Recruiting

aronow.io

Astronomer

Attentive

Aven

Benchling

Boulevard

Brightline brings virtual behavioral and mental health care to kids and teens, with a focus on also supporting families. They have no waitlists, provide customized plans, and work with families to track progress together.

Brightline

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

Docker

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

Format One

FullStory

Galileo

Ironclad

Juni

Linear

Marqeta is a modern card issuing platform dedicated to empowering innovators to launch their products to the world. They have over a decade of experience as a trusted, high-tech solution for builders who need simple, scalable payment solutions.

Marqeta

Mastodon

Modern Treasury

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

Monte Carlo

Multiverse

Notion is the go-to for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, blending everyday work apps into one. It serves as an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management. 

Notion

Compensation software that offers 5,000+ companies clarity for every pay decision.

OpenComp

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

Quora

Ramp

Readme

Replit

Retool

Scratchpad

Sequoia

Sift

Snyk

Sourcegraph

Stytch

Talentful

Treasury Prime

VanMoof is a Dutch e-bike company creating stylish, feature-rich city bikes. They're the fastest growing bike company in the world, with an active community in over 50 cities worldwide.

VanMoof

Vantage

Veev

Verkada

WeTransfer

Zippin

Abhik Pramanik

Culture

Kyra ran our first holiday book exchange, and it's been a hit with the team (to the point people mentioned it in our 1:1s). I added some photos from our recent meetups.


Ben added some improvements to our Slack guidelines. Sylvie added a way for us to learn more about each other in our weekly standup. We've been using both for over a month, and the team has been enjoying the changes!


How we use efficient and deliberate communication at Ashby to keep Slack notifications and meetings to a minimum, focus 36h out of a 40h week, and have fun along the way 😀.


How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive

Engineering

Product

Shannon Ogborn

Nobody accepts a job or hires a person with the expectation that, in a few months, they’ll be let go. But layoffs happen, especially in the current tech environment, and the people impacted by them often didn’t see it coming. Layoffs have a [genuine psychological impact](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/02/07/layoffs-are-harming-the-mental-health-of-workers-making-them-feel-vulnerable-and-disposable/?sh=67b99560667e), and can lead to increased anxiety, depression, and stress. And the talent and recruiting teams who helped their companies grow through hiring booms are often impacted the most.

  

I've been in recruiting since 2014, and I've seen extremely talented people experience layoffs. Ashby works closely with the talent world, and we’ve been lucky enough to meet so many amazing, talented people in the TA space. In addition to a number of more ‘concrete initiatives’ (more to come on this), we wanted to find ways to help the community we love. We’re sure you’re already doing everything you can to move towards your next role, but we put together this article to help validate all you’re doing, and spark ideas for more ways to help those who’ve been laid off to blaze a trail forward.

## The Layoff Landscape

  

Working in tech and startups often creates a bubble, and we’re fast to forget that our space isn’t representative of the wider hiring world. Overall unemployment is at a low in the US [3.4% as of January 2023](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf). In spite of that, tech is experiencing a layoff spree that’s lasted several months, with potential reasons varying from economic downturn to pandemic over-hiring.

  

While general tech cuts have hovered in the 10%-12% range, recruiter jobs have had an outsized impact, with [cuts in the 50% range](https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valleys-talent-spotters-are-now-looking-for-jobs-11669725577). Recruiting jobs saw higher than average [cuts during COVID-19](https://www.protocol.com/coronavirus-cuts-recruiting-and-recruiters), too. Marginalized groups, [already disproportionately affected by layoffs](https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2023/02/19/black-workers-are-the-hardest-hit-by-tech-layoffs/?sh=6a007d25313e), experience a double whammy in recruiting.

  

All of these figures can be dehumanizing, making it so easy to forget that behind each number is a real person who has lost their job. If you’ve been laid off, or have seen people you know being laid off, know that this uptick is very real, and it isn’t your fault you’ve been impacted.

  

## Now What?

I want to validate that you’re probably already doing all you can. Nobody enjoys getting laid off, and if finding a new job is slow going, it’s probably not because you aren’t doing enough. I wanted to create this list of suggestions to keep your gears turning, and to reassure you that you’re doing the right things.

