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 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

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

Halden Pfearsen

If you’re reading this on a computer, thank [Alan Turing](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html).  
  
  
Turing was a scientist in the first half of the 1900s, and in addition to being a key figure in helping to end WWII, his work led to the development of computer science and artificial intelligence as we know it today. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve definitely used items in your everyday life that were created because of his ideas. If you _haven’t_ heard of him, it may be because much of his life’s work was classified after he was was convicted of the crime of indecency for being gay.  
  
  
When Ashby sat down with Arthur Woods, he proudly told us that his company, Mathison, was named for Turing.

“It was his middle name. And so that’s really the backstory of what the company is all about. I grew up in a rural town in Northern California,” he told Ashby. “I came out as gay halfway through college and joined the LGBTQ community. I really got into HR technology and entrepreneurship out of this interesting vantage point of feeling like I was breaking the rules in life in general, and wanting my career to reflect the same.”  
  
  
Mathison is a company that helps companies build their diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, track their success, and train and empower their teams to create the greatest impact. And Arthur’s passion for that mission comes through very clearly when he speaks about it.  
  
  
“As an entrepreneur, I found myself thinking about new, creative ways to solve problems and also to chart my own path. I became passionate about HR technology, in particular DEI. Realizing that we spend the majority of our waking lives at work, and work for so many people is not working! For so many people work isn’t a place where there's a sense of empowerment or belonging. And I was really inspired to dedicate my life to how we innovate to make work something that works for people.”  
  
  
Since launching Mathison three years ago, Arthur has watched DEI go from being considered an optional bonus to an essential category for more employers.  
  
  
“Yet the vast majority of companies are struggling to make progress,” Arthur said. “They’re driving blind right now: they don't know where their gaps are or what to do. There's this huge need to take action. We wanted to start Mathison to turn the lights on in the room and help organizations see where they need to focus their attention, and then give them the tools to take action.”  
  
  
In the course of that goal, Arthur literally wrote the book on diverse hiring. “[_Hiring for Diversity_](https://www.mathison.io/hiring-for-diversity-book) was a culmination of years of research, studying the hiring practices of hundreds of employers and uncovering their greatest gaps and their greatest needs. And what we found in our work was that employers, first of all, didn't really have a playbook or a roadmap for their DEI efforts. We had the opportunity to deliver that to them. After working with hundreds of employers we translated all of our insights into the book.”  

## **What research uncovered**

There’s material in the book for anyone who cares about DEI hiring, but Arthur had a target in mind when he wrote it. “The leader who is trying to go from this extraordinary intent to _impact_. And what we're doing with the book is giving folks case studies, resources, and direct things that they can do to put their DEI strategy into action. The whole notion is that we need everyone to be part of this solution. It's not enough for us to simply just put our DEI activity on the shoulders of HR alone. We actually need everyone to play an active role. And the whole book is about democratizing that responsibility.”  
  
  
To learn that, Arthur didn’t only focus on employers and leaders. He also connected with nonprofits, workforce development agencies, and finally, active job seekers themselves. “We did a study of hundreds of underrepresented job seekers to understand the barriers they’re facing and to ask them _what is it that we can do to ensure we're lifting the barriers for you_. _What are the challenges you are seeing as we walk into the hiring process? How can we make sure that everything that we do addresses those issues?_”  
  

> “It's much more realistic to tell our organization: we may be early on, we may not have all the answers, but let's do this together.”

  
In the course of research, Arthur had some incredible conversations and insights. And something that stood out to him was how narrowly many people tried to define “diversity.”  
  
  
“As employers, many people still have a very narrow definition of what diversity itself is. That largely limits our ability to be inclusive in our efforts, because it hinders our ability to actually support every community.” Arthur told us that they combat this by zooming out for a big-picture approach. “Our model is to embrace a much more holistic definition of diversity.”  
  
  
Arthur pointed out to us that a wall exists between those within a company focusing on diversity, and those applying to work there. And it isn’t always clear from the outside what those DEI efforts really look like. “Job seekers have little idea about an organization's commitment to diversity, their diversity goals, or the efforts that they have underway. Our ability is to tell that story externally and really give organizations the ability to communicate their commitment to diversity. They need to build transparency to stand out to that job seeker that doesn't truly know right now, how authentically committed the organization is.”  
  
  
Sometimes the biggest gaps in a DEI strategy are, oddly, the most glaring ones. “It seems like such an obvious thing, right?” Arthur said. “As an employer that actually is taking steps to be more or inclusive, how can we now help you tell that story authentically to job seekers? But most job seekers, the vast majority in fact, had very little idea about an organization's commitment to diversity or diversity efforts when they went to their career page or when they walked into the hiring process. So part of our vision is helping with that.”  

## **DEI and building in public**

Clarity and transparency is often the focus of Mathison’s work.  
  
  
“Organizations basically have the posture that they need to go do this work underground away from everyone and not really share their progress or results until the progress is noticeable,” said Arthur. “And what that does is limit awareness of the work to a select few in your organization. It hinders collective ownership and actually ends up making the work unsustainable. Limited people find themselves trying to drive this work forward and they can't make a ton of progress.”  
  
  
There’s another approach that works much better, says Arthur. “Instead, say: let's start by building collective transparency across our organization, around our DEI activities. Let's now empower every single person to play a role. Let's equip everyone with the resources to take action. And let's build a continuous conversation with our organization. So everyone feels like they're connected. And that's a very different posture than, _let's have one person go underground and figure this out and they'll report back once they make progress._”  
  

> “What a cool thing for your organization to say, _you're part of the journey with us_. We want you to be part of the solution, give us ideas, tell us what we're missing. You're equally part of driving this all forward.”

