Cohort Hiring to Reduce Time to Fill with Anna Hall, Lead GTM Recruiter at Ashby

- I think it's the idea of continuous improvement. How can we look at what we're doing now, where we need to be, our organization, our growth, our challenges? How can we incrementally improve on what we're doing across various aspects, right? So hiring excellence for me is exactly that. Continuous improvement, knowing that it's not stagnant. - Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful town acquisition teams. Game valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. - Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform empowering ambitious teams from C to IPO and beyond. I am absolutely thrilled to be here today with our very own recruiter, Anna Hall. We are going to get to how Ashby got our time to fill from 66 days to 40 days. But first, I really wanna introduce Anna, who brings over 12 years of experience in the TA space to our team. She began her career in the agency world and then transitioned to HR tech and even had a brief stint in aviation, which if you haven't talked to her about that, you absolutely need to hear about it. Since joining Ashby as our first go to market recruiter just over a year ago, Anna has played a really key role in hiring more than 60 go to market professionals, which is wild stats for her first year. And most of this was actually done through cohort hiring in a cohort model which we'll be talking about today. She's really passionate about optimizing recruiting processes and really believes that small incremental improvements can drive significant business results. So I think there's actually no better person to chat about this than Anna. Anna, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Like I said, today we're going to be talking about cohort hiring. Let's take a step back and talk about what is cohort hiring. So cohort hiring is an ultra efficient hiring process where I guess if I compare it to the way that a lot of people think about a hiring process which might be more of a linear process where you are adding candidates to your pipeline kind of as they come to you. So you have different candidates at different stages of your workflow. And a cohort model you are working, you're putting more work in up front to create your total talent pipeline. So you're talking about posting a role, closing the role with application deadlines, a fixed amount of time where you attract your candidates from all of your different channels inbound referrals, sourcing networking groups. And the idea is to assess your talent pool cohesively up front. We do it in partnership with hiring managers so that they have deep visibility into quality and quantity of the pipeline in the beginning which has wonderful downstream impacts, which I'm sure we'll talk about. It also creates an even playing field for all of your candidates, all of your applicants, right? It gives the best statistical opportunity for marginalized communities. Everybody is entering the process at the same time. And then as the word indicates, you're moving folk forward as a cohort as a group. So inevitably and intentionally, there's drop off at each of your stages. But the goal in cohort hiring is to have multiple people at the final round. Your goal is to have choice at the finish line so that you have three or four fantastic candidates at that final round. And best case scenario, you're able to hire more than one person. Maybe you can pull forward a head count. Maybe you can add a head count if this needs are there. Yeah, that makes total sense. My understanding of cohort hiring, or at least my experience has been, cohort hiring has largely been utilized in the past for more evergreen roles. Let's say SDRs where you're hiring a large volume SDRs and you're putting people through a cohort partially because you want them to all start at the same time. But why do you think that cohort hiring has mainly been used for evergreen type roles versus, you know, we use them for tons of roles, not evergreen. We use it for almost every role, if we can. You're right, I think historically I've seen it used for like earlier in career type positions, maybe entry level. I think there's a misconception that it can be quite transactional both for candidate and like hiring team and recruiter. I think there are misconceptions with it that you might miss out on great candidates. It's something that talent teams talk a lot about with hiring managers, right? You get to the finish line, are we able to make this higher? What if somebody else comes through? And so I think that there are misconceptions with cohort hiring. Yeah, it's transactional, you might miss out on somebody or it might impact how long it takes to fill the role if you're kind of waiting for a cohort to move through. I think it's largely rooted in misconception. That makes total sense. I feel like our candidates have such a positive experience with this, mostly because they know what's going on, right? They know that everyone is going through the same process they're going through at the same time. And so you don't feel like you're really racing against the clock to beat someone on timeline. And again, it creates a lot of equity in the process of we're not skipping people ahead. We're kind of bringing everyone along at the same pace. And I think there's a lot of benefits to that. But that's definitely not the only benefit. