sit in a room waiting for your input. They’re people with lives and feelings. So to achieve a great candidate experience, you have to first abandon that misconception and embrace the fact that it’s going to take time.

### Start with a well-prepared team

Candidates in a newly-opened job too often have poor experiences.

I’d estimate that 80% of jobs aren’t initially specified well, and early candidates end up being unofficial test subjects to help recruiters and hiring managers refine the role. Even if an applicant is excellent, it doesn’t matter if the hiring manager doesn’t know what they want.

Even if it’s an urgent hire, decide what you’re looking for before you start sourcing, so by the time you start filtering people into the pipeline you’re not rushing to build it out in front of them. I recommend you require upfront:

1.  What will the person be expected to do in the role?
2.  A rubric for what qualities/experience they will need and examples of what ‘great’ and ‘poor’ look like.
3.  An interview plan with questions for the interviewers.
4.  If there is an assignment, an outline of the assignment and how it will be assessed.

### Identify and celebrate hiring managers that focus on candidate experience

You need to find the champions that can help you adopt a certain approach - putting candidates at the center - and make sure others look to them to set the culture around hiring. Once you've got that, once talent acquisition and recruitment starts living within the organization, that's when you will start to feel the impact of more formal training.

One way I have seen this done in previous roles was that becoming an interviewer was something you needed to earn. If you were interviewing for the engineering team, it meant you were senior on the team, you had training, you’d done reverse shadowing, and you’d graduated to actually being in front of candidates. It made it something people opted into and truly wanted to do instead of feeling like a chore.

### Ensure hiring managers and interviewers have training

Too many companies think hiring managers will know how to do their job from day one. That’s just not possible. Recruiting takes an entirely different mindset. It’s not fair to expect someone who isn’t familiar with it to take it on naturally. So training for hiring managers and interviewers is crucial. To do this we recommend starting with basic values training, clear expectations of what a candidate will need to be successful, and then track candidate survey results and pass through rates by interviewer to ensure there are no anomalies.

### Ensure hiring managers know who is sourced and who came inbound

Another prepwork fail point is when hiring managers or interviews don't know who has been sourced and who wasn’t. This is always a recipe for bad candidate experience. If the candidate was sourced, they’re already likely to be a good fit - you need to sell them on the company. You want to wait to start interviewing them until they're sufficiently pitched and excited about your company. But interviewers have to know who’s who in order to do that.

### Give candidates all the details before they apply

People want to know how much time they need to invest in the process (especially sourced candidates), so I always put the interview plan up front if possible. It’s a hot topic, but sharing compensation upfront also saves so much time (and is now legally required in a lot of markets too). Waiting until the final stage to discuss compensation is a big waste of time. That kind of clarity helps a lot with the candidate experience; people know what they're signing up for.

### Set candidates up for interview success

What I see going wrong all the time is a failure to set people up for success.

In way too many interviews, the interviewee doesn't know what the interviewers are looking for. It’s a black box, the interviewee can’t prepare. So just tell them. Say:

1.  This is who you're meeting with
2.  This is what they do
3.  This is what they care about on this call

On the candidate's side it’s really detrimental for their experience when they don't know what they need to do to do well. But it’s detrimental to the interviewers, too. It’s so much easier when interviewers are prepared on what to look for, when they know what their goals are. I’ve seen whole interviews where there's no preparation from either side, or every interview at the same stage was different. It’s a horrible experience and it’s completely avoidable.

Most companies that are taking hiring seriously, the first thing that they start implementing is structured interviewing ([these help](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/hiring-memo).) They build interview feedback systems, or instructions that every person gets. It’s so important to standardize this part of the process.

![an interview plan in ashby](/images/ce1-interview-plan.png)

![more of an interview plan in ashby](/images/ce2-interview-plan.png)

### Offer assessment options that create space for different circumstances

Assessments become a bad experience when they don’t match your work style.

At Ashby, we give engineering candidates the option to do either a take home or an in-person live coding assessment. Different people work better in different ways, and this choice lets engineers play to their strengths and show us their best work.

It makes an impact just having the option and making the hiring process feel like a two-way street.

Too many companies still think that talent is a commodity, or that an eight hour long assessment is normal. And it could be normal, but it depends where you introduce it. For instance, I’m a parent. Before I became a parent, I might have had time to go through an eight hour assessment loop, but right now I can’t do that. It’s an unreasonable friction, and not a predictor of good talent.

At Ashby we do one three hour take home, or you can code live with the team for about an hour and fifteen. People have the option to do what they think is best. Just that one choice, it makes all the difference.

### Reach out often, even for rejections

When we talk about what not to do, ghosting is obvious, right? It’s something we all know: always follow up. But unfortunately, in this day and age, getting a rejection, even if it's a canned message, is a good experience. To go a step further than this isn’t hard though.

Automation is one way. In my time as the Head of Talent at VanMoof, we leveraged Ashby’s Alerts for candidates that had been in the pipeline for more than 5 days. This combination let us move candidates along and out of the pipeline with ease. As recruiters, a place a lot of us struggle is in letting people fall through the cracks – it will improve candidate experience if you put a system in place to stop that from happening in the first place.

![alert automation in ashby](/images/ce3-alert-automation.png)

## Measure for patterns, not numbers

If you’re serious about measuring candidate experience, you can’t just use a typeform then crunch the numbers yourself. You want to use a dedicated tool that can help you visualize the data.

But you only need to ask two or three questions at the absolute max. Consider these:

1.  How likely are you to recommend working at this company to someone else? 
    
2.  I was briefed well on what to expect during each interview (setting candidates up for success is paramount to a good cNPS)
    
3.  Open ended question: “Do you have any general feedback for us” (there will be lots to uncover here)

This is an example of the NPS dashboard I built for the team in Ashby:

![NPS dashboard in ashby](/images/ce4-cnps-dash.gif)

I am particularly proud of having a high cNPS (40) in stage “second round” (left bottom chart). These are all people that fill in our survey when they are rejected for a role:

![survey results in ashby](/images/ce5-graphing.gif)

Scan relentlessly for promoters and detractors who get denied in the final stages of your process.

If you find final-stage detractors who should not have been there in the first place, that’s great discussion material for the team on how to optimize in the future. If they detract because they spotted a genuine issue, like bad interview preparation, that’s valuable information, too.