  
  
That desire to bury the work, to do it quietly, Arthur says, may come from a place of fear. “I think it's a fear of admitting to not being far enough along, or admitting to not being perfect. And honestly, that's just an area where we have to shift our mindset to thinking that every single step along the way is progress.” It isn't a bad thing to be working imperfectly. “No one has really figured this work out end to end. No one has the full playbook and no one has all of the answers, right? Our ability to make true progress, and our ability to bring everyone along, and be transparent, and be somewhat vulnerable is a whole different way that we can do this work.”  
  
  
Working this way moves the bar to an achievable height. “It's much more realistic to tell our organization: we may be early on, we may not have all the answers, but let's do this together,” Arthur advised. “That's a very different posture. And it's one that, by the way, I think is much more exciting for the team of people who come into an organization and care about DEI. What a cool thing for your organization to say, _you're part of the journey with us_. We want you to be part of the solution, give us ideas, tell us what we're missing. You're equally part of driving this all forward.”  

## **Building in DEI as a team mission**

If you’re starting a new business, prioritizing DEI from day one is key. “The very first thing that we recommend organizations do is to have a conversation with leadership. Ask: why does diversity matter to us? What does it uniquely mean for us, and what is going to be necessary for us to bring this plan to life? What role will we all play? What activities will we need to engage in?” Starting with leadership is especially important, Arthur says. “If leaders at the top can have that conversation, it articulates the vision, the pillars, and how they're going to measure success.”  
  
  
“In a lot of organizations,” he went on, “What happens is their leaders say they have a diversity challenge. So they go to the head of diversity or to their head of HR and they say, you need to go figure this out, solve this for us. And so there's a collective need at the top, but there isn't a collective responsibility. And it makes everything else much harder. The whole notion of this is that we must go beyond. Leadership is just where the conversation has to start.”  
  
  
The idea of collective ownership of DEI is so vital, Arthur says, that it’s how he closed his book. “The last chapter in our book was _How to Mobilize Your Entire Team in DEI_. And the reason that it was at the very end, was that it’s mostly foundational. We need everyone. And that's a philosophical shift for a lot of organizations to shift the responsibility from that head of DEI to the rest of the organization.”  
  
  
Arthur suggests that the leaders in these conversations find ways to become more comfortable with the concept of diversity as a collective project. “It's going to be out of the comfort zone for a lot of leaders that have been taught for years and years: _you need to have all the answers, you cannot admit to not knowing, and you need to lead from a position of strength_. It's actually a much greater position of strength these days to lead from a position of authenticity, to admit to not knowing and to be willing to listen.”  

## **Adapting to a shifting space**

Excitingly, much of DEI is moving in that direction. Arthur predicted greater transparency and accountability at all levels will soon become the norm in the diversity space. He also predicted that that idea of diversity as a monolith is finally cracking.  
  
  
“Diversity is very holistic,” he said. “There are many different dimensions we can see and not see. It's intersectional — the complexity of diversity exists in ways that we haven't acknowledged before. I think we're going to see a lot of communities that weren't typically on the radar previously, now in the forefront. And a great example of that is the neurodiverse community, which in the last year has become a much more prominent part of the conversation. A lot of folks have very proudly identified themselves in the community in ways that they never previously did. There are employee resource groups dedicated to the neurodiverse community. And I suspect we're going to see more and more communities emerge that others weren't quite aware of as the taxonomy of diversity continues to expand.”  
  
  
Unafraid of keeping up with these changes, Mathison is continuing to grow, and they’re looking forward to a big year ahead. “We're continuing to expand our technology, extend our team, extend what we're measuring, and really be a resource for growing organizations that want to meaningfully take action in this work.”  
  
  
We also asked Arthur what his own goals looked like. “For me personally, I consider myself a permanent student of the work. I don't really believe there are experts in the DEI, because the work is continuing to evolve every day. Instead, there are permanent students who subscribe to the work itself and continue to immerse themselves in it. That's the great thing about this work. There's always a new barrier to learn about. There's always a new viewpoint to understand. There's always a new community to better build awareness of. And we just have to continue to expand our horizons in the work if we want to continue to be equitable.”  
  

> “Diversity is very holistic. There are many different dimensions we can see and not see. It's intersectional — the complexity of diversity exists in ways that we haven't acknowledged before.”

  
One way Arthur is helping to do that is with [Mathison’s Equal Pay Summit on April 12th, 2022](https://www.mathison.io/equal-pay-summit).  
  
  
The summit, Arthur said, is all about, “Uncovering the latest trends in pay equity and pay transparency. There's been a lot of new legislation in states like Colorado and in cities like New York where we're seeing new requirements for pay transparency and job descriptions. As this is becoming a requirement, a lot of organizations are internally wondering, _what have we been doing for pay equity and transparency?_ Have we assessed how equitable our pay is, are we defining everything very intentionally for job seekers who might be severely underpaid in their previous jobs? And we might be perpetuating that pay equity gap when we give them an offer that matches what they're being paid today, right? So there's a huge systemic issue with pay inequity.”  
  
  
He described the depth of the problem. “If you think about the trickle down impact of when someone is inequitably paid, what it means in terms of the house they can buy, the school they can send their kids to, the lifestyle they have, and how they actually become future leaders and organizations, pay alone actually has an enormous impact. And so us being able to be part of this conversation with the community on the latest trends and pay equity, transparency, what they mean for leaders and organizations right now, and how we can take action. It's going to be a very cool conversation!”  
  
  
Attending (or watching a recording) is a great way to be a permanent student of the work yourself. As Arthur told us, “Our whole philosophy is that you should not have to wait in order to make meaningful progress. You should be able to have progress in action, at any part of the journey that you're on. I'm very excited about all the work ahead. It's only the beginning in so many ways.”  
  
You can learn more about Mathison at their [website](https://www.mathison.io/), or on Twitter, [@Mathisonio](https://twitter.com/Mathisonio).  
Connect with Arthur Woods on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurwoods/) or Twitter, [@ArthurWoods](https://twitter.com/ArthurWoods).

Arthur Woods is an HR expert who literally wrote the book on DEI. His business, Mathison, is all about helping companies address their diversity struggles. Ashby sat down with him to talk about his work, DEI, and what both founders and recruiters need to know.