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the pros of cohort hiring are and kind of how those impact your workflow, time management, ability to focus maybe on other more important things like human touch? Candidate experience is real. It's really important, right? I get to your point. I do get a lot of positive feedback from candidates because of the transparency around it, I think. I can say to candidates, everybody is at this recruiter interview stage. We will notify everybody on Friday of this week if we're moving forward or what the next steps look like. And just that transparency and setting expectations is really important. Outside of that, there's a massive business impact to cohort hiring, right? Recruiter efficiency, that kind of trickles over into hiring manager and interviewer capacity when they're focused on interviewing versus when they're not context switching is reduced significantly with cohort hiring. And I think when you talk about like the business, the end goal, what are we looking to do, right? We're looking to fill our headcount. We're looking to hire the best people as efficiently as possible with the quality of hire. We're talking kind of further down the road, reducing attrition rates and all of those things that are important to talent teams. The work that we do up front in cohort hiring, I think the visibility that hiring managers have into the quality and quantity of the pipeline up front means that we can make faster decisions when we get to that final round. We are reducing uncertainty. And we are not having a conversation when candidates are at the final round that is based in, I don't know, maybe we should hold. Maybe we should see if anyone else comes through. No, we've evaluated our entire pipeline. We've seen the best of the best and we can make decisions. So internally here, it's reduced our time to fill, like quite significantly, on top of all of those other efficiencies. I think one of the hardest things in any job, but also in recruiting is that context switching. And it's not just for recruiters, it's the hiring managers. Are they at a stage where they need to help review applications? Are they at a stage where they're actually doing an interview? Are they at a stage where they're looking at feedback and having to make a choice? If you're doing all of those things simultaneously at different stages for the same role, it's quite difficult as a mental model to fulfill that because you're in several different contexts and they kind of start bleeding into each other and that's actually not super helpful for decision making. So I would have to imagine this also is a positive outcome for the hiring managers too. Absolutely. And the way that maybe I should give a little bit of context is to like how we set up a cohort or what that would mean for a hiring manager. If you think about, you know, you're opening a role, you're closing it, you have a fixed amount of time to collect all of your candidates and then folk are moving through one stage at a time together. I can, as I'm kicking off a role with a hiring manager, I can set expectations and say, at the end of next week, I'm gonna need some time for you to review the final applications, help determine who's gonna move forward. The week after that will be recruiter phone screens, that's all on me, that's my dedicated time. The week after that though, I'm gonna need you proactively to open up your calendar, save times for interviews, know that you are going to be deeply focused for quite a lot of that week on hiring manager interviews. Then we'll move forward to whatever the next round is, the presentation, and we can set expectations with those interviewers. That's the week that we're gonna need deep focus and attention from you. And I think it's quite meaningful to their day today and how they're planning their weeks, months, et cetera. For sure, and as an interviewer who's interviewed in our process, it's actually great for us too, because we know approximately what week or a couple of weeks we are going to need to open up our calendars to dedicate time. And overall, I think it just helps people get into the right mindset before it arrives. And so you feel more prepared to engage in that activity because if you're an interviewer and you're switching from the context of your full-time job to the context of interviewing, that's a mental shift, right? And so if you know the mental shift is coming, I find it to be a lot easier to get into the interview mode. - Yeah, I also think that there's less cancellations from interviewers this way. - Right, there's less of the last minute. Oh, sorry, I actually have a customer call that I need to take. I didn't know that there was an interview coming today, which I've seen happen so many times. We don't have a lot of that internally and I think it's a lot to do with this expectation setting. - So these are the kind of the pros, the areas that some people might want to consider if they're looking to do cohort hiring, but like any process or model, there is some areas to watch. So love to hear more about what should people look out for in not necessarily pitfalls, but what's something to keep an eye on? I've made some mistakes, I've had some learnings, right? As I've become deeply involved in cohort hiring, I think a lot of the work, we'll probably talk about this when we talk about how to do this well and what you need to do, but cohort recruiting is very data driven. And so doing the work