When you have promoters who were denied in the final stages, you have reason to celebrate and spread this behavior to other teams involved in hiring. Have high-scoring hiring managers meet with hiring managers who don’t score as well for coaching.

As a rule of thumb: The overall cNPS score is a nice thing to look at, but this will also include people you’ve hired, who most likely will be promoters. You really want to look at the cNPS of non-hires, especially those who made it far into the process.

Therefore I always measure cNPS per interview stage - check out the image above to see what that looks like.

## Take small steps to improving your candidate experience

The #1 thing recruiters can do is to automate the bulk work and then focus that freed time on the human elements. Put less time on email copy and more time on being kind and personable. Most modern hiring tech stacks will help you do this, you just need to start early. But this is all in service of helping the actual human side of the recruiters.

You can start small. There's so many points in the candidate journey that you can focus on. Pick one and work on improving it. Every touchpoint a candidate has is a chance to make an impression.

Too many companies don’t start doing this until they’re getting big. So start as soon as you can, and it will help make it easier while helping your company stand out. You don’t have to catch up if you’ve embraced the basics early on.

And the most basic part is being a nice human.

Willem Wijnans has helped dozens of companies recruit and scale - now he's sharing what he's learned about crafting a candidate experience that will make even rejected candidates love your company.

Candidate Experience | Metrics, Processes, And Anecdotes To Go From Good To Great

Abhik Pramanik

Hiring top-tier engineers is one of the biggest challenges in my role as Ashby’s VP of Engineering. I’ve learned that your careers page - and, more broadly, the way you optimize your website with recruiting in mind - is one of the biggest keys to finding the talent you want.

## What can a job description say?

Ashby was in stealth for a long time, and we had to put a lot of effort into our careers pages because people didn’t know who we were. Aside from the careers page, what else could I tell them about the company before they spoke with me?

I came up with the idea of using our  job descriptions to tell a story.

Every company has some type of role they're thinking about differently than other companies. The first consideration in the job description was how to communicate what makes each role unique. Most candidates half-ignore job descriptions. I thought, “If they're going to read it, I might as well make it something different.” Rather than list requirements and responsibilities, consider: what makes your company and the roles you're designing special?

The second piece is your manager. Your manager makes a huge difference in your job. I wanted to see how to infuse that into job descriptions. How can people figure out who I am and what I'm about?

One of Ashby’s engineers, [Ben](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benasher44/), followed Ashby’s co-founder, Benji, from their previous company. Ben felt that Benji spoke passionately about engineering management. Ben said that most managers felt like they fell into the role, whereas Benji felt like he wanted to change the game when it came to engineering management.

I wanted to find a way to capture that feeling and communicate that leadership strength from the very first contact with a potential applicant. From there I decided to write the descriptions in first person rather than write it as if I'm some corporate entity trying to explain the basics of the job.

![An example of an Ashby job description](/images/job-description-career-pages.png)

I don’t want people to feel like another cog in the wheel at Ashby. I want people to feel the excitement that we have about our work and see the actual projects they would do rather than abstract responsibilities. The career page and the job descriptions are an important piece of that.

Simplicity and using the default structure is your enemy in creating powerful job descriptions and a powerful career page. If you say you need four years of software engineering experience, that doesn't tell anyone what type of experience you're looking for. Instead, think about what you want people to be excited about in the role. Be opinionated so that you'll attract the people who are on board with the way you want the role to work.

## What are candidates looking for, and what are they taking away?

Once you have your job descriptions worked into a form that you like, you’ll find that a lot of the heavy lifting on your careers page itself is handled. From there, you can expand your focus outward to different areas, but you should keep the candidate at the front of your mind as you do.

What are great candidates looking for when they view your career page? When a candidate comes to your careers page, they're trying to understand a couple of things:

1.  Is this something I would want to work on?
2.  Is this a team that I want to work with?
3.  Is this a manager that I want to work for?
4.  Is this a set of leaders that I want to work for?
5.  Does this fit my style of work?
6.  Are these the benefits that I'm looking for?

It’s really just a few big concerns. They want a sense of what the job is, they want a sense of what they’ll gain by working with you, and they want a sense of who your company really is.

Use your careers page to try to answer as many of these concerns as you can as quickly as you can. A lot of job candidates go through the entire recruiting process, really enjoy the company, and then get an offer that doesn't match the band that they're looking for. Or their potential manager's working style isn't a fit. They realize they've wasted so much time. As a company, the more you can pull those questions up front, the more candidates are going to be willing to engage with you. We also use candidate surveys to understand what went wrong and ensure we work that into optimization of our site.

And the more important a concept is to your company, the sooner you should communicate it.

Not every engineer cares about the way they work. They may be very mission-oriented and want to go save the world. That’s fantastic, but that's not Ashby. While we’re not saving the world, we are building a company that cares deeply about its customers and executes exceptionally at making their lives better, and we put a lot of effort into doing that. And we know there are other people out there whose primary goal is to build fantastic software. So that was the perspective we went to, instead of claiming to be something we're not.

On the other hand, if you're a very mission-driven company, you need to lean into it. Focus on communicating how you're accomplishing your mission and why you're going to be the ones that solve it. It boils down to goals.

## Short form content wins

If you want an excellent careers page: drop the idea of a single page. The way I think about it is less about a careers page and more about holistic recruiting marketing. People will stumble upon your website through many different avenues. How is the candidate going through your website to understand more about the company?

When a candidate finds out about you, how will they then navigate to all the content that you want them to read? At Ashby, we wanted to have a steady stream of content about our culture, and we think of that as being under the umbrella of a careers page.
 
As an engineer, I would search for questions relevant to my work and then stumble on personal blogs of engineers who had answers. I wanted to replicate that with our blog. People need to find you. They're not going to go looking for a stealth company by name. But what they are going to do is search for things that are related to their work. And that's where our most viewed form of content came in: [snippets](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/engineering), found at the bottom of our Engineering blog, are small bits of things we’ve learned that are helpful in our day to day work. Short form content helps you connect with the outside world.

![An example of the snippets on the Ashby blog](/images/snippets-career-pages.png)

Every channel of communication you use, from social media to paid ads to your landing pages, should work for both your customer and your applicant.

## Other pages to optimize with hiring in mind

Think about where else your website can be optimized for your applicants.