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

Like many talent professionals, Chauncey Brooks didn’t set out to be in talent. Having recently graduated from college, his biggest goal was avoiding an office job. This led him to manual labor jobs, where connections with his co-workers, many of whom were immigrants, developed a passion for immigration politics and law. He found himself at a law firm in San Francisco, there to fight the good fight, helping people secure asylum .  
  
It wasn’t quite the work he thought it would be. Here he was, in the office he wanted to avoid, mostly filling out H1B paperwork for major companies like Cisco and Yahoo. “Second day of the job,” he told Ashby, “I was thinking, oh shoot, I've made a huge mistake.” 
  
A year into gritting his teeth to force through a job that wasn’t for him, a door opened in the form of a friend inviting Chauncey to join him at Google. Though he wasn’t sure if Google would be any better of a fit, he went out on a limb and applied, and that’s where things began to change.  
  
Google’s recruiting process was intense, and the pressure only ramped up once he was hired. “On day one, they put you through bootcamp,” said Chauncey. He and twenty others in this incoming professional class studied under heads of talent from various companies who taught them about everything from what code really is to sourcing effectively to a deep dive of Google’s business model.  

> "A lot of what the recruiter's job is is understanding what does the company need?"
  
The bootcamp took people with an aptitude for recruiting and showed them the fundamentals of the craft. “I loved it,” Chauncey said. “I loved the sales aspect of it, the technical aspect of it, the technology aspect of it. It was so different from what I had grown up thinking of as work.”  
  
Since his Google bootcamp days, Chauncey has worked for small ad tech companies and industry giants like Stripe and Slack. Through it all, he’s sought the very thing he was taught to source at Google: the elusive idea of good talent.  
  
Chauncey was quick to elaborate on what exactly good talent looks like - now and over a decade ago. “The way that we and the companies now think about talent is much more dynamic and fluid than it was when I was going through this program in 2007. They were teaching us on a very blunt basis, a lot of it ended up being about lists. They trained us in how to spot a good resume, but in doing that they had a list of companies they liked, a list of schools they liked, and those were treated as signals. If they got out of the good school, that's a signal. If they got into a graduate program, that's another signal. If they worked at McKinsey, that's another signal. It was on a very calculated level where they basically taught us to think in terms of an algorithm for each role. But that's changing. Nowadays I think we realize that's quite exclusionary. The person who got to go to Harvard and work at GE and Google probably came from quite a privileged background.”  
  
Realizing this, Chauncey said, has made him into a better recruiter. But though the inputs have changed, the process he’s using and the way he thinks about recruiting has remained. “It doesn't mean that the person who did those things is not still good talent, but it means they're good in one axis. While the person who put themselves through school and got an associate's degree and then went into the military, that is a very different kind of path, but in many ways it tells you much more about them than the person who simply cleared gates in a more traditional or linear career.”  

## On "good talent"  
So which one is good talent? They both are, but, “A lot of what the recruiter's job is,” Chauncey went on, “Is understanding what does the company need? How does the company think about talent and how do I translate that to looking at someone on paper and determining if they've passed through the crucibles we actually care about.”  
  
After years in the field, and helping to get a startup all about hiring up and running, this has been one of Chauncey’s main takeaways. You can’t prescribe what good talent is, but you can create an effective plan to find it - a plan that looks very different at every stage.  

> "Recruiting is everyone’s job. It never becomes just the recruiting function's job, or just a manager's job - they are there to facilitate it and help it scale.”   

When you’re in the early days, doing Seed or Series A funding, Chauncey tells us that recruiting is everyone’s job (though the share falls heavier on the executive team.) “You need to develop your process and get clear about what your company's bar is," he said. "Get yourself a great recruiting advisor to help you build your process and teach you how to build the company." (Perhaps through Continuum?)  
  
Once your company enters Series B and C funding, and starts truly scaling, that’s when things get serious. “Hire your Recruiting advisor or someone like them,” Chauncey advises. “Scale the recruiting team. Hiring is still everyone's job but Recruiting is scaling and running the process and developing candidates. Build your talent brand and start hiring sourcers and recruiters to build scale.” When you're ready, you can take this even further. “Get an HR or Chief People advisor, and work with someone to develop some quick and dirty compensation bands to get you to the next phase.” This is also the stage to start seriously building out your recruiting operations team, not later.  
  
After Series C, moving towards pre-IPO, you should already have a robust system in place for finding good talent. By then, says Chauncey, “Executives should be focused on hiring amazing executive talent. Bring on a CPO, bring on a recruiting leader that has seen a lot of scale. Hire your comp leader. Then you can scale and start hiring pipelines of talent.”  
  
At this stage there’s a mental shift. Your leaders are no longer hiring for their teams, they’re hiring for the company. And, this far along, there’s no time to waste. “If a candidate meets the bar, get them an offer as soon as possible. You can figure out which seat to give them later.”  
  
We asked Chauncey what else founders tended to miss in their search for good talent. “Recruiting is everyone’s job,” he re-stated. “It never becomes just the recruiting function's job, or just a manager's job - they are there to facilitate it and help it scale.” And what else? “Stop interviewing when you know what you need to know. Be hyper focused on what you need each hired person to accomplish in the next year.” To achieve this, “try to envision a stellar annual review conversation - what are you telling them they did well?” Next, “Until your business has strong product market fit, hire great "general athletes" rather than deep specialists. And make sure they're good, because the caliber of your early talent dictates the caliber of your future talent."  
  
It’s a lot of advice, but founders have a lot to consider when hiring. “Startup hiring is a brawl, Chauncey joked, “not a boxing match. There are no rules except that you better win. So you have to be willing to hustle and do unnatural things to get that win. You don't want to do it all the time, but be clear when you need to break the compensation band or change the organizational structure to accommodate game changing talent.”  
  