  

So you’ve been laid off. Now what should you do?

### Polish your LinkedIn

**Consider turning on LinkedIn’s “Open to work” banner for your profile.** I know there’s some debate here - some recruiters find the banner a helpful shortcut when sourcing, others think that it’s a meaningless addition. Setting the banner publicly can also attract spammy outreach sequences. As a middle ground, you could set the banner to be visible to recruiters only. Ultimately, you should choose what you feel most comfortable with.

  

**Make an announcement that you’re looking for something new.** If you feel comfortable, write a post announcing that you’ve been laid off and are open to new opportunities. In this post highlight some of the wins and projects you impacted in your last couple of roles and what you’re looking for next. A big part of making a successful ask is telling your network exactly ‘how’ they can help you. If you feel comfortable, encouraging your close former colleagues, bosses, and friends to comment and reshare is powerful too.

  

**Ask and offer recommendations.** Ashby has launched the #YourNextHire initiative in hopes of lifting up and making more highly visible talented individuals impacted by layoffs. Unfortunately, many of those who were impacted have been overshadowed by headlines and statistics. We want to change that by encouraging people to write LinkedIn recommendations for their former colleagues, share the recommendation on an individual post using the hashtag #YourNextHire and tag their colleagues. Ashby will then reshare for further visibility. Not only will this help better showcase impacted individuals, but it will also brighten their day to see the value they have brought to their work through the recommendations.

### Shake the networking tree

**Don’t be shy about tapping into your network!** If you’re nervous, use that LinkedIn announcement to open up conversations – odds are good that people who commented want to help.

  

**Be clear about your asks.** I love helping people in my network, but it’s much easier if I know exactly what they want up front. Otherwise we waste time beating around the bush with no clear indication of what they need from me.

  

**Be extra appreciative.** If it’s been a while, re-familiarize yourself with a person or group’s social media to find things to check in about. Offer some reciprocity - a recommendation for a recommendation is a great place for two colleagues to start. If you can initiate contact with help or a listened ear to show that you care about the other person, that’s even better.

### Dust off your resume

**Keep up a brag sheet.** List out everything you were proud of accomplishing at your last job, along with KPI outcomes. Maybe these fit on the page, maybe they’re things to mention in an interview, but it’s great to have a quick reference list of successes. (It also feels good to see it all in front of you!)

  

**Highlight the wins.** Use as many tangible metrics as possible to show your performance. The more up-to-date and specific the proof of success, the more impactful and memorable the resume.

### Make new connections

**Tap into the sources you’d want to source from.** Established networks are gold, but adding new ones helps you connect with fresh people. I like to think of my dream role, and then imagine where I’d look if I was the one sourcing for it. Those are the places you want to try.

  

I’ve added a list of great resources to try further down.

## Helping Your Community

Maybe you weren’t laid off, or you already have a new role, but you still want to support the talent community. (That’s how I feel, too!) Here’s some ways you can help:

1.  Offer a resume review - Especially when you’re in the talent space, you know what makes a great resume. But when it’s your own you can get bogged down or overthink it. Use your skills to offer a review!
    
2.  Give a listening ear - Networking is necessary, but so is the feeling of being seen and appreciated in your space. Even if you don’t know of a good role to recommend, offer your emotional support.
    
3.  Join the #YourNextHire campaign - Write recommendations for your former colleagues. It offers information for them to pull from when they get back out there, and shows people you worked closely with how highly valued they are; plus, it’s on display for potential future recruiters.
    

## More Resources To Find #YourNextHire

  

Team Ashby and I feel a strong desire to help the talent community as we get through the widespread layoffs. We want to lift up the deserving talent community, especially after all they have been through in the last few years. We’re kicking off #YourNextHire, and I’m inviting all of you to get involved.

  

Here’s how:

1.  Write someone you know a LinkedIn recommendation
    
2.  Screenshot your words
    
3.  Share that screenshot with the hashtag #YourNextHire
    
4.  Tag the people you reviewed to keep the support going
    

  

This is one method to support each other in a meaningful way, and we hope you’ll join us.