upfront to make sure that you are accurately predicting how long you need to collect the right amount of applications. If that isn't done well, then you risk leaving the role open for too long and having too many candidates, which is just more work and makes it a little bit harder and delays the process. The flip side to that is if you don't keep it open for long enough, then you might not have a strong enough pipeline to get through to that fine around with choice, which is what we're aiming for. So I think the work done upfront is really important and it's a crucial piece of cohort hiring. The data piece continues, like as you're moving through the process, most recruiting teams will be looking at past your rates. Transparently, I think they can look a little different in cohort hiring, but you still have to keep an eye on them. And if there is a drop off at a certain stage, we don't have in cohort hiring, we don't have other candidates. We'd be like, oh, there's a drop off, but we know other candidates are coming through, right? Because we've closed the application time. So then you're talking about reopening a role, which is totally acceptable to be expected sometimes. You can create a second cohort and bring them through, but you want to make that decision as soon as you realize that you don't have the projected hires that you expected, instead of waiting until the very final round. So keeping an eye on the data, and then if you're going to repost, that recalibration moment is important. Where did we go, Amis? Why did candidates drop off? What do we need to change? Job posting wise, application questions, interviews, et cetera. I think that moment is really important so that your second cohort will just effectively be stronger, right, in terms of what you're looking for. And the other piece, we talked about this like in the reverse, but hiring managers, interviewers. We are setting an expectation with them, of, hey, this is the week that you're going to be on. You're going to be deeply involved in interviewing. Well, tactically, you have to make sure that they don't have time out of the office. It did make that mistake last year. We had one interviewer who was a technical interviewer. They were the only person to run this interview, and I didn't ask if they had time off. So I opened the role and the one week they were going to be out of town was the one week they were supposed to interview. Oops, you see, life learning moment. We ended up hiring two people from that cohort. It actually ended up working. But it was a lesson, a mistake that I haven't made twice. So kind of tactically, figuring out when your panel is available is crucial. Yeah, and that's a great thing, though, because you've done all this pre-work. You know who those folks are going to be, and because you know who they're going to be, you can track things like that beforehand and make sure that people are available, that they have the time set aside. So yeah, that makes sense. It's so great, though, like you said, you don't make the same mistake twice. And recruiting teams are perfect, and recruiters aren't perfect. Nobody's perfect. And so mistakes will happen, and there's really no mistakes, right? There's just lessons learned, and you learn it, and then it's there. Right, continuous improvement. It's all worth trying for. Exactly, exactly. Well, I would love to hear more about the process, and I think maybe better put, what are the inputs needed to have successful cohort hiring if someone was listening to this and saying, wow, cohort hiring seems like it could really work for our team. What do I need to do to get there? I would probably break it down into three pieces. I think the process, the data, which I've touched on but can talk a little bit more about, and then your systems, your tools, your tech stack. When I say the process, there's this phrase that many people probably know, it's like slow down to speed up, right? And in recruiting, sometimes you can feel pressure to get the role posted and move quickly and start to get the pipeline going. And in cohort hiring, we actually take a little bit longer up front before we post the role. I build that into expectations with hiring teams as we're talking about when we're going to open a role throughout the quarter, but we want to make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row. So are the interviewers aligned? Do we know what the candidate profile is? What the challenges are? Does everybody have their assessment areas? And no, what a two is versus a three. All of those pieces, we want to make sure our aligned up front because once candidates start moving through as a cohort, the goal is for it to be pretty seamless from a candidate perspective. And I can't do that if I'm saying to a candidate. So we don't have the next step ironed out yet. We're just going to have to pause for a week while we figure that out. - Yeah, once the train has left the station, the train is going and it's hard to slow it down. So, right or to get it right the first time, my new phrase is pre-work makes the dream work. - Oh, I like that. - Yeah, I like that. Okay, that's exactly what we're trying to do here. Yes. So all of that pre-work needs to happen with your process. Data is the other piece. This is, I mean, this is crucial. I don't think that you can operate cohort hiring well if you aren't able to evaluate your data. I mentioned earlier like you're going to set up a job