One more major part of what makes good talent, that founders need to know, is what kind of company you truly want to build. For instance, a lot of founders will say they want a great engineering team. But Chauncey says that isn’t what they really want. He asks them, “What kind of companies have you worked at, what kind of cultures have you liked? What kind of companies do you look at and say, ‘I love what they've built'-? Saying you want a great team is too easy. A great engineer at Google could be a terrible engineer at a five person company because the mindset and the things you have to do to be successful are so different.”  
  
Instead, Chauncey wishes that more startup founders would start with a vision of their culture. “What kind of culture do these founders want to build? And then you cascade that down,” He said. and after that they can focus smaller. “What are the challenges? What are your headcount plans? Then you can start building things like the talent philosophy and the interview processes. And it’s the recruiting team that all actually builds that up and, and scales it out to be able to accelerate.”  
  
Once again, the value of an amazing recruiter shines through. But being an amazing recruiter takes hard work, which Chauncey has learned all too well.  
  
“I think one of the challenges that I've had in my career is that I'm always either at the biggest job of my life or I'm at the smallest company. Either way, I'm always at the steepest end of my learning curve. I've reported to everyone from the General Counsel, to the VP of engineering, to the CFO, to the COO, and very rarely do people in recruiting report to someone who's actually ever sat in your seat and done your job. And that's interesting, because they give you a lot of leeway to figure things out, but it's also challenging in that they don't usually have answers for you.“  
  
“One of the challenges of recruiting is that you get this place where if everything is high priority, then nothing is high priority.”  
  
Chauncey’s method of tackling that lack of answers might seem dark, but it’s undeniably been effective for him. “I've always sort of tried to think what's the thing I get fired for? If I don't do this thing, they show me the door. You can also think: what are the biggest challenges facing the company and how can I have the most impact on that with one blow? I’ve tried hard to understand what’s top of mind for my boss, what keeps them up at night. Even if it’s totally unrelated to hiring or my job, it helps me to distill to my team what they should be thinking about and what's important for the business.”  
  
These questions are good for more than getting into the boss’s head. “It also helps me to prioritize the work that comes to recruiting. One of the challenges of recruiting is that you get this place where if everything is high priority, then nothing is high priority. Many businesses are bad at identifying the real highest priority things, so it’s up to the recruiting leader to actually decide what that is.”  

## What recruiters should know... and what founders miss  
Other advice for those in recruiting? “I like to be prepared for all meetings,” he said enthusiastically. “I'm one of those people that really likes to pre-read, so I can kind of anticipate where things are going to go and understand how I want to direct things. That really helps in having a strong grasp of the metrics and mechanics of your business, and it lets you answer questions that might be pointy or challenging on the fly.”  
  
“I don’t trust people who don’t have scar tissue... if you haven't failed, it means you didn't try hard enough.”  
  
“There's always deadlines,” he told us. “There's always candidates that say no. To some degree that's just part of a game, and you have to accept that. In my twenties and early thirties, I would just respond to things at all times. But I work at an eight person company now. I'm always either taking care of my kids or I'm working. It's important to have boundaries and a functional process. For me, from five PM to eight AM I'm not available. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO himself, because that's the kid's time. The boundary-setting and compartmentalization helps a lot.”  
  
That doesn’t mean it’s always been easy for him. “At every place I’ve worked, I've made mistakes,” he told us, not quite laughing. “The key thing is: what do you learn from them and how do you move forward? I don't trust people that don't have scar tissue, that haven't failed; if you haven't failed, it means you didn't try hard enough. If Silicon Valley has a problem, it's that people don't talk about their failures enough.”  
  
Failures like risking your job, and the jobs of everyone in your company, for instance. For most people, the boss stopping by your desk to threaten to fire you would be the source of a heart attack. For Chauncey Brooks, it was the source of inspiration.  
  
Just a few years into recruiting, he was doing sourcing work at his second company. His boss at the time, Martin, was a fantastic mentor and leader, but Chauncey noted that he was not especially technical about recruiting, and the numbers were slipping as a result. That was when the CFO came to town.  
  
“We had just landed our series C funding and the company was about to double or triple,” he told Ashby. ”Our CFO was this guy from Google, a real New York City, tough as nails kind of guy. I've had like two conversations with him, ever. He swings by our desk and he leans over and says look, you all miss your numbers every single quarter. If you don't hit your numbers this year, I'm gonna fire everyone on the entire organization. Then he just walks away!“  
  
Some recruiters would buckle under that kind of pressure. But not Chauncey.  
  
“Martin and I grab a meeting room and say, okay, we gotta’ figure this out. At this point we were just two or three people trying to get it all done at a hundred person startup, shortly after the recession. What we realized was that we needed some way to determine what inputs were needed to get to the outputs that we wanted. Prior to that we had a rough finger-in-the-wind approach, approximating sort of what we need to get there. In that meeting we distilled down what we needed and built a timeline. And what we found was that, if we need to hire X a number of people in six months, then that actually means we have to have Y number of interviews and Z number of, of, uh, phone calls. And to do that, we would have to have at least like five recruiters, but they’d have to be already on board now. So in reality we should have hired them six months ago!”  
  
“We presented this and I remember the CFO said: Cool! If you're wrong, you have to fire these people. It was the first time that I really realized how important process and strategy was. I was like, oh. This is real.”  

> "If you haven't failed, it means you didn't try hard enough.”  

Chauncey has carried this lesson over into a much bigger philosophy on strategy and planning as a recruiter. “I don't think many recruiters and recruiting leaders like to truly understand the numbers on a fundamental enough level. I think that is largely because they don't look closely enough at these deep links. The idea that if you get your forecast wrong people lose their jobs. And it's really difficult to do that in a scaled organization that understands its headcount. In a company that has shifting finances and changes their head count plan every six months, it's like landing a plane on an aircraft carrier. That was one of the most instructive experiences in my career in terms of understanding how important it was to actually understand the job that we do and how operational it really was. Before that, I sort of thought of it as oh, I talk to people, I find the best candidate, and then I put 'em through! And then I realized, no, this is math.”  

