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

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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 for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. The app blends 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

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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

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Retool

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Sourcegraph

Stytch

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Treasury Prime

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VanMoof

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WeTransfer

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Culture

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Halden Pfearsen

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

## Why to track candidate diversity

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

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

## What not to ask

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

## What data do you need?

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

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

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

## Metrics and effective tracking

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

## Designing for your hiring future

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

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

How To Design a Better Diversity Survey

There was a time when Ted Kleber was making upwards of 75 cold calls every single day just to make a hire.  

“It was a lot of trial and error!” he told Ashby when we sat down with him. “You were given a job description and a hiring partner. And then you had to learn your own way through it.” He had to rely on his candidates themselves to learn what his own interview questions meant. “A lot of it was on the phone with candidates. I would ask them to explain to me what they did and, thankfully, I met a lot of people who were kind enough to take the time to talk to this junior recruiter to explain, _this is what I do and this is what you mean when you're asking these questions_.”  

As introductions to the world of recruiting go, it was a rough one. But it did inform Ted’s hiring philosophy. “You just have to not take it personally if you have a rough call or somebody decides not to take the job you're offering. Because it isn't personal. But that said, it pays dividends to be collaborative and to have a kind and honest approach.”  

These days, Ted isn’t making nearly so many cold calls. He’s the senior manager of recruiting operations over at [Nylas](https://www.nylas.com/), boasting a well-earned decade in the technical recruiting field working for companies like Uber and Twilio.  

“About two and a half years ago, I made the transition into recruiting operations,” Ted said. “And I've been doing that since. At Nylas, the role is kind of unique and it's taking shape even as I'm developing it.”  

## **What recruiting operations** **_is_**

If most recruiters wear a lot of different hats, Ted has a particularly impressive collection. “Part of it is ensuring that our systems are configured correctly and that we have the right tools and software and systems. Another part of it is data analytics and understanding what activities are going on and, and how we’re setting goals. Another piece of it is enablement and training materials, so some of that is building training for the business. That’s so they can feel comfortable with our recruiting process and internal enablement materials, so that the recruiters know how to use our different tools, where to go for resources, and how to interact with the business expectations. There's also an element of employer brand; I'm also helping with our presence on social media like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, AngelList, and contributing a little bit to like our website and making sure that our job posts are all branded correctly.”  

Though Ted is building out a team to help shoulder the work, he mentions that these duties came up organically. “I went in expecting one thing and I just found all these opportunities to expand and help out. That's one of the nice things about being part of a startup, you can really set whatever scope you want to.”  

> "As a recruiter, your focus is really on your client. And there's all this other stuff that needs to be thought of, set up, and built to support that function."

That’s an unsurprising function of the recruiting operations role. In a space so new, definition is a constantly evolving work in progress.  

“Recruiting is such an interesting division to be in in HR, and the recruiting operations function as a subset of that is an emerging space,” said Ted. “If you think about the traditional roles in recruiting, you have recruiters who need to focus on their clients and focus on making good hires for the business. But then there's all this other activity that has to go into recruiting. Think about it as a business within a business. You need to be a bit of a marketer, a bit of a lawyer, a bit of a sales person. On top of that you need to understand how to build a good experience for your candidates and for your hiring managers. As a recruiter, your focus is really on your client. And there's all this other stuff that needs to be thought of, set up, and built to support that function. Recruiting operations can be a bit of a catchall, but it's also an opportunity to fill in those gaps.”  

## **Startup recruiting isn’t made for robots**

After years recruiting for startups, Ted had noticed that many of them repeatedly miss the same marks when it comes to their talent acquisition. “There are some startups that do an incredible job at hiring,” he clarified. But of those that don’t, the mistakes are often the same: “Recognizing the value add that recruiting is.”  

He went on thoughtfully. “I've talked to some chief people officers that have said, _well, I just sort of view recruiting as an overhead_. _It's a function that consumes money from the business and I don't see the value in it._ But then there's other startups where hiring is _so_ critical! People call it the war for talent, and I don't know if I love that term. But the competition in recruiting to get the right people into the role is so key at the startup baseline. If they don't have the right people that has that cascading effect of not being able to ship products or hit revenue goals and eventually that doesn't look great to investors or the public.”  

It’s two very different approaches to hiring that impact everything else a startup is.  

“What really good startups do,” he said, “is recognize the value that recruiting brings as a function to grow the business. They also see a recruiter as being a strategic partner to hiring managers and helping them do organization planning. Everything from thinking about their job profiles and how to build a healthy team, to what the right balance of senior to junior folks on the team is.”  

It isn’t enough to hire often, Ted pointed out. It requires dedicated, full-time thought. “These good startups don't just stop at a job profile, they need an individual that's gonna contribute in a certain way. Recruiters can add a lot of value by taking that consultative approach and influencing that manager to think about the best long-term growth strategy for their team. That goes into headcount, planning, and conversations that they have with HR and finance to stick to that strategy.”  

>"What really good startups do is recognize the value that recruiting brings as a function to grow the business. They also see a recruiter as being a strategic partner to hiring managers and helping them do organization planning."

“I think the best startups view recruiting as more than just _I turn the crank, I point my recruiter coin-operated robot, and they get me the people_,” he went on. “They add so much more value than that. That's the difference between recruiting at a successful startup and recruiting at just a regular one.”  

Of course, it’s easier to speak of the recruiter who can keep up with that than it is to find them.  