For instance, a lot of small companies start with a team page, but just as quickly stop showcasing it. And then they show their executive team, maybe like one or two people as profiles. But I think your team page is actually super, super powerful. These are the people applicants are going to work with — why not share who they are?

Candidates don’t meet the team right away, but they want to know your team. So I thought it would be really nice to have the entire team just sitting there, available for you to get to know them a little bit more. And it's been huge. Not only do people really read it, they come into our interviews and ask the team questions about their pages. Our team is then answering those questions deeply. It’s wonderful sharing.

What the team does is impressive, so why not show it off?

Another element to seriously consider is your values.

Be opinionated. If you present a set of values like every other company is presenting, you don't differentiate yourself. Instead, think about what makes you different than every other company out there. That could be your mission, the way you work, or something else, but it's what makes your company unique.

One value might be your DEI initiatives. DEI is important to Ashby, and I wrote as much in our job descriptions. I wrote it from a kind of a personal perspective in the style of our job descriptions. Simply including that note has stood out to people from underrepresented groups who are reading these listings, and I do hear it a lot when I talk to candidates. You need to really call DEI out on your career pages if it's important to you.

You also need to avoid platitudes. If your values are to “be kind to each other,” know that everyone says that. What people care about is how you’re actually making that value a reality.

Our [thoughtful communication](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication) is a good example of that. A lot of candidates have commented that it's actually more powerful than a set of values to them. While we haven't articulated all our values, one of our core values is excellent communication, and that comes through. A lot of companies can say that, but in that article we show candidates how we accomplish it.

## Measuring success

When it comes to measuring success, I suggest you track a few metrics:

1.  How many visitors are you getting and who are they? Here I look for top performing blog posts, understand who is viewing them and then think about other related topics we could expand on.
2.  What are your conversions to final rounds? If someone sees a job description, are they actually applying? Are the candidates applying high quality? If you build all this content, you still have to distribute it, so you want to see what distribution channels are creating quality conversions.
3.  What are people actually reading? How many people actually get from the top of my page all the way to the bottom? If they stop halfway, then I’ll either condense it or switch the content around, because you want people to read it end to end.
4.  What are your paid ad metrics? We've tried Twitter ads before for our job descriptions. We didn't get as much lift as we would like, but we wanted to see how many people would convert from that.

Treat your careers page like a product. It isn’t enough to measure your wins and call it a day. There are many things that adversely impact otherwise great career pages.

## Your listings aren’t for everyone - and that’s good

The fear that you have of being opinionated is that you’ll turn people off. And our opinionated content has turned people off. It’s a good thing. I start my email outreach by sharing our article on how we communicate. Some people love that, but some people find that isn't for them. And that's totally fine, I don't argue. Articles like that are there to help people understand who we are as a culture and how we approach engineering.

The people who aren’t a fit will eventually figure it out. And for us that was through the interview process. I would take the first call and then we'd talk about it and they might say, “Oh, you don't use Slack? This is not a fit.” I'd just wasted thirty minutes of my time and the candidate’s time taking this call.

So it's best to put those differences upfront in order to save your team, your team's time, and the candidates' time.

## Creating career page excellence

The career pages that stick out to me are the ones that are transparent. But PostHog is a notable exception. Our team spent some time with [Cory Watilo, Lead Designer at PostHog](https://www.linkedin.com/in/corywatilo/) to talk about how they approached it.

Their career page has a unique, customized feel that makes it stand out. Every element was designed around the natural flow a candidate would take as they explored the page. Every element is intentional - and communicates either something about PostHog’s culture or something that candidates would want to know about the job.

Cory used Ashby’s API to build and host their careers page, inserting fun moments that, in his words, “spark joy,” like a count of who on the team prefers pineapple on pizza and a spray of digital confetti when you submit an application. PostHog is doing things no other company is trying, and it shows.

<a id="content-download" target="_blank" href="/downloadables/posthog-career-page.pdf" css={{display: "block", fontSize: "$35"}}>Download this PDF to see an in-depth guide of what Cory’s design choices were, and what you should think about when using Ashby’s API to design your own careers page.</a>

Abhik Pramanik, Ashby's Co-founder and VP of Engineering, has mastered the art of creating job descriptions and careers pages that convert amazing talent. He's shared his approach, plus a downloadable guide from PostHog's Cory Watilo on designing a careers page that builds up your brand.

Career Pages | Building Your Employer Brand to Attract the Right Candidates 

Halden Ingwersen

When Daniel Grayson sat down with Ashby, he jumped right in, and we couldn’t start recording fast enough.

“When I was trying to break into tech,” he said, “There was this really intense level of skepticism that potential employers had about my background, particularly around whether I was equipped to think through recruiting issues at scale, because there's a perception that the only people who know how to think about problem at scale are tech companies. And my experience so far is that what I've seen done in industry recruiting, both in my current company and at others, is less deliberate, less strategic, more transactionally focused than anything I ever did in higher education.”  

From the moment he started speaking, Daniel had a lot to say about recruiting, every bit of it valuable. Daniel started his career in higher education, doing admissions for universities before making the switch over to tech recruiting. Academic admissions and recruiting have their similarities. But they also have areas where they drastically differ.  

“How companies decide who's worthy of joining is less strategic, less methodologically sound, less interrogated, and less scrutinized than what we did in education,” he said definitively. “For the most part assessment of candidates and their skills, particularly at the top of the funnel, is an exercise in outsourcing to what everybody else has decided is worthy. So how do you know if someone's strong enough to interview? Where did they go to college? Where did they go to university? Where do they have their graduate degree? What is the assessments that all these other schools make about them, and where else have they worked? They think that *if Google has assessed a candidate and deemed them worthy of a job, they must be strong enough to work here*, rather than relying on your own internal assessments or figuring out how to make a set of assessments at scale.”  

## From higher ed to recruiting ops

As we see so often, Daniel’s path to recruiting wasn’t linear. In college, Daniel planned to become a lawyer, but conversations with active attorneys warned him away. “I graduated," he said, "And really didn't have a plan.” 

He spent the summer after graduation tutoring students at an SAT prep camp, where the head was a college councilor. She suggested that Daniel might like admissions, so he gave it a shot. “I started applying for college admissions jobs, got one and then discovered not only did I really, *really* like it, I was also pretty good at it.” He remained at that job for years, eventually working his way up to much greater responsibilities.  