  

If you’re looking for your next hire, I’ve compiled a list of hiring resources that might help:

-   [Tech Layoffs Loom, but These Industries Are Still Hiring](https://money.com/job-market-layoffs-industries-hiring/)
    
-   [63 Companies Hiring in 2023](https://www.inhersight.com/blog/finding-a-job/companies-hiring-amid-layoffs)
    
-   [Now Hiring](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/now-hiring-where-are-the-jobs-right-now-economy-rcna68783)
    
-   [Level's Still Hiring List](https://www.levels.fyi/still-hiring/)
    
-   [These companies — from Chipotle to United Airlines — are still hiring](https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-companies-that-are-still-hiring-now-open-jobs-2023-1)

-   [Brianna's Job Board -- a labor of love curated to highlight interesting and impactful opportunities](https://briannadoe.pallet.com/jobs)

    
-   [Layoffs.fyi](https://layoffs.fyi/)

While US unemployment is down, the tech space has still seen months of widespread layoffs - and the TA community has been hit harder than most. If you've been impacted, here's some help stepping towards #YourNextHire.

Now What? A TA Professional’s Guide to Finding #YourNextHire

Sourcing has a ripple effect on the rest of your recruiting process, touching everything from retention to DEI initiatives.

When I was at Google, I did full lifecycle recruiting with a focus on DEI and found that our inbound applications featured mostly dominant identities. Through this I learned that, if you want a diverse team, it's really important to increase that top-of-funnel market representation through sourcing and outreach. When done well this will increase your pass through rate and lower your time to hire. This isn’t a guide to writing your first email sequence; rather techniques for improving the quality of your sourcing and sequencing with a DEI lens.

## Developing your sourcing strategy
A powerful, DEI-focused outreach strategy requires four primary steps.

1.  Define your audience
2.  Find your source pool
3.  Build an intentional sequence
4.  A/B test and iterate

These steps are your basic roadmap, the below aims to explore how to build your process in more detail.

### Define your audience
To get started, work with your hiring manager to establish the [minimum requirements](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/true-minimum-requirements) for the candidate. Establishing a minimum requirement doesn’t diminish the quality of the candidate but it helps you and the hiring manager focus on exactly what skills the role calls for, and develop a job description and sourcing search centered on the competencies, not necessarily titles or degrees. Doing this will open your search to more diverse candidates.

### Find your source pool
With a clear definition of your candidate profile you can begin sourcing. LinkedIn is great, you need to be using it, and Ashby can save you a lot of time sourcing there with the Chrome extension. But building more than LinkedIn into your sourcing strategy is essential.

Talent hides in all sorts of places. And non-traditional places present a great competitive advantage for finding diverse talent.

If you’re wondering where to look, check out [Ashby’s Top 20 “Less Obvious” Spots to Source](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/less-obvious-sourcing-list) as a starting point.

### Build an intentional sequence
Once you have a good pipeline of candidates we suggest building a three part email sequence. In developing your sequence, put thought into both what you want to say and how you want to say it. For these messages, you should ensure you have the following details:

Message one:
-   Why you are reaching out to this candidate
-   Why the candidate would enjoy working at your company
-   Key details about the role: location, salary, what they would work on

Message two:
-   Should be a shorter email that summarizes the above quickly
-   Email should come from hiring manager or peer vs. recruiter (this is easy to do in most ATS CRMs – including Ashby)
-   Email should link to relevant article about culture and business success, [here’s an example we often use on cultural norms](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/thoughtful-communication).

Message three:
-   Sent at least one week after initial email and follows up on previous messages
-   Address why now is the right time to consider role
-   Ask for any feedback or role or company and if recruiter/hiring manager can reach out in future if now is not a good time

Just like there’s [screening-in and screening-out](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/screen-in-mindset), as you are building this sequence consider how you can further personalize the content to feel directly relevant. This can be scaled with modern CRMs, and in Ashby can be done with tokens.

### Use intentional language in outreach sequences
Beyond personalization, look at the words you’re choosing.

A prior company of mine did internal studies about sourcing outreach and language. In one study, a team used expansive language, discussing planetary-scale problems and saving the world. Another team used smaller-scale, realistic language. The first group had a lower response rate, especially with underrepresented groups. Polarizing words can trigger imposter syndrome; you end up seeing a lower response rate and people feel more intimidated by the opportunity instead of excited about the opportunity.