## **The right skills for a unique job**

It’s a complex time for recruiting. COVID-19 continues to impact the world, companies are deciding between remote or in-person work, and news outlets struggle to name the ongoing wave of quitting and hiring and recruitment confusion. But Ted points out that we’re still in a candidate’s market.  

“Everything that you do,” Ted told us, “Either front of mind or back of mind, should be providing a good candidate experience. Every call you make, every email you send, every follow up that you need to do, all of that has a direct impact on your ability to attract top talent. It’s in the communication cadence, and the importance of making sure that you’re giving somebody the right kind of attention. Even though there's tons of opportunities out there, the job search can be a very personal and vulnerable thing.”  

Falling short on experience too often is damning to a small startup. “It can start to build a reputation. There's a ripple effect that accumulates out there in the market. It makes it a lot harder to attract talent if people are not saying great things about your company.”  

The best way to combat this, advises Ted, is to understand, “It's a numbers game. You need to know your clients and your managers, and the profile that you're looking for. You have to provide a solid experience for each candidate, regardless of whether or not they're moving all the way through the process. You never know who you might need to call again, and you never know what people might leave you on a public review site.”  

The other key for anyone making the jump into recruiting operations is prioritization, the harsher, the better. “As a recruiter and now as an operations manager, there are so many things that need to be done. Being pulled in so many directions at once can be really daunting. Sometimes it can be to the point where you're a bit paralyzed and you get nothing done because you have 16 things to do and you feel like you have no time to do them, or you can't do all of them well.”  

Ted fixes this by making firm calls and committing to them. “I borrow one of the values that I learned at Twilio: ruthlessly prioritize. Taking a step back from the waterfall of the things that you have to do and saying, _what can I fill my bucket with?_ I'll stick my bucket out and I'll catch the things that I know are going to have the most impact.”  

Even the best don't always make the right calls. “Sometimes you let the wrong things slide. Sometimes you execute on something that doesn't necessarily really have as big of impact as you expected. But if you start to think about your role in that sense and focus on the wildly important things, it will help you manage the rest.”  

## **The structure makes the success**

An excellent manager helps with all these skills, of course, and can be the bridge between a recruiting team wanting to do their best and startup leadership seeking to hire top talent.  

“For career growth and for opportunity, never underestimate the value of a good leader and a good mentor,” Ted told us. “Being able to recognize that quality as you're interviewing, and finding someone that you want to work with and you feel has your best interests going to go a lot further than just the name of the company you might join.”  

As for his own managers, Ted hesitated to limit the praise to a specific person. “I wouldn't point to any one single person and say this is the person that changed my career forever. I learned all sorts of different things from different people along the way. I learned a lot of discipline from some mentors in the agency. I learned a lot of general process knowledge from people in operations. Even my peers have been mentors in some respects. I really believe anyone you can learn from is a mentor, and I think you can have multiple mentors that serve multiple mentoring purposes. It all comes down to communication and being genuine and kind to your colleagues and offering what you can. Because you may view them as a mentor, but they also might view you as a mentor too.”  

With all the progress he’s made in his career, the kind and honest approach Ted learned doing hiring agency work has not changed. “I've met a lot of recruiters and tried different tactics in my day and I've often found that what people best respond to, both colleagues and candidates, is honesty and being genuine. As long as you're being upfront and genuinely yourself when you're talking to people and when you're collaborating or recruiting, it builds that foundation of trust. That's gonna' be important later on in the process.”

You can find Ted on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-kleber-47124143/).

We spoke to Nylas's Ted Kleber on getting into recruiting, and why a thoughtful approach helped him succeed.

Nylas’s Ted Kleber on Bringing out the Best in Recruiting Operations

**By Kenza Moller with The Swarm**


Hiring? Finding it more difficult than ever? You’re not alone.  
  
Even as the United States has opened back up, job openings have remained at a record high, with open roles in February outnumbering unemployed Americans by [a record 5 million](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/there-are-now-a-record-5-million-more-job-openings-than-unemployed-people-in-the-us.html). In 2021, the number of open tech jobs [nearly doubled](https://datapeople.io/tech-hiring-report/state-of-the-tech-hiring-market/) and the average tech listing attracted under [100 applicants](https://datapeople.io/tech-hiring-report/applicant-source-analysis/) for the first time since 2019.  
  
The hiring squeeze has incentivized more startups to expand their reliance on recruiters. Unfortunately, the talent gap has also struck the sourcing field, with the number of open recruiting jobs [outpacing the overall job market](https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-strategy/data-shows-soaring-demand-for-recruiters) and a quarter of recruiters reporting challenges in [filling sourcing roles](https://www.recruiter.com/recruiting/five-of-the-biggest-recruitment-challenges-concerning-hr-leaders/) on their own teams.  
  
For an early-stage business that isn’t yet dominating job boards, it might seem like hiring has never been more challenging. However, just because it’s becoming harder doesn’t mean recruiting has to be impossible. Here are five ways you can streamline recruiting, even as competition for recruiters grows fierce.  

## Lean into referrals

When it comes to recruiting more efficiently, it’s all about quality over quantity, which is exactly what an [employee referral program](https://community.theswarm.com/c/articles/how-to-build-an-employee-referral-program) (ERP) will do for you. Compared to applicants who apply on a company career site, referred applicants are [nine times more likely](https://datapeople.io/tech-hiring-report/source-of-hire-for-tech-jobs/) to be hired. They also save startups approximately $7,500 per hired referral.  
  