“I was acting as the product manager for any digital work that we were doing, virtual tours, our website, all these other things, and then eventually started directing international recruitment. And that exercise was really, how do you build relationships with people who will never set foot in your physical space? If you're talking to kids in Vietnam and Nigeria and France, they're not seeing you in person. How do you create the infrastructure that allows these people to build deep relationships with their own aspirations? Across thousands of people all at once? I found that to be really interesting, fulfilling work. I was able build a lot of things there. ”  

It was a puzzle Daniel was interested in solving. But the challenges were about to end. “I got to the end of my eight year run. Year nine was just making the trains run on time, instead of figuring out where the tracks should go. And so I left.”  

He ended up falling back on a set of consulting opportunities that eventually grew into a small solo consulting firm for institutions working with human capital, helping them to operationalize relationships, marketing, and recruiting processes. While he enjoyed the work, consulting fell into much more planning than implementation.  

“I missed the iterative nature of coming up with a plan and then putting it into practice. I knew I wanted to go in-house. I started two years of really core professional networking and knowledge building.” Daniel notes that his first job in recruiting came because the company needed talent enough to hire an untested newcomer. But they gave him a chance all the same.  

Over a year and two roles on the other side of that switch, the things Daniel learned in higher ed come through on the job every day, both in the similarities and the differences.  

“Education recruiting is like highly cyclical,” Daniel told us, “There's a period of time where you're building the relationship. *This is when you're assessing, and this is when you're closing*, and those moments are fixed in time rather than rolling across candidates. Although even then there are universities that do that in rolling sense, but the number of prospects we were cultivating in any given year was in the order of tens of thousands. The number of applications we were receiving and actioning on was in was around 15,000 to 20,000 a year. And we received all those applications in the span of a month and a half or so, and actioned on all those applications in the span of two and a half months.”  

It was a pace that required robust internal processes in order to reach their goals, Daniel pointed out. “We needed systems set up so that we could move through 20,000 applications in two and a half months using just 20 professional staff. The scale of what we did in that space was a lot more intricate and a lot more complex than the scale of what I see in the talent industry. We needed to be able to build relationships with and give them reasons to choose us both pre-close and close. And we need to be able to do that at scale because we were going to be making 3,000 offers, essentially simultaneously, and we'd have a month to offer to those 3,000 people and close about 1,500. So we were closing 1,500 people in a month using 20 professional staff.”  

## Advancing the human capital supply chain

Higher ed recruiting involves a level of operationalization that many tech recruiting set ups simply don’t have. This difference in methodology has directly impacted Daniel’s approach now that he’s in recruiting.  

“If a company worked in manufacturing,” he explained it, “If you're The Gap or Tesla, you're selling physical things to the world. You'll have gigantic teams who are given strategic remits and capital inside the organization to think about how to improve the quality of outputs and reduce the cost of inputs. These are really, really important teams at these companies.” The classic question, for so many of these product-based businesses, is as simple (and yet as complex) as increasing the value of the product while reducing the cost to create and sell it.  

“However,” Daniel went on. “If you work in tech, the only input you have is human. Yet you really can't find a company that thinks about human capital with the level of rigor that Tesla thinks about its supply eye chain.”  

The idea was so radical that the Ashby team took a moment to absorb it before pressing Daniel on why that might be. “Some of that is because it's more difficult to do,” he said. But that wasn't the only reason. “The kinds of people who are typically drawn to work in human resources and recruiting are usually the kind of people who don't like thinking about numbers, they like thinking about people. There's a sense of self-selection in terms of who ends up in those spaces. If you're the kind of person who likes operations and data, there are better paying and more prestigious fields to go into than HR or recruiting. So there's this gap between the level of rigor companies should be bringing to the way they think about people, versus the level of rigor that they have or are interested in using. And that relationship is recursive. Companies don't usually think of people ops or recruiting as a center of strategic excellence, they don't invest in the salaries of people in those spaces.”  

He has evidence for this impression. “In an economic downturn, the very first businesses to get hit are those who provide HR tools because the first function in a company to get cut is recruiting. And before you cut the people in recruiting, you cut the budget for their tooling. And so there's this pretty big strategic gap.” It's a gap that shouldn't be there, and companies would be much better off if that gap was bridged. “I think there's a recursive relationship between who's drawn to the space, what the space is then allowed to do, and then who gets drawn into the space.”  

> You really can't find a company that thinks about human capital with the level of rigor that Tesla thinks about its supply eye chain.

Daniel might have a fix for that. But it’s going to take a radical shift in perception across the recruiting industry.  

## Conventional input, unconventional output

In spite of his wealth of experience, Daniel hasn’t always had an easy time showing others his unique recruiting perspective. The prestige so often associated with academia falls flat in tech - a space where the drive to execute on great ideas is lauded more than time spent in a classroom. Daniel suggests that part of the issue was the perception of academia as a slow-moving, antiquated dinosaur, lightyears away from the “move fast and break things” attitude popular in startups. Over two years, it took Daniel many interviews and more applications before he got his foot in the recruiting door.  

“I worked enough in the business of rejecting other people long enough to know it's not personal,” he laughed. “But I also know that there's a lot of incentive to de-risk in who you hire. If you make a wrong choice in hiring, there are really substantial costs involved in both time and money. And the feeling that I had articulated to me over and over and over again was that the recruiting I did in higher education is not deeply relevant to the recruiting that done in industry.”  

The problem, however, is clear: how do you manage volume and assess risk while still being open to unconventional talent?  

“If you work at a startup, the goal is to achieve an unconventional outcome. And if the only input that you have is human hours you have to manage that through the lens of de-risking. You end up hiring the most conventional people because though the people who de-risk the most.” The paradox stands out. “You're trying to produce this very unconventional outcome by hiring the most conventional people available to you, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.”  

It isn’t unfair of recruiters to focus on the elements that they already know work. “You need a way to deal with volume,” Daniel admits. “You have to create some dimension early on in the process that allows you to very quickly weed out a large portion of that volume so that you can focus on something smaller. If you're trying to make one hire, and you have 400 inbound applications, you need a way to triage. The fastest way to triage is look if the company they came from does work that looks like the company that I'm at now. Because if their role aligns, then I can be reasonably certain that the structure of their current work looks like the structure of our current work.”  