## The changing world of recruiting  
Like so many recruiters, it was the team and the people that made those failures worth it. And with the future of work looking so remote, Chauncey made a note that those entering the field now we're facing a very different set of challenges than those who came before.  
  
“I think it must be really hard to be new to recruiting right now, because I learned so much being in an office and just overhearing what was going on. At Google we would sit in a pit and listen to each other's pitches constantly, and we would tease each other and compete every morning to see who could do the most outreach. And that was fun and it was energizing. And I don't know if I would've liked this industry if I had not started with something kind of like that. So I do think it must be tough right now. You have to find a way to make it entertaining and fun, and make it into a group sport. I actually got this line from [John Vlastelica](https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnvlastelica/), who's an amazing recruiting guru. He said you run to the fire. Find the hardest thing, the thing that no one wants to work on... and go make it work.”

If you’re interested in connecting with Chauncey, you can find him on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cbrooks1/). You can also check out [www.joincontinuum.com](https://www.joincontinuum.com/about) to see how Continuum is disrupting the status quo.

Chauncey Brooks is a talent rockstar who has experience recruiting for Slack, Stripe, Google, and, most recently, Continuum. We sat down to pick his brain about recruiting, founding, and what "good talent" really means.

Continuum’s Chauncey Brooks on Startups, Recruiting, and What It Means to Find "Good Talent"

Benjamin Encz

I’ve recently tried a new technique when it comes to hiring decisions for critical leadership roles, which I now call the the **“hiring memo”**.  
  
Like many companies, we have a live debrief session at the end of each interview loop to discuss the feedback we capture. While the individual feedback is very important in isolation, the live discussion often reveals themes that weren’t picked up by any individual alone. We have had a few cases in which we made a no-hire decision based on a theme that emerged during the debrief, despite consistently positive scores in each session.  
  
If you have hired for a role many times before and are well-calibrated, the live debriefs become pretty efficient and usually allow for a hiring decision without prolonged discussion.  
  
For novel roles, and especially for key leadership hires, the live debrief can become a bit unwieldy. A typical leadership interview process involves _a lot_ of interviews. Leaders are also tested across a lot of rubrics. Because of that (and because of the high bar and the high stakes for leadership hires) you are unlikely to end up with a candidate who excels in all interviews and in all rubrics.  
  
Prior to starting Ashby, I was involved in a series of leadership hires and the debriefs always felt difficult to manage. In some cases they felt rushed given the importance of the hire. In other cases a lot of time was spent but it was challenging for the hiring manager and recruiting team to synthesize the many points of feedback. Which positive or negative feedback is the most relevant? To which degree does it tie back to the actual skills required for the job?  
  

> **For novel roles, and especially for key leadership hires, the live debrief can become a bit unwieldy.**

## Writing the hiring memo

This is where the hiring memo comes in. If a clear consensus could not be reached in a reasonable time (I would limit it to 30 minutes) during the live debrief, one proceeds to writing the memo as a next step instead of making a hire/no-hire decision on the spot. During the debrief, the hiring manager should take notes on all the positive and negative pieces of feedback that were voiced. They then take time to write a document that synthesizes these points of feedback and ties them to the original requirements for the job.  
  
My memo took the following structure:  

- **A link to document with job requirements and skills we are looking for**
- **Deconstructing the negative feedback**
   -   One bullet with the feedback the way it was voiced, e.g. “It seems that this candidate lacks experience selling to SMB. They couldn’t surface good examples of that in our interview.” (No, this is not from a real candidate!)

   -   Sub-bullets that outline the hiring manager’s position on this point of feedback; how relevant is it?

- **What stood out positively**

   -   One bullet for each point of positive feedback, as it was voiced, e.g. “The candidate had strong opinions but was open to changing them through discussion, for example...”

   -   Sub-bullets that outline the hiring manager’s position on this point of feedback; how relevant is it?

- **In Summary**

   -   A couple of paragraphs discussing the feedback contributes to a hire or no-hire decision

  
This memo can be very helpful in bringing structure to what can often become a fairly unstructured live conversation. It ensures that all concerns are articulated and addressed. It also forces the hiring manager to explain why they recommend a hire or no-hire decision and how that decision relates to that feedback.  

## Distributing and discussing the hiring memo

Once written, the memo can be shared with the debrief participants. They can comment asynchronously to make sure that all feedback is accurately captured and to provide their agreement or indicate that they want further discussion. It may be that the writing of the memo adds enough clarity to get everyone on the same page. If there are still remaining disagreements a second live debrief can be run with the small subset of open issues and a much smaller group of people - that will help keep that conversation efficient.  

## Making a decision

How you end up making the final call will depend on your hiring philosophy. At Ashby, the hiring manager has the ultimate responsibility for a hire/no-hire decision. No hiring decision is certain, but at this point the hiring manager has gotten as much information as possible and it’s time for a final verdict!  
  
I believe this tool to be pretty helpful for building consensus where possible and to help people that may disagree with the outcome to understand the reasoning behind the decision.  

If you try this out, [let us know how it works for you on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benjaminencz_the-hiring-memo-a-tool-for-managing-complex-activity-6913204278950051840-1pUi?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web)!

We're using a new technique in our critical hiring decisions. It's called a hiring memo - here's what it is and why it works.

The Hiring Memo - a Tool for Managing Complex Interview Debriefs

You’ve worked hard to find the right data reporting tool for your team. Now you just have one challenge: rolling it out and getting the whole team to use it.

At Ashby we’ve helped a lot of customers bring new data to their teams through our recruiting analytics product. We often get questions about how to roll out a new data tool within an organization - and we have a lot we’ve learned that can help you with just that. In this post we’ll walk through some straightforward steps that will make a successful rollout of a new tool on your team a lot more likely.

If you’ve ever been through it, you know that rolling out a software tool and encouraging wide adoption isn’t easy. With technical software, like data reporting, it can be even harder.