Referrals can be helpful, especially for early-stage startups, who have a harder time competing when it comes to employer brand recognition or salary. Connections can vouch for your company’s culture, opportunities, and mission, and they know ahead of time whether a referral would be a good fit.  
  
The key to running a successful referral program is to mine your contacts extensively, including employees, investors, advisors, and your personal network. Set up [a formalized employee referral program](https://community.theswarm.com/c/plan/creating-your-employee-referral-program) to reward employees for referrals and publicize that you’re looking.  
  
Don’t be afraid to ask your colleagues for introductions. A personal note to your advisors, investors, and personal connections can bring a ton of referrals your way, and job postings shared on one’s own LinkedIn or Twitter can garner interest from your networks.  

## Don’t overlook a career-changer

If you limit yourself to hiring a tech recruiter, you’re pretty much guaranteed competition. But if you’re willing to get creative, you may still have an excellent recruiter on your hands, even if they have a different background.  
  
Plenty of talented employees in other roles, from customer service to sales, may make great recruiters, especially if they’re already familiar with your industry. The overlap between tech recruiting and other fields has already been recognized by companies like [Recruit Rise](https://www.recruitrise.io/home), which help career switchers train for a role in tech recruiting in just nine weeks.  
  
Rather than compete for an experienced recruiter, consider someone with experience in your field and a desire to try out tech recruiting. If you hire for soft skills and cover their training for the hard skills, you might just end up with a talented recruiter who has deep experience in your field.  
  
Of course, this goes for other roles as well. If you can train and promote from within, you can save yourself the hassle of competing for external talent. [Promoted employees](https://www.umassglobal.edu/news-and-events/blog/promoting-from-within) not only save employers an average of 18% compared to external hires, but their performance reviews tend to be better for at least two years after promotion.  

## Outsource certain tasks — to technology

Whether you work with an in-house recruiter or you’re sourcing all applicants yourself, certain software tools can help you do more with less. Outsourcing certain tasks — from sourcing and screening to scheduling and follow-ups — can help you increase your bandwidth without having to hire on additional recruiters.  
  
Today, technology exists to streamline all stages of the recruiting and hiring process. A few areas you might consider include:  

-   Using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) (like [Ashby](https://app.ashbyhq.com/product?partner=underdog#sourcing)) to help you source candidates, automate communication and high-volume interviews, and track your pipeline.
-   Leveraging platforms like [Knockri](https://www.knockri.com/), which use AI to remove systemic bias from the interviewing and hiring process.
-   Outsourcing technical interviews to companies like [Karat](https://karat.com/), where trained engineers can screen candidates for the specific technical skills you need.

## Embrace transparency

Hopefully, honesty and transparency are already part of your company M.O. — but if you want to beat the competition in the war for talent, you may want to take it a step further.  
  
Job seekers today, including recruiters, are increasingly looking for jobs that match their goals in terms of values, work/life balance, and pay. And when competition is fierce, any company that can share data around those pillars will stand out. (According to Indeed Canada, job postings that share salary data receive up to [90% more applicants](https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/pay-transparency-job-postings-youth-1.6435727).)  
  
Transparency isn’t only helpful because it increases the number of candidates attracted to your role, either. It also helps disqualify those who aren’t a good fit for your company early on; that helps you save time and ensure that those you _do_ interview are actually well-aligned with your company.  
  
How can you be more transparent when recruiting?  

-   Include salary ranges for each position
-   Don’t just share that you have a “generous” vacation or healthcare policy — share the policies themselves
-   Don’t preach “work-life balance” if your teams frequently work late; be honest about the challenges and opportunities that come with certain roles or your company’s growth stage
-   Be open about where you are in your diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, instead of simply saying that you’re committed to them

## Use storytelling to stand out from the crowd

As an early-stage business, it’s unlikely that prospective recruiters or employees will know your company name or your employer reputation before applying. Rather than considering this a challenge, use it as an opportunity: you get to share your story exactly as _you_ would like it shared.  
  
Leverage [the principles of storytelling](https://community.theswarm.com/c/closing-candidates/storytelling-in-recruiting) at all stages of outreach, interviewing, and hiring. Start by setting up a Careers page that clearly shares your mission, what it’s like to work for you, and the impact individual employees can have at work. Continue by sharing employee stories on LinkedIn and teaching employees (and leadership!) how to become thought leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn.  
  
Don’t forget to continue telling the story when you reach out to candidates and interview them. Focus on them as the main character: what mission are they helping to solve? How do they fit into the puzzle? Who are the other characters along for the ride with them? A compelling story can help you compete against those who may have an edge in available salary or brand awareness.  

## Work smarter, not harder

As an early-stage startup, the labor squeeze can seem overwhelming. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to streamline your recruiting efforts and stand out. And the best part is that all of these efforts pay dividends as you scale — so that even if hiring becomes effortless for your teams, these systems and practices continue to pay off.  
  
*This post was written by Kenza Moller in collaboration with [Ashby](https://app.ashbyhq.com/access) and [The Swarm](https://www.theswarm.com/). The Swarm makes it easy for companies to source referrals from their collective networks.*

Ashby has partnered with The Swarm to do a deep-dive on the current state of hiring recruiters, and how you can beat the competition and nab the recruiter you need.