Here’s an example of a great outreach:

![a great example of outreach](/images/good-outreach.png)

Here’s what makes that email good:

-   It has light personalization. It’s not hard to find something to grab something from a profile (school, location, hobbies, etc.) that helps you make a connection. Humans respond well to be treated like humans, not numbers!
-   It calls out where they align with the role - ie. Why are you reaching out to them?
-   It shows care for their career and aspirations. Most people enjoy talking about what they are looking for, and when they know you’re taking that into consideration, they’re more inclined to talk to you. It also creates the feeling of inviting a discussion rather than sending spam.
-   The message tells the candidate how much time you’re asking from them, up front.

Now for a weak outreach:

![a not-so-great example of outreach](/images/bad-outreach.png)

Here’s why this wasn’t great:
-   It primarily focuses on what the candidate can offer the company. It feels like there’s nothing in it for the candidate.
-   There’s no specifics on why they are a match, no personalization, and no humanization. It feels robotic and impersonal.
-   It’s lacking in the details you’d want to know (like time to talk) if the candidate seriously wanted to fit a meeting into their schedule.

Each part of the language you use in your first sequence matters. Consider it carefully before you press send.

### A/B test your sequence
Your initial sequence is important, but so are the subsequent ones, and you should run testing.Tools like Ashby make it easier to see the results, but you can run A/B tests without any tools.

Some areas to A/B test:
-   **Time of day –** Send batches of emails by time (morning, noon, and evening, always off from the hour) and track the results by looking at deliverability, open rates, and response rates
    
-   **Subject lines –** Test different subject lines; the more specificity, the better
    
-   **Value propositions –** Try being upfront about your exact benefits or compensation vs. letting that information out later
    
-   **Length of message –** See if a short introduction interests candidates, or if they want more details upfront
    
-   **Sourcing locations –** The same message that lands great on GitHub may not be a winner on LinkedIn
    
-   **Level of personalization –** Some people may respond great to having their hobbies or social media called-out, while others might prefer you to keep it strictly professional

When you're building sequences, make sure that you're conscientiously testing the language and looking at the results. This isn’t an “if it ain’t broke” kind of situation – you can always be improving, even if you’re already doing well.

Having the information to test, evaluate, and retest is a very important aspect to sequencing - it allows you to see how much your language matters.

## Using data for calibration
With a good basic sequence in place you should then use these additional metrics to calibrate as you go. The key metrics to consider are:
-   Open and response rates - Open rate is important, but if you have a high open rate but a low response rate, that tells you much more than the open rate alone. It is likely that your subject line is strong, but the body of the email doesn’t resonate. Focus on the body.
    
-   **Pass through rates -** How many people did you reach out to and how many converted to candidates and passed the initial hiring manager screen? Here you should be double clicking on the rejection reasons and adjusting your search accordingly.
    
-   **Stage reached by source -** This is my favorite type of report to build. It shows you the quality of different sourcing efforts in a very obvious way. If my sourced candidates are making it further than inbound or referred candidates, I know my strategies are working. It also helps me plan for the future - if a given role is typically filled with inbound applicants and we see high quality and good representation from the inbound, I know I don’t need to focus as hard on sourcing for that role, and if there is a specific source that works really well, I’ll start there next time.
    
-   **Underrepresented Groups in Pipeline -** If you’re making a solid effort to have a DEI-centric outbound recruiting strategy, make sure that you’re seeing your pipeline composition reflect that. If it doesn’t, you may need to alter your sources or messaging.
    
-   **Candidate feedback -** Beyond numbers, track what people are saying in their candidate feedback survey responses. Look at your overall NPS, but more importantly at the comments.
    
-   **Add candidate tabs and set alerts –** The very first person I reached out to when I was at Google started interviewing a year after my first contact. Because he said he was open but not right now, so I made a note of that and came back to him later when another matching role arose. If I’d written him off as a rejection, I wouldn’t have filled that later role with such low effort. Setting alerts in your ATS is a way to make this process easier.