Luckily, there’s an approach you can use to tailor your rollout and give yourself the best chance of not only getting full adoption of a new tool, but genuine buy-in from everyone using it. This is that approach, laid out step-by-step, so you’ll ask the right questions and find the right answers to set yourself up for success.

This article uses recruiting reporting and data software, such as Ashby, as an example, but this rollout method applies to any analytic tool, from Google Analytics in content marketing to efficiency data for manufacturing. The data may differ, but the rollout methodology remains the same.


## Step one: Goal setting

From the start, you need to be thinking about the end. We encourage you not just to think over your goals, but to write them down formally and, as part of your rollout, share them with your team. But more on sharing in a moment.

It isn’t enough to say that you want everyone to regularly use this tool. You need to be specific. In your ideal outcome:

1. Who is using this tool?
2. What do they do with it?
3. How frequently do they access it?

You may end up writing a few different use cases. That’s a good thing, because it gives you nuance in how to approach the rollout with different groups in your organization.

For instance, your answers may look like, “Recruiters are using this hiring reporting tool to help them hire every day.” But, at the same time, they may also look like, “The Head of People is using this hiring reporting tool to see metrics and pull high level reports bi-weekly.” A single tool can do more than one thing for more than one person, and noting the nuance and the various use cases helps you explain the tool more effectively to different groups.

If you find yourself getting stuck on a question, make a note of it and return to it later. Flag who you need to talk to or what information you need to fill in those gaps.

At the end of this step, you should have a strong idea of how your team will use your reporting tool on a daily or weekly basis. Your answers to these questions will inform every other element of your rollout.


## Step two: Determining scope

A critical part of a successful rollout is knowing exactly who the stakeholders are. This step is more than an offshoot of goal setting, and should include people who need to buy-in but may not be using the reporting software themselves.

The easiest question comes first: who wants this tool and why? Let’s say the hiring managers on your engineering team are frustrated with a lack of detailed information about their hiring process. They’re the ones who it will be easiest to roll out this tool to, because they’re asking for it.

Next, think of who needs to give their approval on the tool. If this group is not also a user of the tool, they may not be the easiest to convince, but their buy-in is crucial.


Finally, consider who isn’t using the tool, but will still be impacted by it. Maybe you have a small team of interns who will be asked to pull reports, even if they aren’t doing the hiring. This group doesn’t need to be convinced, but they will need to be involved in the rollout.

If you work in a larger organization, it may be helpful to put all these stakeholders in top-down order, to highlight where you need to start to achieve full buy-in. In this case, that would be: *Executives > Hiring Managers on Engineering Team > Interns*.

Approaching these three groups in the same way won’t get you as much success as taking a look at their unique needs and customizing your pitches and approaches. Maybe the executive team wants to hear about the ROI and hiring improvements this tool will make. Maybe the interns don’t care quite so much about ROI, but will be thrilled to hear that the software is easier to use than the current system. Give each group the story they need to fully buy-in.

The easiest way for you to do this is to make a note of what they’ll need, then gather the data they need to see. Creating a sample dashboard or environment  within your new analytics tool for each group is a great way to do this. It feels more tangible and real than numbers in a slide deck. It also lowers the barriers for entry: even if they end up changing things later, you’ve given them a great place to start engaging with the tool. The side bonus of this approach is that it familiarizes you with the tool so you can answer questions more easily.


## Step three: Review your data

Prior to rolling out the tool you will want to do an initial review of your data hygiene.

They say “numbers don’t lie” but real truth in numbers comes from good data hygiene. If you aren’t consistently updating your candidate details as they move through your funnel, the best reporting tool in the world won’t be able to help you track your time to hire. Give data tools clean, clear information to work with.

But be aware that even if you feel good about your data hygiene, reporting tools are likely to find flaws anyway. All analytics tools work like a blacklight: they show you messes you couldn’t see in areas that seemed clean. That’s not a bad thing, in fact it’s almost inevitable, just use some of the time you’re investing to clean up your original data.

The good news is that the higher-quality your reporting tool, the better it will be at cleaning up your data. Make sure to ask your point of contact to see how the tool can help you make this part easier.


## Step four: Make a communication plan

Once you have buy-in from your stakeholders, don’t keep them in the dark about what’s coming next.

Create a timeline of your rollout and share it with each group. Your timeline will look different depending on what the tool is, how easy it is to adopt, and how many people will be using. it. Here are some examples of what you might include in yours:

* When will your data tool be available to check out?
* What day(s) will training take place?
* When should the team start using this tool for new info, such as incoming hires?
* How long will customer support be available?
* When will the team stop using old tools entirely?
* What’s the first day that everything needs to be fully moved over?
* What’s the last day data from older tools will be available before access is lost?
* When and how frequently will you be checking in with stakeholders?

Make a note if this timeline has wiggle room or if it needs to remain firm. This helps avoid misalignment surprises later.

A timeline may already be clear to you, but it may be less clear to others at various stages of adoption. An obvious reference document will also help answer questions for you, saving your bandwidth.

Follow-up with your stakeholders as the timeline progresses. You want to be active partners in the rollout, from beginning to end.


## Step five: Move with intention

You have a plan, you have buy-in, you know what data you’re working with. Now you need to carry that success through the rollout process.

Rushing a rollout is a good way to fail quickly. Humans have a natural resistance to change, so even the most excited new user may be a little slow to take up some parts of the software. That’s not always because the old method or tool was better, but because it’s familiar. Stay consistent and lean on your new tool’s customer success team, product documentation, and any other tools they’ve offered to help you roll out.

Stay consistent with your setup, too. You’ll likely need to tweak your software as you go, but once it’s set up, change it slowly and not all at once. Good data results develop over time. If you mess with your setup too frequently, it will take longer to see the important info. Be patient as you observe the information develop.