The Last Recruiter: How Startups Can Handle the Fierce Competition for Recruiters Today

Candidate experience is critical for recruiters, but how can you know that yours is truly top notch? Is it even possible to take the assumptions and guesswork out of candidate experience?  
  
The most effective way to know for sure is to get data from your candidates in the form of a survey. But, even then, not all surveys are created equal. Your survey needs to ask the right questions in the right way to truly get to the core of your candidate experience.  
  
We spoke to several professionals in the Talent and Recruiting Operations space to see how they approach surveys, and what you can do to replicate their success. This article will walk you through what to ask, how to ask it, and what you should keep in mind as your candidates fill it out.  

## Why candidate experience is key

First impressions have a huge impact on how humans think and feel about new people and groups. And, for a potential new employee, candidate experience is their first impression of your company. You could be the best place to work in the world, but if the process of applying for a job is horrible, you’ll still struggle to attract quality talent.  

> “A company can unknowingly go from an amazing experience to a miserable one without the insights that allow your team to catch things like the need for interviewer training refreshers.” - Destiny Lalane
  
In a 2021 CareerPlug survey, they found that [58% of respondents declined a job offer because of a poor candidate experience](https://www.careerplug.com/blog/candidate-experience-statistics/). That’s a staggering number, but if you’ve ever had a poor hiring experience, you’re probably not surprised. It can feel frustrating, disorienting, or demeaning to go through a hiring process where the hiring team feels checked out, distant, or dismissive.  
  
The problem is that no hiring team is acting that way on purpose. (After all, who would want to lose out on good candidates?) Most negative candidate experiences come from pure ignorance of how bad the process really is. That’s why no guide on how to improve your experience will help until you know what experience you’re already creating.  
  
Destiny Lalane, Talent at Ashby, weighed in here. “A company can unknowingly go from an amazing experience to a miserable one without the insights that allow your team to catch things like the need for interviewer training refreshers.” You can avoid that ignorance by thoughtfully scaling your recruiting team, training your recruiters, and, as we’ll discuss here, studying data from high-quality surveys.  
  
Now that you know how vital creating a good candidate experience survey is, let’s see how to do it.  

## Timing

When should you send your candidate experience survey? That depends on what you want.  
  
The “end point” of your funnel is going to look different for different applicants, depending on how far along they get. Destiny says to ask yourself, “What kind of information are you trying to collect? At what volume are you interviewing? This will help you decide.”

Jeremy Lyons, Talent Partner at SGNL.ai and former Manager of Recruiting Operations at Wish, told us that, "The further along an applicant gets in your process, the more likely they are to fill out your survey and provide high-quality answers."  
  
Make sure to note how far along a candidate was when they filled out the survey! That will help you to identify if your experience is great up to a point, or if you have an issue further along your pipeline.  
  
For rejected candidates, there is one more element to consider: don’t send your survey too soon. Candidates who were rejected may not be quite so glowing as candidates who were hired. And if you send a survey and a rejection in the same email, you’re not setting yourself (or them) up for fair and objective feedback. Send the rejection, then wait two or three days for any especially negative feelings to die down before requesting feedback. This will help ease negative bias in the survey, even if it might not eliminate it fully.  
  
Jeremy also pointed out that there’s more to timing than how long it’s been since you gave your applicant an answer. “Something that gets overlooked here is the time of day that you are sending your survey,” he told Ashby. “You want to send it between 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM. People are often distracted during that window and looking for something else to do. If that is the case, they'll blitz through a survey you send.”  

## Length

Once you’ve decided when to send your survey, you should consider the length. Brevity is your goal here; aim to get the best information in the shortest time possible.  
  
Lalane recommends no more than five or six questions. “You're asking for a favor, for feedback, which is very valuable,” she told us. “You want it to be as easy as possible to get the information you most care about.”  
  
That might mean you need to make a few trade offs. If you want a lot of detail, for instance, consider using long-form text boxes and asking open-ended questions, but just two or three total questions. On the other hand, you may be able to ask an extra question if all the questions are in a simple scale or multiple-choice style.  
  
Beware survey fatigue! Odds are good that a candidate is filling out multiple job applications and being asked to complete multiple candidate experience surveys. Make it easy for them to choose to complete yours.  

## Questions

We’ll begin with a few guidelines for the types of questions you might need under different circumstances. Nobody outside of your organization can tell you _exactly_ what questions to ask. Your company and interview process is unique, as is the information you want to learn with this survey, so your questions need to be custom-tailored to fit. That said, we’ve included a few examples for ways to get this information, along with the style of survey question it is.  

**Timelines of responses / Speed of responses-** Are your communications prompt? Did the process drag out too long?
- _1-10 Scale_ I didn’t have to wait long to hear back from my recruiter
- _Extended Response_ Did you feel that communication was prompt?

**Professional attitudes-** Was your team professional in all of their communications? Do your interviewers need more coaching on effective interviewing? Did your interviewers appear prepared? Did they give you time to complete your answers with minimal interruptions?
-  _1-10 Scale_ Everyone I spoke to was professional and polite.
-  _Multiple Choice_ How would you describe the team members who interviewed you? (Professional, Rude, Excited, Knowledgeable, Disengaged, Withdrawn)

**Sourcing-** Where did you get the bulk of your candidates? This is especially useful to see if word of mouth, paid marketing, or in-house referrals are making a big impact on your sourcing.
- _Multiple Choice_ Please select where you heard about this job (Indeed, LinkedIn, Google, Other)
- _Short Response_ Can you tell us where you first heard about this role?