But this method cuts out those trying to enter the tech world, including Daniel himself.  

“It's not a criticism of the approach,” he said. “Because it *is* the easiest way to deal with the volume. But it speaks to my point about the level of sophistication I saw in higher education, and how we evaluate candidates and what I see in industry. This is not a sophisticated approach. It's not an approach that allows you to find really powerful minds, really powerful actors who don't look how you expect them to. It exacerbates the DEI problems that exist in tech.”  

Daniel likened the reliance on referrals and tendency to replicate in tech hiring to [survivorship bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) - an error in which one considers the qualities only of things that made it through a challenge, rather than considering the qualities of things that did not. A compelling comparison for anyone interested in making their recruiting strategy stronger. And it’s linked to the biggest issues that Daniel has observed in recruiting.  

## What are you looking for, really?

“The biggest obstacle I see in recruiting,” Daniel told us, “Is that it's very hard to know what you're evaluating for. Do you actually need a candidate to be good at what can you train quickly? What *can* you train quickly? That's a hard question to answer. And then let's assume that you can answer that question accurately. And here are the skills we need to evaluate, because these are the things that are important to the job, and that we can't train quickly. Now, what's the assessment for that?”  

The problem is already daunting, and it only grows bigger. “Even if you can build that assessment and you build it well, let's make that assumption need hiring managers and people in the company who are skilled at assessing the responses to the assessment. And that's really hard to teach, too!”  

He seemed to realize what a major conundrum he’d presented, and paused for a moment. “This is one of the things that I think makes human capital really interesting as a problem space and, frankly, it's why I'm interested in it. The problem itself is really hard and not easily quantifiable. Data and operations are hugely important, but data and operations are *tools*. They are arrows in your quiver that allow you to solve a problem. They are not the *solution* to the problem. I use Ashby's stuff all the time and there are very few reports, if any, that I can build an Ashby that tell me what the actual answer to a problem is. More often what recruiting data points you towards is what the question you need to be asking is, and then you have to use your own quality understanding of what's happening in the space and your own sense of empathy to find the solution to that problem.”  

That telescoping back and forth between qualitative and quantitative is what makes the recruiting space so challenging, but it’s also why Daniel thrives here. “What do you actually need to be measuring? Can you measure it? How can you measure it? What are you using to measure it? How do we understand the results of the tool we're using to measure it? Each of those things is really difficult to do, and you have to do all of them well in order to construct an interview process that actually gets you what you want.”  

## Learning from higher ed

Recruiting operations has learned so much from sales and revenue, Daniel said. These are industries that have undergone huge changes in the last two decades. “Sales used to be about finding the right most charismatic sales people that you can and allowing them to use brute force charisma to achieve deals. And so many early stage companies, that's the way they approach recruiting. They find a high charisma, brute-force recruiter who goes in and uses that charisma to close candidates.” But it doesn't need to be a brute-force activity when data and analysis could take the field so much further.  

“It’s understanding cohort analysis,” Daniel suggests, “Understanding customer life cycles, customer journeys. Marketing can calculate a customer’s lifetime value. And if you understand customer lifetime value and the factors that go to it, then you can find segments of the market that are cost efficient to go after and acquire. Because if you know what the cost of acquisition is, and it's low enough, and you know what their value's going to be over time, you know, exactly which deals are worth pursuing and which are not. The same thing could be done in recruiting on the op side. Can we assess an employee's lifetime value to the company? Do we achieve a higher employee lifetime value by going after someone who is well-seasoned, who will pop into the role and get bored after a year and a half and go elsewhere, or do we find a higher lifetime value by finding somebody who's junior, bringing them in, having a longer ramp period, training them up, and then retaining them for longer?”  

Though he’s asking big questions, Daniel doesn’t claim to have all the answers. “I actually don't know which of those outcomes is better or worse for which roles at which companies. But neither do the companies in question! But an organization of any real size or scope has a marketing or sales team that understands exactly what those metrics are for the people they target.” So why not recruiting, too?  

“Programs like recruiting acquire debt, the same way that your technology acquires debt, and there are trade offs that you make between long-term vision and short-term gains. And if you optimize for short-term gains over long-term vision, you accumulate more debt. And that's not to say it's a bad outcome, but companies need to be mindful of the system they use and which debts they acquire.” But, Daniel says, companies are making a mistake by thinking they can wait.  

“Lots of companies wait until they get to 150 or 250 people before where they start thinking about what the structure needs to look like in HR and in recruiting,” he said. “If you wait until you get to that size point, you've accumulated a lot more debt than if you start thinking about what that work looks like early. Earlier stage companies, if you believe in your own success and you have enough faith in your own success, then you have to be thinking about your systems. What kind of systems allow for us to have a recruiting engine that supplies itself efficiently, effectively? Well, with high quality, high caliber talent, where our success and failure in this function does not rely on a single person, their historical knowledge, and their individual charisma based ability to close candidates.”  

You can find Daniel on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgrayson/).  

Enjoyed this article? [Subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/all#newsletter-form) or read others like it:  

* [Continuum’s Chauncey Brooks on Startups, Recruiting, and What It Means to Find "Good Talent"](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/chauncey-brooks-interview)
* [Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/stephanie-baysinger-interview)
* [Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/arthur-woods-interview)

Ashby sat down with Astronomer's Daniel Grayson about the ways academic recruiting has the potential to rock the tech recruiting status quo.

Astronomer’s Daniel Grayson on Why Academic Recruiting Can Be Tech Talent’s Secret Weapon

Should you cook dinner or order out? Should you buy a turn-key house, or have one designed for you? Should you buy a ready-made software or build the system in-house?  
  
Both building and buying can have benefits and downsides, and it can be hard to know what the right choice is for you and your business. If you’re considering building a reporting solution for your talent and recruiting team, you probably have a lot of questions. What will it look like? Who will have access and will they be able to update the reports themselves? Does every team member get the same reports, or can you customize results depending on the function? _Who_ will build the reports, and _how_ will they get built? Can you change a dashboard after it’s been made? How often does the data update? Do you get reports for sourcing activity? How about coordinator scheduling activity?  
  