## Step six: Avoiding potential roadblocks

Any rollout is likely to encounter a few bumps in the road, no matter how well-planned. The best way to make even these bumps a little smoother is to consider them in advance so they don’t take you by surprise. We’ve outlined a few common hiccups and potential responses to help you troubleshoot.

**Changes in management:** Keep a paper trail of the decision-making process for your data tool, including notes about what rollout elements have been completed and when. If your leadership changes part-way through the rollout process, you’ll be ready to bring everyone up to speed.

**Detractors:** Some folks may disagree on the best tool for a job, or be resistant to change no matter how good it is. The best way to respond is to be empathetic and hear out any concerns instead of shutting them down. Make a list of the things you love about this tool in case you need to share it to win someone over.

**Data issues:** Maybe your use case is an edge case, or maybe something went wrong in the setup leading to unexpected results. Make sure you have the contact details of the tool’s providers, and check ahead of time if you’ll have access to a help desk or a specialist who can help if anything goes wrong. That’s an email you want before you need it!

Frustrating as they may be, these issues and others like them are nothing to worry about if the rest of your plan is solid. The stronger the rest of your rollout strategy is, the more easily you’ll be able to cope with surprises.


## Success isn’t far off

A good rollout is almost as powerful as a good new tool. As you may have noticed, the biggest element of a successful rollout is time and planning. You may want the material to be ready yesterday, but going slowly and thoughtfully into a big data tool change is going to make everything else easier in the long run. It’s always worth it to invest real time and thought into doing this right. 

If you liked this article, or it helped you with your rollout, bookmark it or [subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting#newsletter-form) for more high-level recruiting information.

Data reporting tools are so important to a strong recruiting strategy. While rollout can be a challenge, this method will help you get the best result.

The Straightforward Guide to a Successful Data Rollout

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (often abbreviated as “DEI”, though they’re three separate things) are critical to modern hiring. Recruiters and hiring managers have a lot of power to make their companies and industries into better, more inclusive places to work.

Assessing and improving your DEI initiatives starts with effectively tracking demographic information about your candidates. Unfortunately, while you might know that this information is crucial, deciding *how* to track and measure it can be intimidating. Often, teams end up feeling paralyzed and not doing anything at all.


In this post, we'll walk you through your options for beginning to track demographic information, as well as show you how to report on it. With these metrics in place you'll be able to improve your DEI practices in no time.

## A quick history of tracking demographic data in the U.S.

In the United States, demographic data is mostly tracked via [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) questionnaires](https://eeocdata.org/). To be compliant with U.S. government standards, certain private employers need to track EEO-1 data. Other countries have their own versions of this info, but for now we’ll focus on the U.S. While it started as a compliance tool, more and more companies are relying on this data to assess their performance on DEI.


Using EEOC data has a few common limitations:

1. Because the questions are often just embedded in job applications, they may only be completed by applicants going through them - not current employees or applicants from other channels.
2. The survey is voluntary, and concerns of discrimination or discomfort with personal disclosures can prevent applicants from filling it out.
3. The standard questions are very limited, and don’t take into account all of the identities a single person could hold.

While EEOC data can be limiting it’s a good, clear place to start if you’ve never tackled DEI data collection before.


If you’d like to explore more advanced ways of collecting DEI data, there are plenty of ways to approach it.

## The three approaches to collecting demographic data

There are three fundamentally different ways to start when it comes to tracking demographic data: candidate self-identification (“Candidate ID”), recruiter-led identification (“Recruiter ID”), and inference. You may get a different quantity or quality of data from each approach; no one is “better” than another, they’re simply different. We’ll explore each of the options and also touch on why it’s common to mix multiple approaches.

### Candidate Self-Identification (“Candidate ID”)

One way to collect demographic data is by letting candidates volunteer information about themselves in the interview process. EEOC questions are one form of candidate ID.


Because these surveys are usually placed with the original job application form, you can run into a problem with sourced or referred candidates never seeing these questions. Some applicant tracking systems address this by supporting automatic survey requests at different stages and from all candidates, which can increase your completion rate.


An increasingly common alternative to using EEOC questions is creating a custom demographic survey where you choose the questions and answers yourself instead of relying on the government mandated form. This option is more available to companies who aren’t required to stick to and report on the base EEOC questionnaire.

### Recruiter-Led Identification (“Recruiter ID”)

The second way to collect demographic data is recruiter ID, where a recruiter manually tags candidates with their demographic information. This is the most accurate and comprehensive approach, because your hiring team will personally ensure that each candidate is represented fully and accurately.


However, the manual nature of this approach can make it very time consuming. When a recruiting team is already on a time crunch or stretched thin, this relying on recruiter ID data can add to the workload. At Ashby, we often see customers use this approach for later stage candidates (e.g. only Offers/Hires) where they want the most details on someones demographics.

### Inference

The third way to collect demographic data is using inference, where your hiring tool estimates the demographic information of the candidates who did not otherwise supply it. This data comes from census information and uses applicants’ names to try and fill in their gender and ethnicity.


The downside to this is that it isn’t perfect (Ashby's version is about ~80% accurate). The upside is that it can be applied to all candidates (including all of your historical data!) Because of that, for most teams, this is a very valuable data source to add in addition to Candidate or Recruiter ID.

### Selecting your starting point

So which starting point is right for you? That depends on your needs and your team - one is not always better than another. If you have time to devote to it and need high accuracy, recruiter ID is your best bet (as mentioned above, we often see this focused on later stage candidates.) If you want a high degree of coverage and would like to review your historical performance, algorithmic inference will help a lot.


Don’t be afraid to hybridize! You can start with inference data and add candidate or recruiter ID later. Hybrid approaches tend to be the most effective, as one method can cover gaps left by another.

## The most impactful DEI metrics

Now that you’ve started gathering data, you can dig into your performance. As we go forward, keep in mind that it’s not realistic to get all you need to know at once. Data improves and develops as it grows in volume over time. Furthermore, this information is a diagnostic tool. It’s all *quantitative*, or number-based data. To completely understand your DEI initiatives, you’ll need *qualitative* data, which will give you more specifics on how real people feel about your hiring process.