**Quality of questions-** This is useful if you’re looking to make sure that you’re asking the right questions to identify good talent. It’s also useful if you want to make sure that candidates feel heard and understood.
- _1-10 Scale_ I found the interview questions challenging.
-  _True or False_ I felt that the interviewers got a good sense of my skills.

**Briefing-** Does your candidate feel that they knew what to expect throughout the process?
- _True or False_ I knew exactly what to expect from each stage.
- _1-10 Scale_ I wasn’t surprised by any part of the interviewing process.

**Open ended response space-** This is less a type of question than a type of answer. Consider leaving room at the end of your survey to ask candidates if they have anything else to say. They may show you problems you’d never have anticipated!
- If I could change one thing about this hiring process, it would be...
- Is there more our team should know?
- What do you wish we’d done differently?

  
If any of these types resonate with you, you may need them, but don’t limit yourself. You may not even know what your blind spots are until you get candidate feedback.  
  
Keep in mind as you customize and write your questions that they need to be as clear as possible so that the maximum number of applicants understand them. Clarity will also help you avoid asking leading questions that push respondents to a particular answer.  
  
If you were to include all of these questions it would far exceed the recommended length. What information is most important to you? How much of that can you fit into the suggested length?  

## Aggregation using net promoter score formula

In contrast to a linear 1-10 scale, you may find that an NPS is a better fit for some of your questions. An NPS or “Net Promoter Score” is a metric that turns 1-10 scale ratings into a percentile. While those taking your survey will still see a “1-10” option on their end, you’ll be able to aggregate and calculate their scores into a percent on the recruiting team’s end.

NPS calculation refers to people who answered your question with a nine or ten as “promoters” and those who rated a 6 or lower as “detractors.” Simply, you find the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. (7 and 8 raters are called “passives” and don’t factor into the the final score.) The NPS score lets you know what percentage of those surveyed are truly delighted with your candidate experience - especially when you consider that the original concept came from the question, “How likely are you to recommend this to a friend?"

For instance, if you had 10 respondents, and 6 of them rated your candidate experience a 10, while 4 of them rated it a 1, your final NPS would be 20. (*60% promoters - 40% detractors = 20*)

NPS scores are extremely helpful when condensing many different survey responses into a single, digestible number, making it easier to quantify your overall candidate experience. And a digestible number makes it much easier to set realistic, actionable KPIs.

## The many facets of candidate experience

When we think of “candidate experience,” you’re liking to think of the specific interview process. But keep in mind that candidate experience begins with the job posting itself, and continues through every element of the hiring process.  

> "The further along an applicant gets in your process, the more likely they are to fill out your survey and provide high-quality answers." - Jeremy Lyons
  
Here are some areas you might consider incorporating into your survey, or even auditing to get a better sense of your overall experience:  

-   Language and accuracy of job listings
-   Emails
-   Glassdoor reviews
-   Website language (especially “about us” or “meet the team” pages)
-   Specific or niche industry review sites

  
As you craft your survey, don’t forget that first impressions and, by extension, your candidate experience, comes from more than just your interviews.  

## What else do you need to know?

As you form your questions and curate your survey length, there are a few other things to keep in mind.  
  
You’ll need to decide if you want your surveys to be identified or anonymous. Identified answers have the benefit of making it easy to track and follow up, but it may come at the cost of candidates not wanting to tell you their true thoughts (especially if they’d like to reapply later.) If they’re anonymous, candidates should be assured of this up front, and it may encourage them to be more candid and open.  
  
Regardless, allow applicants to skip any question they want. A required long-form answer may scare them off of being honest or may be too identifying for an anonymized survey. You want to encourage edge cases, like a candidate who accepts the job yet has strong feedback about the process.  
  
Decide which responses are helpful _after_ receiving them, not before. If you assume a swiftly denied candidate has nothing new to tell you, you rob yourself of the chance to learn something new. Give every candidate a chance to complete the survey.  
  
That said, be prepared to see some negativity from rejected applicants. It never feels good to receive bad feedback, but if you find similar sentiments across different applicants, you may find exactly what you need to change to make future reviews much better.  
  
This survey isn’t your only source of data about your candidate experience. Keep an eye on Glassdoor reviews, the language in candidate emails, and verbal feedback given to recruiters to see the whole picture.  
  
Finally, be sure you really put this data to work. “A lot of people have these set up,” says Lalane, “But they don’t have a clear process of sharing the responses within the department, with hiring partners, or implementing feedback where appropriate.” You’re doing hard work, so don’t waste it!  

## Start maximizing your success

Candidate experience can be complex, but measuring it doesn’t have to be. Ask questions thoughtfully and measure it with care, and the rest will fall into place.  
  
If you thought this article was helpful, [subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/#newsletter-form) for more.

To succeed in providing a high-quality candidate experience, you'll need to measure your process. Here's our complete guide on how to tackle your candidate experience surveys to get the results you need.

How To Effectively Design and Run Candidate Experience Surveys

“Candidate experience” is a pretty nebulous term. Firstly, it can mean a lot of different things to different people and, secondly, it's been used as marketing jargon for recruiting software in the last few years, making it even harder to to know what it really *means*.