This is a two-part series, and this article centers on building. We’ll answer the questions above, as well as go over a few key areas like:  

-   The elements of a standard data reporting solution
-   The the cost of a reporting solution
-   The biggest benefits that come from an in-house build
-   Potential complications and downsides to building your reporting software

Though we’re using Ashby Analytics as our primary example, the information in this article is just as relevant to other products. Of course we’re Ashby Analytics fans, but we’re examining the “build vs buy” decision as a whole. You might be just as interested in comparing [Looker](https://www.looker.com/) or [tableau](https://www.tableau.com/) to building an in-house tool.
  
Let’s begin by breaking down the upsides, complications, and costs of an in-house building solution.  

## The traditional data team solution

When you’re looking at improving how data-driven your business is, your first stop is often to build out your data team. Here, you have two immediate choices: do you have a [**centralized data team** or an **embedded data team**](https://medium.com/@mikldd/data-team-structure-embedded-or-centralised-f179aa231108)?  
  
The **centralized** **data team** tends to take on a service model, where a core team of data engineers and analysts maintain both the data infrastructure and data analysis requests that are fielded in an approach similar to support tickets. The core data team is often responsible for standardizing corporate metrics as well as maintaining systems that make analysis results and reports available across the organization’s various teams.  
  
Although some very large organizations maintain and operate under a centralized data team model, after a certain size (typically at least four or five team members) some organizations opt for an **embedded analyst model**. In the embedded approach, each analyst will work within a given product area or function (e.g. the marketing analyst, the core product analyst, etc.)  
  
If your organization is large enough to have a data team, one of these approaches may sound familiar. Which one works for your company will differ, and doesn’t always impact the build or buy decision. But regardless, **neither tends to serve the recruiting function well**. The centralized data team model by its nature (and to its critique) is request-based and results in only periodic, intermittent reports delivered. And even for large organizations that can afford many embedded data analysts, it’s rare that one is dedicated to the recruiting team exclusively.  
  
In the rare and fortunate case that your recruiting team has a dedicated analyst, that’s great! It makes building an in-house recruiting analysis system a much more feasible and attractive option. At this point, you’ll need to make decisions about the analysis tooling and infrastructure itself, which brings us to our next topic.  

## Breaking down cost

The elements of building out an analytics tool is completely inextricable from the cost. Every element that goes into the design, construction, and upkeep of a large, complicated internal application adds to the cost. We’ve broken down what you’ll need to account for by stage, so start here, then jump to the stage that _best_ describes your business_._  
  
Which data maturity stage is your organization in? Here’s a rough guide to check against:  

-   **Early stage (~seed to series A startup):** No central data warehouse, no standardized reporting infrastructure or tooling, reports are done in a one-off basis, reports are hard to share broadly and require a lot of custom rework if the results are to be updated
-   **Beginning stage (~series A to B):** Central data warehouse and standard data sources are integrated across business and product systems, typically one data engineer and at least one data analyst, a standard reporting tool used to regulate and share common reports
-   **Established stage (~series C and beyond):** Your data team has a manager, two data engineers, and a number of analysts such that most corporate functions are covered through a service or embedded model, standard metrics and regular reporting are mostly standardized, your product is mature and growing with a majority of analysis efforts spent on optimization and new feature development

Got your stage? Then let’s break down what you’ll need to build out effectively.  

### Early stage considerations

If you’re at the early stage you’ll be facing the challenging of starting from scratch. These foundational efforts will be tied to the time scale of hiring your first data expert, but it will also bring up a number of technology decisions. At the very least, you’ll likely be faced with the following steps:  

-   **Hiring your first data domain expert** - Founding hire; [salary may range between $66k - $200k](https://www.glassdoor.com/Career/data-analyst-career_KO0,12.htm)
-   **Purchasing a data warehouse** - For data storage; may range from $10k - $90k yearly
-   **Purchasing data integration technology** - To continuously sync and maintain data records across business and product systems; may range from $2k - $90k yearly
-   **Purchasing your reporting infrastructure** - There are open source options here which come with the cost of building and maintaining; off-the-shelf reporting solutions may range from $50k - $100k yearly

In addition to the starting costs, there is still the time cost of establishing each of these components  

### Beginning stage considerations

At this point you likely have the foundations of data team and reporting in place. The question at hand typically becomes _where is the data team’s time and effort applied?_ As mentioned above, small data teams have to operate on a request basis, as they are not large enough to pursue an embedded analyst model. At this point it is likely that some departments or specific challenges receive solutions, while others are left unattended.  
  
The questions most pertinent at this stage are:  

-   Can your recruiting team get dedicated attention from the data team?
-   Do you have reporting infrastructure built? If so, does your team have access to it, to ensure everyone is looking at the same results and metrics?
-   Is your ATS data integrated into your data warehouse and has it been modeled by analysts already?
-   How urgent are your reporting needs? Do you need results next week, or is a month or longer acceptable?

It’s common at this stage to see a company investing the data team resources into a backlog of corporate and product reporting. It’s also normal to see bandwidth divided between multiple areas, such as product usage and engagement across your customer base, marketing efforts, sales and success planning.  
  
You’ll want to make a sober assessment of your recruiting analytics needs relative to the demand the data team is under to assess whether you’ll get the assistance you need at the cadence you need it. While it’s normal to see a queue forming, that doesn’t mean the queue is unavoidable or that it’s the best option.  

### Established stage considerations

If you’re at a large organization with a well-established data team there is more of an opportunity for talent and recruiting teams to get dedicated analysts. At this point, it becomes an internal conversation about setting bandwidth and budget. Many of the beginning stage considerations above do still persist, and implementation still takes time, but an enterprise-level business may have more ability to address the costs and complications.  
  
At the established stage, the scale and importance of a reliable solution becomes more evident. In the absence of standard-built solutions, teams have likely learned to live on their own, using partial solutions and spreadsheets. Though the point solutions may exist for various needs, the ability to train new team members or perform broader analysis across teams veers towards the impossible.
  
At this scale, the important thing is finding a strong solution quickly, be it built or bought, as the time and energy atrophy of these ad hoc solutions can create some serious havoc in the talent acquisition process.

### “Hidden” cost

There’s a baseline cost to any data solution that comes from hiring a data professional and investing in the infrastructure technologies they require to do their job. Those initial investments really are just the beginning of a data solution.  