Take this data back to your hiring managers to add qualitative data to this quantitative information. They’ll help you make sense of why areas of the pipeline might have outliers in their pass-through rates and spot anomalies in the data. They’ll also help you find issues in candidate feedback and help you brainstorm how to fix problems. Qualitative and quantitative data do their best work together.

## DEI-focused sequencing fosters inclusiveness and innovation
What we used to think of as “playing safe” in hiring is now being recognized as shutting out great talent. A high barrier to entry at the top of the funnel keeps amazing people out of your team. If everyone is thinking the same way, you can’t drive innovation and invite the highest quality of work possible.

Luckily, outreach is the very first place that can help with that. By sourcing a wide array of diverse and talented people, you can fill your talent pipeline with competitive, complex talent who will truly make your team stand out.

Trying to find the best possible candidates? Check out these other great articles:

-   [Screen-in vs. Screen-out Mindset](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/screen-in-mindset)
-   [True Minimum Requirements](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/true-minimum-requirements)

And download Ashby’s less-obvious sourcing guide - totally free, no email required.

Shannon Ogborn has helped dozens of companies create successful DEI-focused recruiting and sourcing plans. Here's her take on how to build DEI into your outreach process from Day 0.

Hiring Excellence | Building An Outreach Strategy With DEI In Its DNA

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

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 Pfearsen

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

Jeremy Lyons


All RecOps roles call for, at a minimum, an advanced knowledge of Microsoft Excel and/or Google Sheets. With 450+ functions, it can be hard to know where to start and which ones to learn.

To help, here is a list of formulas we recommend you know:

### VLOOKUP / XLOOKUP / HLOOKUP

 - The staple has always been VLOOKUP to find information across a
   vertical column and check it with search criteria. XLOOKUP eliminates
   some of the restrictions of VLOOKUP and offers greater flexibility.

- Used heavily in spreadsheets to find information.
    

### TRUE/FALSE
    
-  These often appear when checking lists or in other formulas to determine exact match or a relational match.
    
-   Used heavily to checklists
    

### IF especially IFERROR and IFNA
    

-   The IF family is especially effective if you checklists. Using IFERROR or IFNA are helpful when trying to have information stand out.
    
-   Used heavily in checking lists
    

### COUNT especially COUNTIF and COUNTA
    

-   Like the name suggests, it counts values. When building tables without using Pivot Tables, using these can be helpful.
    

### QUERY
    

-   Allows you to extract and manipulate data from a table or range of cells based on specific criteria.
    
-   Very useful when dealing with a massive table and multiple inputs.
    

### ARRAYFORMULA
    

-   Allows you to apply a formula to an entire range of cells at once, without having to manually copy and paste the formula into each cell.
    

### IMPORTRANGE
    

-   Allows you to important information from another workbook (Excel) or sheet (Google Sheets).
    
-   Extremely useful if you need to filter and manipulate data from a master spreadsheet that many people use at the same time.
    

### INDEX
    

-   Allows you to retrieve a value or a range of values from a specific location within a table or range of cells. Often used in combination with other functions like MATCH or IF, to search for specific data within a table or range and retrieve the corresponding values.
    
-   When trying to calculate team data, this function is fantastic.
    

### MATCH
    

-   Allows you to search for a specific value in a range of cells, and return the relative position of that value within the range.
    
-   Can be helpful in various tasks, such as looking up data in a table or validating user inputs.
    

-   Advanced-level formulas to be comfortable with are:
    

### QUERY(IMPORTRANGE())
    

-   Allows you to import data from another workbook or sheet spreadsheet and then filter and manipulate that data using SQL-like queries.
    
-   Fantastic if you want to pull in information from a master spreadsheet but only want a few columns.
    

### INDEX(MATCH())
    

-   Allows you to search for specific data within a table or range and retrieve the corresponding values.
    
-   Powerful alternative to V or XLOOKUP for searching for specific data within a table or range, and retrieving the corresponding values. It can be beneficial in large datasets where manual searching can be time-consuming and error-prone.

With 450+ functions between multiple spreadsheet tools, it can be hard for RecOps professionals know where to start and which ones to learn. To help, we've created a list of formulas we recommend you know.