post for a fixed amount of time. How do you know how long that time should be? You need to look at historical hiring data. What is your application ratio for applications to hire? Let's say it's 150. Our goal in cohort hiring is not to have one hire. It's to have multiple qualified candidates at the final round. So maybe we actually want to try to achieve three. So we're not looking for 150 applications. We're looking for 450. Okay, how long do we need to leave a job open for to achieve that? With sourcing, referrals, inbound networking groups, whatever your channels might be? And this is where some of the nuance comes in because recruiting is very human-driven, right? If I'm going to open a recruiter role in this market, I might achieve that in four to five days. If I'm going to open a nuanced marketing role that hasn't really existed before because we're testing the waters in some capacity, I might link to the video open for 10 days or two weeks. So that piece is really important to get your pipeline accurate in the beginning. And then you're going to use your data all the way through the process to track what you're doing. The last piece I mentioned, your systems, your tools, I'm a recruiter at Ashby. I don't think I can like talk about this without talking about how Ashby of a tool helps me do this. But honestly, I think having a tech stack that helps you with scheduling, with automation, reducing some of the manual work that we all know can slow down a recruiting process. If I'm going to be moving through 15 people to a hiring manager stage, I want to be able to do that in an automated way in a way that is seamless for the candidate to book time. So scheduling, stage automation has saved us a lot of time and reduced our time to fill. So I think that having Ashby has helped me considerably in this. I mean, if it works or if it works, you know? Right. This all makes sense. And the data piece sticks out to me the most because the process improvement, really understanding how many people you need, even going back to sourcing and saying, hey, this is what we need supplemented for this type of role. Having all of that data is critical to success in this. So I appreciate you really breaking these down for us. But I know that we wouldn't be doing this if we hadn't seen impressive results from it. So I would love to hear more about what the outcomes have been since, you know, you've been working here since you've been doing the cohort hiring and just what outcomes other teams might be able to have through doing cohort hiring. Yeah, the results are everything, right? When I was looking at what we achieved in 2024, we had one recruiter, one sorcerer, and our VP of people in talent. So on our VP, Jim steps in, absolutely. I would say we had two and a half people in talent acquisition, kind of last year, working these roles. We had 65 hires. And we ran, I think I was counting five of our searches. We were able to hire a head on because of cohort hiring. So we had five circumstances where we opened a role anticipating one head count. We had multiple stellar candidates at the end. And we were able to say, okay, well, we actually had a second head count next quarter. Let's just pull that forward. It saves time, resources, you know, money, et cetera. And then we had another search where we didn't pull the higher forward, but we were able to push out the candidate's start date. So we still found two candidates in that cohort. The candidate was in sales, wanted to reach the end of their quarter. It makes total sense. And it worked out for us as well because we knew that we had a head count the following quarter. So we were able to hire 10 people out of those searches by only opening five roles, which is quite meaningful in terms of recruit or capacity. And I talked about us reducing our time to fill. We reduced it last year from the previous year, from 66 days down to 40, which is a massive improvement for one year. Yeah, impressive is probably an understatement there. 66 to 40 is absolutely wild. I'm sure there's also, we haven't talked about this before, but I'm sure there's also benefits for finance and prediction of spend and runway and all of these things, because you know that you have these hires in the sea already, and you can kind of predict a little bit better out on the finance plan. Absolutely. Yeah, I would agree with that. Well, kudos, because I have been a first recruiter before, and that is not easy at all. 65 people just, wow, incredible, incredible results. And like you said, results are everything in a way. You obviously have to give it time to see what works. But at the same time, no one's going to do something unless they feel confident that it's going to actually have an impact on their business. But let's be honest, there's a lot to lose if you don't hit your hiring plan. And so, this actually helps you see that earlier, you're going to hit your hiring plan. So, you know, you're going to have the people in seat to do the things that need to happen in order for you to reach your revenue goals, which that's bottom line. That's kind of the name of the game, you know. I were here. You're right. Exactly. Yeah, so what were you going to do? Absolutely. I think it goes at that very beginning moment when your hiring manager is looking at the pipeline, right? You're able to say, are we on track here or are we not? We're only a weekend to this search. So, if we need to pivot, if we need