>> Businesses of all sizes should keep an eye out for different pricing structures when comparing in-house vs. purchased options. For instance, [Looker charges a $5k/month fee](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/looker-vs-tableau/) that may be inaccessible to a small business, while [tableau's $70/user/month](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/looker-vs-tableau/) rate may be unfriendly for large companies. When crunching the cost of a potential build, make sure you're running an accurate comparison!
  
Here are some common additional in-house build costs to consider:  

-   **What is the time to your solution?** This is an opportunity cost. Some Ashby customers have reported taking more than six months to get a reliable reporting system established prior to making the switch to Ashby.
-   **What is the cost of ongoing knowledge transfer?** Recruiting is a complex business, and you need to ensure that your data analyst understands it. Many teams find one of the primary time delays is having to explain the recruiting business and operations to non-recruiter analysis.
-   **Is your solution resilient?** Recruiting is a dynamic field where the strategies and tactics often change. One of the most common outcomes we’ve seen is a business intelligence-based solution that’s _brittle_: it reports useful metrics but doesn’t afford slight modifications that are required to drive further insight. Further insight demands additional requests and more time from your data team.
-   **Are you able to self-serve your own reporting needs?** Many recruiting teams are handed reports they’re unable to adjust as needed. This relates to the brittle BI solution above, but it’s important to address whether you have the autonomy to drive your own reporting needs, not just adjust pre-existing reports.

You may already be familiar with some of these situations. In any in-house software build out, hidden costs are completely normal, and are really only a big problem when they take you by surprise.  

## What you get for the price

In-house software is expensive, but what else is it? There are several benefits to building an in-house solution.  

-   **Project control:** Building in-house means that your business is in control of every single aspect of the solution. You get the final say on where to focus resources, who is managing the data, what’s done with the data, and what the user interface ends up being. This might be a requirement for businesses with extremely high security or privacy demands.
-   **Pivot:** Due to that level of control, you’ll be able to pivot your methodology as quickly as the data itself will allow. The learning curve is built along side the system itself.
-   **Specificity:** Having your own personal analysis system means you can get heavily granular with your information, data, and reporting in a way a purchased ready-made solution often isn’t. If there’s something especially specific that you need to dig into, that’s unique to your business’s recruiting, this alone may make it worth it.
-   **Long-term cost:** If you already have a robust data integration tool, warehouse, and data experts on staff, it may be worth the time cost to see the long-term savings an in-house built system will offer you.

## Recruiting analytics-specific complications

If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering why typical data solutions seem to fail to address recruiting analytics needs.  That’s a good question, and the short answer is that *recruiting analytics done well is a difficult data problem*. But there’s more to it than that simple statement.  
  
**The underlying data is dynamic in ways that reflect the real world.** Unlike, say, a product analytics environment where engagement measures are well defined, recruiting touches the real world. Interviews are created, cancelled, rescheduled, canceled again, and rescheduled. Then one of the three interviewers doesn’t show up, and only one of the two submits feedback. The candidate takes a vacation, so you get back to them at a later date, and when they come back they want to apply for a different job so you transfer them. A different hiring manager takes over, your in-house recruiter goes on leave, so a different recruiter gets involved. This is a very real portrayal of the paper trail of data that gets created in the recruiting environment. Answering a simple question like _"How many people did recruiter X hire?"_ gets complicated pretty quickly.  
  
**Recruiting data is prone to quality issues and requires a lot of data modeling and filtering.** It’s always necessary to clean and prepare data. Recruiting data and the complexities of the real world are _particularly_ prone to quality issues. This is where powerful filtering, data exploration, and underlying data modeling comes in. Building this in-house takes a lot of domain familiarity, and maintaining the system as recruiting efforts evolve is far from trivial. New sources, agencies, team members and recruiting efforts all act to continuously complicate the reporting landscape.  
  
**The scope of analysis focuses on the individual all the way up to broad, long-term trends.** Recruiters need to pay attention to the details, know where individual candidates are, and get timely alerts and reports for day-to-day operations. Managers like to see weekly summaries, while executives need to see broader aggregates and be able to drill down into the details. There are variety of stakeholders, each of whom have separate requests. This isn’t hard per se, but it is a lot of work!  This is where the amount of time to stand up a recruiting analytics solution and ongoing maintenance costs factor in.  
  
**Self-serving reporting is critical to maintaining recruiting velocity.** Some of the most critical metrics in reporting relate to time: time to fill a position, time in process, and time to hire. When a recruiter needs to make an external request they’re almost certainly looking at additional days of delay. Those days add up and hiring efforts slow down in aggregate, which trickles down to your organizations progress against the hiring plan. Self-service is a mission critical aspect of any recruiting analytics solution. The requisite filtering, grouping and customization needs to be readily available to the end user: a recruiting team member, not a data analyst. This is a hard data design problem, and the standard BI dashboard with fixed reports does not meet recruiting team needs.  
  
Recruiting analytics are simply different from other types of data analysis. This alone complicates recruiting data system significantly. While building in-house isn’t impossible, and may remain the right choice for your business, it’s uniquely difficult in a way that other in-house systems are not.  

## The bottom line

Building an in-house data analytic system for recruiting is a massive undertaking. Once you pull it off, it can offer a lot of additional control, precision, and specificity that many bought solutions can’t match. However, it’s time-consuming, expensive, and may prioritize what stakeholders _think_ they need over what they _actually_  need.  
  
Building in-house is most likely right for you if:  

-   The type of work your business does and the type of recruiting you undertake is exceptionally specific
-   Intense recruiting data privacy is a must in your field
-   You’re at an enterprise level or are established enough that building more data systems isn’t a large additional cost or lift
-   You’re willing to wait longer and spend more money to create something completely unique to your business

Even if this sounds like you, building still isn’t your only choice. Join us in part two of our article to learn more about the pros and cons of buying recruiting analytics tools.

Choosing to build an in-house recruiting analytics tool or purchase an out-of-the-box solution is a major business decision. In the first half of a two-part series, we've weighed the pros and cons of each to help you make the best choice for you.

Hiring Analytics Tools - Is Building or Buying the Best Choice for You?

If you want to know who is applying to work at your company, or if you’d like to cultivate a more diverse and inclusive workforce, you’ll want to track demographic data. In order to start tracking that data, you need to ask some questions first. That’s where a lot of people hesitate; how can you know that you’re asking the right things in the right ways to get the information you want while being as inclusive as possible?  
  