The 11 Most Important Formulas to Know for RecOps and Data

We’ve compiled the following list of resources you'll be able to use to grow your data knowledge or find information for your stakeholders:

**Books:**

-   [How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information by Alberto Cairo](https://www.amazon.com/How-Charts-Lie-Getting-Information-ebook/dp/B07P88R6DW/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=Cj0KCQiAx6ugBhCcARIsAGNmMbhbiL1PZoFy44-pHr9emY_tYfDQVgL8t_8r63py_DsWCEYn0AhKPZ4aAglAEALw_wcB&hvadid=338881486269&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9030959&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17589077887488862357&hvtargid=kwd-671762044713&hydadcr=3173_10390882&keywords=how+charts+lie&qid=1678495588&sr=8-1)
    
-   [Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic](https://www.amazon.com/Storytelling-with-Data-audiobook/dp/B079H3ZJJZ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=36DKWYQXZT18S&keywords=Storytelling+with+Data%3A+A+Data+Visualization+Guide+for+Business+Professionals+by+Cole+Nussbaumer+Knaflic&qid=1678495614&sprefix=storytelling+with+data+a+data+visualization+guide+for+business+professionals+by+cole+nussbaumer+knaflic%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1)
    
-   [Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals by Brent Dykes](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Data-Storytelling-Narrative-Visuals/dp/1119615712/ref=sr_1_1?crid=35ERU5XZ1OAU5&keywords=Effective+Data+Storytelling%3A+How+to+Drive+Change+with+Data%2C+Narrative+and+Visuals+by+Brent+Dykes&qid=1678495634&s=audible&sprefix=effective+data+storytelling+how+to+drive+change+with+data%2C+narrative+and+visuals+by+brent+dykes%2Caudible%2C137&sr=1-1)
    

**Websites:**

-   [Level.fyi](http://level.fyi/)
    
-   [Comprehensive.io](https://www.comprehensive.io/)
    
-   [Salary.com](https://www.salary.com/)
    
-   [30 Best Salary Sites to Know Your Worth in 2023](https://www.tealhq.com/post/best-salary-information-websites)
    

**Excel/Google Sheets Learning:**

-   Ben Collins -  [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@benlcollins)  /  [Website](https://www.benlcollins.com/)
    
-   Prolific Oaktree -  [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@ProlificOaktree)  /  [Website](https://www.prolificoaktree.com/home/)
    
-   [Sheets Help - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@SheetsHelp)
    

**Metrics to Track:**

-   [GitLab’s Talent Acquisition Performance Indicators](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/performance_indicators/)

**Reporting:**

-   [Ashby Offer Acceptance Rate Trend Report](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/2023-trends-report-offer-acceptance-rates)

Looking to become a better data analyst? We’ve compiled some resources to grow your data knowledge and find information for your stakeholders.

Ashby's RecOps Data Resource Round-Up

A job description often calls for years of experience in a particular role. But, frequently, I’ve found that those role titles don’t have as much to do with the skills needed for the job as they sound. This often bars excellent candidates from the pipeline. Luckily, it’s a problem with a fix.

When you calibrate with hiring managers, focus on the true minimum requirements. What does a role actually entail? What “requirements” are really just nice to have? What are the competencies required to do the job well? Looking for the same minimum requirements across the board helps keep the whole process more equitable, and it gives sourcers more freedom. 

Of course, you won’t move a profile forward if they don't meet the minimum requirements. But when you’ve thought critically about the true minimum requirements, you can find someone who’s met those bars in non-traditional ways. 

If you want someone with a year of software engineering experience, maybe that could be updated to say “or technical experience or coding.” This will broaden the requirement to include folks from less traditional backgrounds. They could nail the interview, they could be the best performer on the team, but unless you think critically about what the requirements are, you are counting that person out before they can even be considered.

This type of calibration includes more people, invites more diversity of backgrounds, and helps you create a team capable of true innovation.


Are you relying on years of experience, or something deeper?

What Are Your True Minimum Requirements?

An excellent outreach strategy requires a screen-in mindset.

