How FullStory Leverages Recruiting Data to Take a Strategic Seat at the Table

The entire customer success team at Ashby adores working with Daashon Eldridge, Senior Recruiting Ops Specialist. Over the years, Daashon’s approach to recruiting has become a best practice we share with other Ashby customers. We sat down with her to hear how FullStory's recruiting team is upleveling with data and productivity gains.

Problem: Insights Company without Hiring Insights 

Even with data at the core of their business, the FullStory talent team previously lacked such insight into their own hiring process. The team’s legacy ATS/tools still required manual processes, hindering the team’s ability to...

• Operate efficiently as a talent function, previously dedicating an entire headcount to running manual calculations in Google Sheets.
• Track internal progress towards goals, leaving the team in need of a better way to view pipeline metrics. 
• Communicate confidently with senior leadership. While leadership understood the strategic importance of exceptional hiring, they struggled to understand bottlenecks in the hiring process or performance relative to goals. 

Hypothesis: Real-Time Data for Real-Time Hiring

Knowing the importance of real-time and reliable data, FullStory wanted to uncover a more sustainable way to understand and take action on their hiring data. Despite growing to over 500 employees across five locations, their hiring process was fractured across a swollen tech stack and manual processes.

The team started by mapping their “table stakes” metrics, which were being tracked manually at the time:

1. Pass-through rates by hiring manager, role, recruiter, and department
2. Time to hire on bespoke and evergreen roles
3. Offer acceptance rates by role, recruiter, and department
4. Basic DEIB metrics, such as EEOC
5. Candidate experience, such as Candidate NPS

Daashon and team then brainstormed what it would look like to take reporting to the next level and drive strategic alignment. This would ideally include:

1. Pre-job data visualizations to predict capacity requirements and a realistic time to hire

2. Data dashboards to better understand metrics such as:

   1. Inputs such as inbound or sourced candidates 
   2. Pass-through rates to understand questions like, is there bias in the process? 
   3. Outputs across DEIB to proactively leverage data to improve the process

3. Easily visualized data, with drill-down capabilities and an ability to share strategic narratives with the executive team, hiring managers, and in 1:1s with recruiters

“I created a New Role Alert Email internally that is powered with historical job information from Ashby Analytics — JDs, hiring information, time to fill, passthrough rates. There was one instance where a hiring manager felt we were not seeing enough pipeline for their open role. And from their view, it made complete sense. Thanks to Ashby, our talent team dug into the New Role Alert emails and quickly saw historical trends. In a few clicks, we could see that the last time we hired for this role we not only used agency recruiters… but every person hired had short tenures with the company.”

— Daashon Eldridge, Sr. Recruiting Ops Specialist

Solution: Ashby Analytics → Ashby All-in-One

The FullStory team looked at a number of BI tools and recruiting analytics solutions. While there were some benefits to BI Tools and some concerns internally about adding yet another recruiting tool, FullStory decided to go with Ashby Analytics – which conveniently plugged into their legacy ATS. Market research made the choice clear:

With Ashby as the chosen solution, the team was ready to see if the product met the earlier listed challenges.  

"It was almost instant. I opened Ashby Analytics and saw clear numbers, color-coding, and all the reporting we’d been missing. It was obvious which goals we’d hit and where they were at risk. It was painting a picture of our performance that made it so much easier to be accountable."

— Daashon Eldridge, Sr. Recruiting Ops Specialist

When it came time to renew, the success with Ashby Analytics inspired the FullStory talent team to migrate fully onto Ashby All-in-One, consolidating their bulky tech stack into one system.

Impact: Half the Cost & Thousands of Saved Hours

The decision resulted in a 51% cost reduction by consolidating tools, over 2,000 hours saved by no longer context switching constantly, and meeting the analytics needs first outlined. 

"With [our legacy tools] there were areas of opportunity we knew we were missing; we just didn’t know how to solve for them. Ashby Analytics was the first step; once we switched over to Ashby All-in-One, it felt like we’d leveled up. Everything we’d been missing was finally there. For us, it was the natural next step in recruiting."

— Daashon Eldridge, Sr. Recruiting Ops Specialist

The FullStory Talent Team is now…

Operating Efficiently

With self-serve data over manual reporting, the collective team increased their speed and agility, replacing the aforementioned data pulling with more strategic work around workflow optimization, implementation of Ashby data learnings, and ensuring that progress to goal was being maintained.

Communicating Confidently With Leadership

With baseline metrics established, recruiting was excited to finally be able to organize information for easy sharing with executive leadership, recruiting managers, and hiring managers.

One clear example was moving from anecdotal evidence (which limits credibility and allows everyone to have their own theory on what is affecting pipeline) to personalized Ashby dashboards for cross-functional leaders. Daashon set up dashboards that quickly drilled into: 

• Departmental view of total candidates in pipeline
• Organized by DEIB breakdowns such as gender splits at recruiter screen
• And layered on key callouts around where the SLA was met or missed by hiring managers on their team

“Once we had real-time, reliable, and actionable data to lead strategic conversations with leadership – it was a total game changer. Rather than being met with pushback we were able to get on the same page very quickly and align our expectations on timelines, hiring teams, SLA's, and roughly when functional leaders could expect hires to be made. We were also able to more easily influence strategic initiatives and unlock the necessary resources.”

— Daashon Eldridge, Sr. Recruiting Ops Specialist

Increased Data Fluency for Recruiting

With the recruiting team armed with clear data visualizations of where the business stood at any point in time, FullStory no longer had to frantically react to a problem that was suddenly apparent. Ashby’s recruiting planner allowed them to do what FullStory does best: Leverage a data-drive approach.

The team’s biggest learning was to consistently take stock of how recruiting time is being spent and constantly be on the lookout for ways to simplify those workflows. The more they could optimize, the more they could shift brainpower to strategic work such as managing candidate relationships. 

"We’re saving so much time and energy that we can redirect into making our hiring process stronger and more candidate-focused. And it's all because of Ashby."

— Daashon Edridge, FullStory’s Career and Commerce Lead

Enable Hiring Excellence at Your Organization

FullStory's journey from data deficiency to data pioneers showcases the transformative power of Ashby Analytics and Ashby All-in-One, coupled with industry best practices. By consolidating tools, enhancing data-driven insights, fostering collaboration, and implementing industry-leading recruitment practices, FullStory achieved cost savings, efficiency gains, and a stronger focus on candidate-centric hiring.

Hear from Daashon directly, who shared her Hiring Excellence journey at the 2023 Ashby Keynote:

Ready to unlock data-driven recruiting at your organization? Request a demo.