To us at Ashby, candidate experience means that we want each candidate to feel as positive as possible about the time they spent interviewing with us. Ideally, they'll even feel inspired to recommend other candidates to interview with us, even if they didn't get the job!  

A great candidate experience will have a positive impact on your hiring process and your company brand. IBM conducted [a study with 7,000 candidates in 2021](https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/YMOARJJG) and found that:  

* A great candidate experience leads to **38% more accepted job offers**
* Candidates who had a good experience are **twice as likely to become a customer**
* Rejected candidates who had a great experience are **80% more likely to apply again**

We regularly hear very strong feedback on our interview process. We want to use this article to demystify “candidate experience” and share a few practical tips that will help you improve it, no matter the size of your team.  

![love for ashby in a candidate email](/images/ashby-love-email.png)

## 1. Be fast and responsive

If you only take away one lesson from this post, make it this one: speed matters in hiring. There are two main dimensions to this. The first is that a  quick response represents excellent service. If you’ve ever interacted with customer support, you’ve surely paid attention to how responsive they’ve been. You may have also noticed that responsiveness typically correlates very closely with the quality of service you receive.  

The second dimension of hiring speed is about candidate churn. In a competitive hiring market, hiring teams that move slowly will lose candidates that are mid-process with other companies.  

The rule of speed applies to every step of the funnel. You sent an outbound message and received a reply? Move to scheduling as soon as you can. You received a strong inbound application? Reply as quickly as possible.  

A responsive hiring process makes applicants feel more valued. An unresponsive one can even discourage the candidate's own engagement. You need to give responsiveness to get responsiveness.  

## 2. Communicate your process clearly at every step

Candidates want to know what to expect from your hiring process. A candidate left guessing might think that you're disorganized or uninterested, which leads them to proceed with other offers. Help them by making it clear what your interview and assessment process looks like from the start.  

At Ashby, we share an outline of the entire interview process with each candidate. This document highlights all the interview stages and who they can expect to meet at each one. We reinforce this by sending additional briefing details at every step of the process.  

As an early stage startup, you may occasionally make opportunistic hires and where you’re not as prepared as you’d like to be. That can be okay if you set the expectations with the candidate clearly. Let them know that the first one or two interviews will be more open-ended but that, afterwards, you’ll share a structured plan for the remainder of the loop with them.  

It takes a little bit of work to prepare the candidate-facing outline and email templates upfront, but it makes a *huge* difference for candidates. Providing clarity on the process also helps the candidate perform at their best, which means you’re going to get more clues if they’re a good fit from your interview.  

## 3. Let candidates know who they're meeting with and who their team might be

When you’re interviewing a candidate, they’re also interviewing you. They want to make sure your company is a good fit for them as much as you do, so find ways to help them out! The clearer a picture the candidate can get about what it would be like to work on your team, the more likely they are to move forward in the process.  

At Ashby, we tackle this in a few ways. Our [team page](https://www.ashbyhq.com/team) shows who new hires will be working with. It’s incredibly helpful to let candidates know who they’ll meet during each interview, and who might be on their team someday.  This eliminates surprises and allows the candidate to prepare better.  

We also share our content pieces (on [thoughtful communication](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communication) and [time and productivity](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/time-and-productivity)) to highlight the more distinct aspects of our culture and give applicants a sense of how they’d be working if they were to join us.  

Together, these amount to a lot of high-quality information for a candidate, allowing them to prepare better for interviews and get a strong sense of our company culture. We’ve also noticed that having this content out there allows candidates to come to our interviews with much better questions about the team and work environment.  

## 4. Leverage your interviews as opportunities to sell

How you conduct your interviews themselves is, of course, a huge part of the candidate experience. This is your chance to interface with the candidate directly, and it gives them the best sense of what it’s like to actively work with you and your team.  

Challenging and relevant interviews are the best way to engage strong candidates. In the best cases you can highlight some real-world challenges your team is facing - this will give the candidate a sense of the type of problems they would get to work on. It’s also a great way to show, rather than tell, what your business’s main concerns and priorities are.  

You should ensure that all interviewers are well-equipped to speak about company culture and other common questions that candidates bring up. Have new interviewers shadow or take a small role in a series of interviews before leading them personally.  

Ideally, as you grow the company, you will introduce a more structured interviewer training program. This can help team members who are new to hiring, or hire infrequently, to feel confident and capable in the process. That confidence will be noticed by your candidates, who don’t want a nerve-wracking interview process thrown off by an interviewer asking confusing questions.  

## 5. Measure and iterate

The best way to ensure a strong candidate experience is to collect quantitative *and* qualitative data about your process from your candidates (ideally most of the ones you interviewed, whether or not you ended up hiring them.)  

You can create rubrics that align closely to the areas you care about most. We’ve kept our survey very short and focus mostly on expectation setting (ie “I was briefed well on what to expect during each interview.”) We want to keep the survey short enough that candidates won’t have to work hard to complete it.  

![ashby candidate experience rating](/images/ashby-ce-rating.png)

We’re always pleasantly surprised by how many candidates want to provide feedback on our process. It’s already provided some helpful insights to improve candidate experience even further. Treat every candidate as a chance to improve your candidate experience.  

## Make candidate experience your next big focus

All of this advice can be accomplished with the tools you are already using today. It’s all about making candidate experience a top priority, and giving each candidate the time, thought, and attention they deserve.  