All this is to remind you not to grow discouraged if you start on DEI reporting and don’t see high volumes of perfect data in one week. Give it time, keep working on it. This is one of several tools, and you’re already off to a great start by having it set up.


With that out of the way, let’s look at the DEI metrics we recommend tracking.

### Percent of hires from underrepresented groups

The first metric we’ll look at is percent of hires from underrepresented groups. To have an inclusive frame of mind, approach this metric as “more of X” rather than “less of Y,” i.e. you want to hire *more* women and nonbinary applicants, not *fewer* men. Track this metric both overall and by department to get a more comprehensive look at your company’s diversity standing.


When setting hiring goals, reference the distribution of the current market. If 24% of engineers are women, aiming for your engineering department to be a 50/50 gender split is going to be challenging, but aiming for 30% female hires is more attainable. Aim to set ambitious but realistic goals and do it with intention.

![statistics of percent of hires](/images/percent-hires.png)


You need to track hiring percentages not only to see who you’re hiring, but to help you make sense of our next metric...

### Conversion rates sliced by demographic data

Look at conversion rates from stage to stage. You want this to remain fairly consistent from one stage to the next across different underrepresented groups. This is an extremely important metric, as it’s a good way to spot problem areas in your hiring process. You may find that you begin with a more diverse range of candidate than you end up hiring, and that’s worth examining closer.


If you notice a big drop off in any of the groups you’re tracking from one stage to the next, that’s a sign that something exclusionary might be happening at that stage. Take time to investigate that stage and the source of the drop. Just like we mentioned at the start of this section, conversion between stages is an area where metrics can tell you that a problem exists, but only qualitative data can tell you *why*.

![passthrough rates by gender in Ashby](/images/passthough-gender.png)

### Percent of initial screens with diverse candidates

We recommend tracking the breakdown of your pipeline at the initial screen stage. This metric can be tracked nicely over time, making it a good indicator of success in creating a more diverse pool of candidates at the top of your funnel.

![bar graph of gender at screening in Ashby](/images/gender-screen.png)

As with your final hiring metrics, look into industry numbers to get an idea of what goals you should set. Industry distributions are always a good place to start.

### Percent of candidates sourced from different demographics

Finally, take yourself all the way to the top of the funnel to examine the percentage of candidates sourced from different demographics. You may find that a lopsided hiring system begins further back than you think, which is a sign that you need to change where and how you advertise your job postings and source your candidates. Revisit your job posting language to spot hidden biases, and try new job boards to expand your reach to populations that are underrepresented at your company.


A great way to further improve this metric is by tracking your job marketing campaigns. If you notice a spike in the types of candidates you’re looking for, check what campaign you were running at the time to see what worked.


Be especially aware of sourcing and internal recommendations. If you repeatedly dip into the same pool of people, your applicant diversity will stagnate very quickly.


A lot of our customers intentionally focus their sourcing outreach on candidates in underrepresented groups. That’s generally a very effective way to increase the diversity of your overall talent pool.

![image of a pie chart of various candidate racial and ethnic backgrounds](/images/percent-sourced.png)

## More to keep in mind as you implement

Of course, numbers don’t tell the whole story. You could write a book about making your hiring better and more inclusive ([and many people have](https://teambuilding.com/blog/diversity-inclusion-books)!) You’ll need to be on the look out for several other things in order for your investment in your DEI metrics to pay off for everyone.


Making these improvements is going to take time. You shouldn’t expect results overnight, and even setting up the analytics is going to take some time to do right. That means that you truly need buy-in from everyone involved. The executives at your company need to be as invested and as patient as your recruiting team. Get out ahead of any issues by presenting DEI metric tracking as a worthy time investment from the start, so that everyone is on the same page before you find yourself caught up in the process.


Focusing on improving your DEI metrics will come with tradeoffs. You may find that, when you dial in on metrics like improving stage to stage conversion rates for certain demographics or increase the percentage of underrepresented groups you hire, other metrics, like “time to fill” might go up. Remember that this is part of improving your overall hiring system for the long term. Because of these tradeoffs, buy-in from all levels is once again vital.


If your company has been around for a while, you may be using unofficial metrics to track diversity and inclusiveness. Now is a good time to revisit those. If your guidelines are particularly outdated this is the perfect time to toss them out and start fresh. The datapoints we’ve outlined above are going to be more fair, accurate, and definite than vague rules of thumb.

## Ready to begin?

There’s no need to fear the numbers. Too many great companies hold themselves back from tracking DEI metrics because they’re nervous about not doing it right. Success is going to look different to different companies, and there are multiple types of diversity to consider in hiring. Don’t let that overwhelm you! Instead, let it empower you: everyone needs to start somewhere, and right now is the best time to do it.


Tracking your DEI metrics is the first step in a much larger process of making your business a more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and welcoming place to work. We hope that this guide will help you take on the challenge!


If you found this article helpful, bookmark it, then [subscribe to our blog](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/all#newsletter-form) for future recruiting insights, stories, and how-to’s.

You know it's vital to always work towards improving your company's diversity, equity, and inclusion - but do you know the best way to start tracking it?

How to Track and Improve Your DEI Hiring Metrics

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

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

Continuum’s Chauncey Brooks on Startups, Recruiting, and What It Means to Find "Good Talent"

The Hiring Memo - a Tool for Managing Complex Interview Debriefs

The Straightforward Guide to a Successful Data Rollout

How to Track and Improve Your DEI Hiring Metrics

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

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

Continuum’s Chauncey Brooks on Startups, Recruiting, and What It Means to Find "Good Talent"

The Hiring Memo - a Tool for Managing Complex Interview Debriefs

The Straightforward Guide to a Successful Data Rollout

How to Track and Improve Your DEI Hiring Metrics

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

Subscribe to Updates

Product

Resources

Company

Developers