more sourcing, if we need to repost the role, we can make that decision very early on in the search, which exactly to your point means that we can predict reaching that goal much more accurately. Well, any last thoughts on cohort hiring that you wanted to share? I highly recommend it. There are definitely learnings, you know, as you go through. And we're still making adaptations. I don't think that it's ever a fixed process. We're constantly learning and understanding what we can do more, but I think that it's worth a shot. It's worth people trying it and asking questions and being willing to try something a little different. Definitely. That's the joy of pilots, though, right? You can pilot it with a hiring manager that's really excited about the potential of it. And if it works well, then you actually have the data to support it and fan it out to the rest of the team. And that hiring manager who really loves it can talk it up to other hiring managers about why it's so helpful, you know, really having an advocate in like the hiring managers that you're working with, I think, can be really beneficial. Absolutely. Yeah, well, taking a huge leap back, you probably know this better than anyone. We talk a lot at Ashley about hiring excellence and what we think that means. But especially since you've been here, I would love to hear when you hear a hiring excellence, what does that mean to you? For me, I think it's, it's like a really cheesy phrase of like, it's the journey, not the destination. I think it's the idea of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement, knowing that it's not stagnant, what worked for me in Q4, might need to pivot a little bit in Q1 because the market changes, the company changes, okay, candidates change. So yeah, I sum it up to continuous improvement. - I love that. I think especially at the stage that we're at, the market that we're in, if you take your eye off the ball for one second, it might hit you right in the face. Like you have to, you gotta keep your eye on the ball. - Yes, and be willing to move. - Yeah, exactly, like dodge it, dodge it if you have to. We're playing dodge ball here. Well, my favorite question, because I always just get so excited to hear from our guests about this. What is your recruiting hot take? - I think mine is probably based in feedback. I give lots of feedback. Candidates ask for a lot of feedback, and I understand it. Being a candidate is a lot of work and quite stressful. But I think the reality is, if you've made it to that final round, there's only gonna be one or two openings, even if we're lucky and we can pull forward a head count. The numbers are probably stacked against you, and that's the name of the game sometimes. And so while feedback, I hope that the feedback we give can be helpful. It doesn't mean that you're not valuable. It doesn't mean that you couldn't have done the job. It means that this feedback is for this role at this company, at this stage, and just focus on incorporating what you can, to show a pastoral use you can in future interviews, without it feeling like you weren't valuable. - I like what you said, though, about, it doesn't mean you can't do the job. Rarely when people are rejected, is that what it means? It just means that we have a process that we feel like is predictive of who's gonna do the best in the role. And if we only have the opportunity to hire one person, we believe that other person will be the best for the role. Does that mean that you couldn't come into that role and completely crush it? No, it doesn't. It actually doesn't mean that at all. It just means that our process is predicting that someone else might be a little bit ahead of that. And so, yeah, it's hard as a candidate because you're getting feedback or you're not getting feedback so much that it's really taxing. And so I love that we give feedback so that it can help people do better, especially if they're hearing a trend of feedback across the board, you can be more concise in your answers and things like that. The feedback is there to help not to hurt. - Exactly, yeah, I like to say to people, I'm like, take it with a pinch of salt because take the pieces of it that are helpful that you can incorporate moving forward and focus on the moving forward piece. If you've made it to the final round, you are skilled, you've shown that you've had a lot of impact and success. And I know it's hard, but I hope that it can be a little bit helpful. - Yes, it's hard to keep going. The right thing will happen for sure. - It will be there, it will be there. - Amazing. Well, I think we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work? - LinkedIn, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I am always happy to talk about the creating process, obviously specifically cohort hiring, but also other challenges. Yeah, I say find me on LinkedIn. - The best thing about our team is that everyone loves to talk about people externally about what we're doing here. And I just, I love that so much for us and for everyone. Well, Anna, I cannot thank you again. cohort hiring is such an interesting topic that I think could definitely be better utilized in our space. So I really appreciate you spending the time. I'm showing this about it. - Thank you. That's fun. - This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be. A scalable all in one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. (bell dings) (upbeat music)