Fueling Recruiter Potential Through Enablement with Stephanie Baysinger, Recruiting + Enablement @ Anthropic

How can recruiting enablement transform your talent acquisition strategy?

Stephanie Baysinger, Recruiting + Enablement leader at Anthropic, joins host Shannon Ogborn to discuss how recruiting enablement is vital in creating efficient and impactful talent acquisition teams. Stephanie shares her insights on streamlining processes, fostering team growth, and maintaining the human touch in a tech-driven recruitment world. From discussing the importance of daily habits in achieving hiring excellence to balancing automation with personalization, you’ll get a fresh perspective on building teams that can thrive in today’s fast-changing landscape.

Key Takeaways:

1. Efficiency without losing the human touch: While automation improves processes, creating space for recruiters to build authentic, personalized connections is crucial to maintaining candidate satisfaction.
2. Borrowing from sales and marketing: Techniques like pipeline management and customer personas can enhance recruiting efficiency and candidate experience.
3. Training vs. enablement: Not everything needs formal training. True enablement empowers teams with the tools and systems they need to succeed and self-serve.
   
   

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:28) Stephanie’s journey in recruiting enablement

(03:46) What recruiting enablement looks like in practice

(06:22) Streamlining processes and reducing friction for recruiters

(08:54) Balancing automation and the human element 

(12:03) The importance of daily habits in driving hiring excellence

(16:10) Borrowing ideas from sales and marketing 

(18:36) Distinguishing between training and enablement

(21:22) Creating self-motivated, empowered recruiting teams

(25:10) Building a champion team through enablement and support

(28:05) The future of recruiting and the role of enablement

Transcript

Stephanie Baysinger [00:00:00]:

I do like the idea of being able to enable the team to build resilience and habits. We can predict that things will be unpredictable. And there are strengths in all of us that we can help escalate. And I also see the other part of my role in enablement as some of those kind of less tactical pieces around growing a team. A lot around communication, motivation. Part of enablement is kind of reading, reading the room and just being like, we're not going to get the most excellent champion team because of like these variables that are part of our situation right now, and helping the team be able to perform in the environment that they're in.

Shannon Ogborn [00:00:49]:

Welcome to Offer Accepted the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. I join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain 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 seed to IPO and beyond. I could not be more excited to be here today with Stephanie.

Shannon Ogborn [00:01:28]:

Stephanie Basinger. She is a seasoned talent acquisition enablement and operations leader currently driving recruiting enablement initiatives at Anthropic. With over a decade of experience at companies like Marketa, Klaviyo and HubSpot, she has expertise in TA team design, recruiting, operations, strategy and data driven decision making. Beyond her corporate roles, she is also a certified coach specializing in leadership and career coaching, bringing a unique blend of operational excellence and people development to her work and talent acquisition. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:01:59]:

I'm really happy to be here. A long time listener, first time caller. You know, I listen to this podcast all the time.

Shannon Ogborn [00:02:05]:

I love that so much. But first, I would love if you could give our listeners a little bit of background in your current role at Anthropic.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:02:12]:

Yeah, I am a recent joiner to Anthropic. I've been there about just hit my 90 days, but I'm really excited to take on a role that's focused specifically on recruiter and recruitment enablement, and we just have this incredible team of recruiters. I've worked with incredible recruitment teams in a lot of the roles that you mentioned. And so in my role doing enablement, I'm specifically looking for opportunities to find efficiency in our processes, in our tools, to just kind of help make the life of a recruiter a little bit easier so that we can focus on the things that really matter, reducing a lot of friction. That's like a really interesting part of the world that I'm. I get really excited about on a daily basis and then upskilling learning and development and amplifying the work that we're doing. I'm kind of at this place in my career where I know that I'm surrounded by a ton of recruiters who know this job and they're smarter than me and all these aspects of it. And so I'm kind of seeing my role at anthropic of, like, amplifying the expertise and the experience of the team and finding connecting points so that we can learn from each other and, like, build each other up as a team.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:03:12]:

So I'm kind of acting as you know, Shannon, I looked at a lot of what you do in, like, community management and bringing people together and finding common themes to go and fix. So I'm kind of playing that role as an individual contributor on the recruiting team right now.