If that sounds familiar, this guide will help you figure out what to ask and why, to take the stress out of designing diversity surveys for your candidates.  
  
Note that, for this article, we’re focusing on candidate and hiring diversity surveys, rather than surveys for current employees, which is a topic for another day. We’ll be focusing on candidate diversity surveys. We’ll cover reasons to track candidate diversity, the best things to ask (and how to ask them), and briefly touch on how to track your results.  
  
If you want to be better about tracking diversity information, but don’t know what to ask, this article is for you.  

## Why to track candidate diversity

An inclusive, equitable, and diverse workplace starts well before an employee signs on. It starts as far back as how hiring is approached and thought of by those in leadership. It moves into how you write job descriptions and where you share them. By the time someone applies you already have a lot of moving pieces that impact how that person is likely to identify.  
  
Tracking diversity at the hiring stage can tell you who is applying to work at your company and where your organization is falling short of market representation, as well as revealing the stages of hiring that help or hurt your diversity goals.  
  
If you want to make your company into a richly diverse place to work, tracking DEI data is the most informative place to begin.  

![an example of an EEOC survey](/images/ashby-eeoc.png)
  
You may already be using [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]([https://eeocdata.org/](https://eeocdata.org/)) or EEOC data, either because you’re required to or because it’s a good base from which to start tracking candidate diversity data. And it _is_ a good base! But the EEOC survey set up can present as non-inclusive to applicants. Additionally, you may want more detail, or to track an element of identity that the EEOC questions don’t cover.  

## What not to ask

The knowledge that there are questions you simply cannot ask a candidate may hold you back from running a diversity survey. Asking questions that could lead to discrimination is illegal in an interview. However, surveying for inclusiveness is critical to building a diverse workplace, and even required in some cases. Following the [The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/clearing-up-misconceptions-uniform-guidelines-employee-selection-procedures.aspx) is a good way to avoid any issues as you design your survey.  
  
**It’s important to make sure these questions are always voluntary for the candidates.** They should never be required in order to submit an application. They must also be uniformly asked and not related to a specific role in any way. Adding a note to the survey-taker that these questions are for furthering your DEI strategy, and will have no impact on their application, is a good idea.  
  
Additionally, ensure that this data is anonymized to those who are involved with hiring your candidates. This data is great to collect, but only if it’s being used _after_ all hiring decisions are made. It must never impact the choice itself, even accidentally.  
  
Check your hiring software to see what your options are for working with EEOC and diversity survey data. Ashby captures this data in such a way that it cannot be viewed on an individual basis, but can be analyzed in aggregate. You won’t be able to see the data per person, even accidentally, but generating reports and analyzing your DEI survey data overall is extremely easy.  
  
Once you’re confidant in your approach, the way you ask your questions is the next important consideration.  

## What data do you need?

To figure out what questions you’ll ask, pull back and look at your goals. Are you looking to improve where and how you source candidates? Are you hoping to uncover unconscious biases in your hiring process? Set your goal first, then consider which metrics that can help you make progress towards that goal.  
  
For instance, if you’re working to improve diversity via candidate sourcing, you may want to track which candidates come from which sources. So you may ask some questions about how they identify as well as how they heard about the job. Then you’d see if those things have a correlation. Frequently, inbound applications and referrals skew less diverse, but being able to identify that trend helps you show that you need to expand where you source new candidates.  
  

> Keep in mind that there are many types of diversity. Racial and ethnic identity, gender identity, LGBTQIA status, disability status, and veteran status are some elements you might want to consider, and you may have other elements of identity that you’d like to track instead or in addition.

  
It’s much more effective (and easier!) to tailor your questions to your goals than vise versa.  
  
While clear single-choice answer options will keep your data the cleanest, open-response boxes will give you the most inclusive answers. We suggest merging both. **In academic and scientific surveys, the best practice is to ask participants to click on the best multiple choice answer _and_ specify further in a write-in box.** This helps you get both clean data and a full spectrum of answers, including ones you may not have considered.  
  
![survey setup in ashby](/images/success-diversity-survey.png)  
  
In Ashby, diversity surveys are completely customizable. You can start with EEOC questions or skip right to devising your own. And you can customize the type of question to match the information you need, so don’t feel pressure to stick to multiple choice ranges.  
  

## Metrics and effective tracking

As you focus on improving your recruiting pipeline’s diversity, you may see other metrics go down a bit. This is a temporary issue, and the focus shift will be worth it in the long run, but you’ll want to make sure all your key stakeholders are aware of this up front and are ready to see those metrics shift.  
  
We talk more about that in the next article in this series, [How to Track and Improve Your DEI Hiring Metrics]([https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/track-and-improve-dei-metrics](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/track-and-improve-dei-metrics)), so read that next if you’d like to know how to watch the results and make them better over time.  
  
Think about how you want to send these surveys to your candidates. A big risk to optional surveys is survey fatigue, when a participant is tired from filling out multiple surveys or answering more questions than they have the energy to pay attention to. Survey fatigue can result in incomplete or skewed data.  
  
Ashby offers very powerful tools for survey delivery automation - you aren’t stuck giving them to candidates after they’ve filled out the rest of your application. Instead, you’re free to collect the data at a later stage in the interview process. Check to see if this is an option for you.  
  

## Designing for your hiring future

It's ok to feel nervous about pursuing DEI and wanting to get it right, but following these best practices will help to alleviate stress and uncertainty while seeking to build out a more diverse and inclusive team.  
  
Once you feel like you know what to ask, head over to [How to Track and Improve Your DEI Hiring Metrics](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/track-and-improve-dei-metrics) to learn more about tracking and analyzing what you’ve learned.  
  
Liked this article? [Subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/#newsletter-form) for more.

How can you know that you're asking the right questions to get the DEI survey data you need? Ashby has combined best practices from recruiting and scientific data collection to help you perfect your applicant diversity surveys.

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Salary Transparency | Practical Tips for Compliance and Recruitment Marketing

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Career Pages | Building Your Employer Brand to Attract the Right Candidates

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Hiring Analytics Tools - Is Building or Buying the Best Choice for You?

How To Design a Better Diversity Survey

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