If you want to learn more about how Ashby can help, feel free to [contact us](https://app.ashbyhq.com/startups/product), and [subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/engineering#newsletter-form) for more recruiting advice every other week.

Everyone wants to create an amazing candidate experience. But what does that really mean, and how can you maintain an excellent experience with an effective hiring process? We're diving into that question right now.

5 Simple Ways to Improve Candidate Experience and Close More Candidates

Stephanie Baysinger wants a seat at the table for recruiting ops. Because, according to the recruiting ops expert with 12 years of field experience, that’s where those in the role will truly shine.

“My strong opinion with recruiting operations,” she told Ashby when we sat down with her, “Is that it can’t be the catch-all for your team. You need to think of your recruiting operations team as a strong strategic partner. They’re key in helping you connect dots for your overall long-term vision of what you're trying to accomplish.”

Between knowing what the long-term goals of a company are and understanding the short-term moves needed to reach them, Stephanie explained, recruiting operations pros are most effective when business founders view them as a partner. Unfortunately, that’s not always what ends up happening.

“Part of my role is to make sure that what we build will scale along with us and not break in the next stage of business growth,” she told us. “It's this constant balancing act of trying to build things when the team needed them yesterday, and then feeling comfortable with knowing what you need to solve for right now to the next level.”

But it can be hard to stick to that high-level vision when there’s always more to be done. “Every day you log into your email and see everything from, *We need to redo our entire referral process to, Greenhouse has a bug today, can you fix it?* And everything in between!”

Though it’s seen an explosion in numbers in recent years, recruiting operations is still a growing field, and that leaves many teams confused with what, exactly, to do with someone in that position. The end result of this has been more tangential projects, side work, and putting out fires than Stephanie would prefer.

“One of the things I’m wishing I’d see is the role of recruiting ops as the central hub of information. It’s a great spot because we work alongside our recruiters, but then we're also partners with our HR team, and with finance. The number one skillset of a recruitment operations team is the ability to anticipate needs and anticipate how an action taken now might have a trickle effect later.”

## Becoming the expert

Stephanie’s advice doesn’t come from nowhere. She started in recruiting at a global consulting firm, doing high-volume, high-touch MBA recruitment to bring in new consultants.

But Stephanie says she was soon taking on more than just direct recruiting. “What I found myself doing was constantly looking for ways to improve our processes. That job taught me a lot about the importance of consistency, creating a global brand, and ensuring that any candidate that engaged with us left with both a global and local connection to the work. But what that also meant was that, as a global recruitment team, there were things that we wanted to standardize. To that end, I started stepping into an operations role to help all of our recruiters get the resources they needed so that we could create that global experience and brand in a consistent way.“

It sounds like a huge undertaking, especially outside of the confines of her actual job description, and it was. ”I was taking on a lot. I found that a lot of the problems we had stemmed from recruiter training. So I started a global recruitment training program for new hires in their first month. I would do monthly trainings to help all of our teams understand the operational rigor of the role. I could actually catch people in their first thirty days, and then follow up with them six months later and get all the best practices down at the beginning.“

Stephanie spent seven years doing this before moving on to HubSpot, where she formally pivoted into a more technical role. Though she entered HubSpot as a recruiter trainer, her role was situated within operations functions. This was perfect, because it let Stephanie build a score of programs to help train and enable HubSpot’s recruiters. She rose to a management level before making the move to Klaviyo, where she was the company’s first formal recruitment operations leader, building out her own team and her own systems.

In the course of her career, recruiting ops has gone from being a helpful add-on to a recruiting role to something that Stephanie herself is being recruited for. Most recently, Stephanie has found herself at Marqeta, where she’s the Director of Recruiting Operations. “What was exciting about this role,” she told us, “is that this was one of the first strategic leadership hires on the recruitment team, because we have a leader here who truly believes in the importance of enablement and operations.”

## The recruiting dominos

That upper-level buy-in and enthusiasm is key, Stephanie says, in part because it’s not the case everywhere. “I've seen some people describe recruiting ops as, *'we have our recruiters, and our sourcing team, and our coordinations team, and then everything else goes to recruiting ops.'* And that's a recipe for not having the clarity, power, and partnership of a recruiting operations function.” The role can be cloudy enough even without that attitude, Stephanie says.

On the other hand, a functional and thriving recruiting operations team is what unblocks so many of recruiting’s current problems.

“A true collaboration between so many different departments is this dance that needs to be flawlessly choreographed. You need to understand and be a really great partner to the ones determining our overall head count. But then that trickles down into so many other things. What are the strategic roles that I actually need? What budget might we have to hire new talent? What roles are we prioritizing and what's the strategy behind it? Then you start bringing in your HR business partners and your talent managers. And they're trying to help hiring managers understand how to build out an organizational structure. And then from there you're working with your systems team to make sure that there's data validity and that we're compliant. And then you have a recruitment team who gets to take those roles and actually hire incredible talent for them.”

It’s a dizzying list.

“And you can see, they all sequence,” Stephanie went on. “It's like dominos: you want them all to nicely collapse, but usually it's all trying to fall at the same time.”

Naturally, the biggest stress point is one of the earliest in that chain.

“I don't think I'm the only recruiting ops person who would wish there was a magic wand or a piece of technology that could help me manage my head count!” she said. So far, nothing has cracked that problem for her in specific, but that's just one more reason why a talented recruiting ops team is so valuable.