A screen-out mindset is where you look at a candidate profile with the framing: *“What about this person does not meet my criteria?”*

A screen-in mindset is where you look at a candidate profile with the framing: *“What about this person would match or add value to the gaps that we have right now?”*

Instead of trying to eliminate people who fall short of the ideal profile, I'm trying to find reasons people would qualify. Screening-in helps a lot with diversity and really increases that diversity pipeline. Part of why I do that is because I’m never looking for the “perfect” candidate.

> I once hired an engineer who had been an analyst for several years. He had no formal software engineering background. But I noticed that he’d done engineering coursework in college, along with a few other traits that really fit the role.
> 
> He performed the best on the interviews of any candidate I ever put through. Had I been looking for the perfect person, I would've missed out on the best fit.

Screening-in helps recruiters challenge our own biases without lowering the bar for excellence. It gets rid of arbitrary barriers, like specific role titles, or only hiring for specific companies, while focusing on the skills needed to actually do the job.

Starting from a place of screening-in can change your entire outreach mindset. If you want a better top-of-funnel, start there.


An excellent outreach strategy requires a screen-in mindset.

Screen-In vs Screen-Out Mindsets – There Is A Right Answer

Laura Li

Looking to break out of the LinkedIn bubble? Ashby’s consulting team has put together this list of sourcing locations you might not have thought of.

1.  Skill-relevant Slack communities

2.  MeetUp communities
    
3.  Github, Dribble, and other coding websites
> **Break-In Talent** If you’re open to hobbyists, you come across gems of talent that aren’t full-time engineers, but would like to be.

4.  School websites
 
5.  “First 50” groups
> **Kicking Off With a Team** If you’re hiring for an early-stage startup, there are many people who want to get in on the ground floor - first 50 groups will help you find them.
    

6.  Programs for under-represented populations
> **Great Groups** Identity-specific schools, clubs, bootcamps, and classes are a great way to source great talent from specific populations.

7.  Hackathons
    
8.  Quora
    
9.  Gyms and fitness studios
> **Go Where The Talent Is** If you have a role that requires heavy physical work an ad at a gym might do some “heavy lifting.”

10.  eSports tournaments
    
11.  Relevant subreddits
    
12.  “Jams”
> **Coding and More** While “code jams” were once the purview of just engineers, “jams” have expanded into all kinds of roles and areas of expertise.

13.  Message boards and interest groups for role-related certifications
    
14.  ResearchGate
> **True Experts** Need to hire for a scientific or research-focused role? ResearchGate is often called “Facebook for academics.”

15.  Skill, job, or interest-related Facebook groups
    
16.  College cafes for new grad roles
> **More Than Career Fairs** You’ll find students about to enter the job market in many campus-adjacent areas. An old fashioned posting on a coffee shop tackboard is a great start. So is checking to see if the campus has a career center that shares open job listings.

17.  Facebook career pages in the local market
    
18.  Specific interest meetups
> **Think Beyond Role-Focused Meetups** What does your ideal candidate do for fun? You might find excellent engineers at a robotics club or great content marketers at a writing workshop.

19.  Industry or skill-related panels and speaking events
    
20.  Running an ad in an interest-specific newsletter

We've put together this list of sourcing locations you might not have thought of - and we're updating it regularly!

Recruiting

Now What? A TA Professional’s Guide to Finding #YourNextHire

Hiring Excellence | Building An Outreach Strategy With DEI In Its DNA

Salary Transparency | Practical Tips for Compliance and Recruitment Marketing

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

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

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

Snippets

The 11 Most Important Formulas to Know for RecOps and Data

Ashby's RecOps Data Resource Round-Up

What Are Your True Minimum Requirements?

Screen-In vs Screen-Out Mindsets – There Is A Right Answer

Ashby’s “Less Obvious” Sourcing List

Product

Resources

Company

Developers

Recruiting

Now What? A TA Professional’s Guide to Finding #YourNextHire

Hiring Excellence | Building An Outreach Strategy With DEI In Its DNA

Salary Transparency | Practical Tips for Compliance and Recruitment Marketing

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

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

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

Snippets

The 11 Most Important Formulas to Know for RecOps and Data

Ashby's RecOps Data Resource Round-Up

What Are Your True Minimum Requirements?

Screen-In vs Screen-Out Mindsets – There Is A Right Answer

Ashby’s “Less Obvious” Sourcing List

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