“Recruiting operations isn't a field that can just be put to the wayside. It's becoming a piece of a business operating plan that needs dedicated planning and rigorous rhythm, because that's how it functions best. What I've found has worked is being extremely transparent and learning from the previous quarter, as well as knowing that it's probably never going to be solved perfectly. It's just learning from the last time we did it and making the process incrementally better.”

## Making improvements

In a career so busy, in a role not everyone understands yet, with endless challenges to iterate upon, Stephanie hasn’t stopped going out of her way to keep making improvements.

“I surround myself with really smart people,” Stephanie says, starting out humbly. “I about think the things that I'm currently learning in my role about building a recruitment strategy, and I think that they've had to pivot and change so much in the last couple years. What I want us to do more of is really getting to know the candidates and their decision motivators and all the different reasons why someone might want to make a change in their career. Just truly building that relationship. As we think about the future of work, the strategy should be focused on where we find incredible talent. “

And where is that? Anywhere in the world, Stephanie tells us. “Now that box has been completely opened so that it's not limited by geography. And that creates an entirely new way of strategizing how you bring talent into your company! I've worked at places where we've thought about using a pod or a hub-and-spoke model. We would hire in different regions and people could work in a hybrid way, but there was always a home base or a place for someone to go. But what’s the motivator for the employees? What do they actually want?”

What an employee wants is changing, and rapidly, just like the workplace as a concept. “Part of the strategy is to think about not just what we need right now, but what we're going to need in the next couple years. What will be the economic needs of our company? What gaps are we hoping to fill, and how do we start hiring for those things now? And how are we up-skilling and giving our current employees the opportunity to gain those skills once they're already here? Part of the strategy now is hiring for the skills you might need in the future, as well as hiring for really incredible cultural additions to your company and providing them with those resources to grow and prosper in their roles.”

## The ever-changing tech systems
Recruiting ops might still be new, but Stephanie says this is the most exciting time to be here. “I'm really excited to dive more into a lot of recruitment and HR technology. I've seen that space just boom in the past decade. We started with a lot of homegrown tools, and then we found the limitations of the tools. And now, I probably get two or three emails a day from various vendors who do various things. This might become an entire strategic role on a recruiting ops team in the future, to be someone who can manage the tech and ensure that our systems are empowering our recruiters. I've just seen this space just skyrocket.”

So what’s Stephanie looking for when she’s picking out tech for her team? “UX and tools for our recruiters that are intuitive, that make their life easier. It used to be about, *can I measure how much time we saved?* There'd always be these ROI metrics of saved hours a week. But now the technology is more around the analytics and how the technology and the time saved can actually impact the bottom line of a company and interviewer investment.”

Stephanie even specifically mentioned some of her favorites. “Ashby has been a really strong recruiting tool. I'm being very serious! Having done a recruiting operations role, I'm finding I have no desire to reinvent the wheel anymore. When there's a tool or a piece of technology that you can plug in, that integrates really well with the other pieces like your ATS, and does some of the lift, that's the kind of thing I want. And then I get to focus more on data cleanliness and validation and not vanity metrics.”

Any tool that helps streamline Stephanie’s workflows is a good one in her book. “There's a lot that happens behind the scenes that keep the boat floating and keep us running in the right direction. And when we can automate those and find more ways to innovate, there's usually a really big conflict between time and capacity. And so I'm consistently trying to find ways to automate a lot of repeatable steps so that we can create more space for growth.”

## Moving forward

Though she’s still new to Marqeta, Stephanie is an expert in what she’s doing, and she’s got big plans. When we asked her what the first thing she’d do in a new role might be, she had an answer ready to go. “It's so cliche, but I would just go on like a true listening tour. When you're misaligned on the talent that you *think* your hiring manager wants, or you think the business wants, that's a lot of wasted time, which is wasted money, which is wasted resources and burned out employees.”

“I would make sure that I'm really truly understanding our value proposition that we want to give to future employees,” she went on. “And I want to learn about that from the executive level, diving into old board of directors decks. What's super important for us? What kind of people do we want to work with? What kind of culture are we trying to create at this company?”

The passion she's cultivated over her career is obvious, and it's a great model for anyone interested in being a standout recruiting ops professional - or hiring one. “I want to be so embedded as such a strong partner to all of the hiring managers and to the employees at the company. I just want to be so in sync with where the company's going, going to all the town halls and looking at our CEO's two, three, five, ten year goals. And am I aligning the recruitment strategy to that?”

She paused and smiled. “That would be probably the first thing that I'd do.”

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

Stephanie Baysinger is a recruiting ops pro, with over a decade of recruiting experience. We spoke with her about how to help the recruiting operations team achieve the best results at any company. Here's what she had to say.

Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

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

Shannon Ogborn

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

How To Design a Better Diversity Survey

Nylas’s Ted Kleber on Bringing out the Best in Recruiting Operations

The Last Recruiter: How Startups Can Handle the Fierce Competition for Recruiters Today

How To Effectively Design and Run Candidate Experience Surveys

5 Simple Ways to Improve Candidate Experience and Close More Candidates

Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

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

How To Design a Better Diversity Survey

Nylas’s Ted Kleber on Bringing out the Best in Recruiting Operations

The Last Recruiter: How Startups Can Handle the Fierce Competition for Recruiters Today

How To Effectively Design and Run Candidate Experience Surveys

5 Simple Ways to Improve Candidate Experience and Close More Candidates

Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

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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