Shannon Ogborn [00:03:24]:

I love that so much, and I'm sure the recruiters thank you, because having that enablement is just another way to set the team up for success and sort of like, on that note, as you've stepped into your newest role and sort of gotten a fresh perspective, is there anything that particularly comes to mind that you're thinking a lot about right now?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:03:46]:

I think enablement is like a newer type of word, I think in the talent space, it's always kind of been part of just general operations that I've led ops teams before and kind of put that just as one of the pillars that sat under Ops. So to have this, like, out on its own is really special, and I'm really happy that there's an investment in it. And so a lot of what my brain, like, hurts on a daily basis is trying to think there's, like, these power skills and leadership enablement and all of that type of work that then is sitting side by side with our tech stack. And so half my day might be trying to find a couple ways to trim clicks out of our ATS process or document a new international hiring process for offers. But then at the same time trying to really dive into what's the next skill set that we're going to need over the next couple months to be true talent advisors to the business. And so I know for those that are in the recop space, we spend a, we talk a lot about like being in like this high low type of world. Like sometimes I'm at a 10,000 foot view and then some days I'm completely in the weeds helping someone create an offer letter. And enablement is proving to be like a very.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:04:54]:

Maybe it's because me, maybe that's how my brain works, but I'm finding enablement is very, very similar and there's things that are going to enable the team that could be just reducing five minutes on a process that we already have and I have. I consider that enablement, and I'm also working on things like, hey, for the next three months, we're going to focus on closing and we're going to bring knowledge leaders from across the business together. And I'm going to look at some of the recruiting data and figure out who's kind of cracked something in this process and then bring them to the team and do like panels and that's like these big meaty, meaty topics. And spending half my day maybe in like small in the weeds things, but knowing that those things both make an impact is making the job kind of exciting right now. And something I didn't fully recognize when I focused a bit more on training and enablement in previous roles.

Shannon Ogborn [00:05:40]:

I just started reading the book atomic habits. I know it's a book that a lot of people have read, and I'm kind of late to the game. I'm a bad reader, so hope no one judges me for my delay in getting to it. But I just was getting to the part where they were talking about the british cycling team and how if you just take all of these compounded efficiencies and put them together, it actually saves the team a lot of time. In this case, it saves the team a lot of time and a lot of effort, a lot of manual effort. And in the end, that's life changing. Some people may think that that's kind of like a big phrase to use, but it really is, because now people can talk to more candidates in that human element that requires human touch, or they can go be with their families or their friends, or like, all of these things that actually matter to people outside of work are more easily accomplished. Reducing your workload.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:06:36]:

Well, we could talk about James, Claire and atomic habits all day. It's one of my favorite books. Or if anyone just needs to listen to some podcasts. Funny enough, Shannon, I actually keep this posted on my desk, which this was not planted, but it is from like this habit making theory of just a system as a collection of daily habits. And that's what I'm just trying to lean on a lot more, is we're just so distracted by all of these options or new bells and whistles or new ways of doing things and kind of every time there's a new idea I myself can get stuck in. Great, well, we should create a whole new process about this and let's do a whole training. And you can't like kind of pivot this big ship all the time. It's exhausting.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:07:16]:

And so really trying to uncover what are the daily habits that are going to get us the results we need and then finding and enabling the team to one, like, like you said, like also the permission structure that you can focus on those things and they will make a difference. They're sometimes not the sexiest or the coolest thing to put a meeting request on your calendar on Fridays to, to like send no update updates or. Some of our recruiters are doing such a great job, like putting reminders that are all of our tools have these systems to alert you when someone's been in stage too long. Like, I got one from a test candidate this morning and it was like, oh, empathy. That's what it feels like to get the big red banner in my email that my test candidate has been in stage for too long, but those things actually work and giving the permission structure to have those daily habits.

Shannon Ogborn [00:07:58]:

You had mentioned that you were really glad that anthropic was so invested in recruiting enablement. I'm curious if you could describe a little bit why it is so important to have that investment in recruiting enablement.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:08:13]:

That's such a good question and I'm still trying to figure it out and kind of like prove it myself right, having it be a newer role in recruiting. But I think as recruiting teams are starting to more and more be seen as like having that seat at the table being true talent advisors, then you need to have the investment in that team so that we're constantly growing as a team. We're investing in like greatness on the team and efficiency on the team. I think investing in elevating the work, amplifying the work, and like you said, like finding like even the smallest of efficiencies in the work. Like make us champion teams. And if you want a champion team or all the kind of words that are out there, world class team a players, all the things that we kind of cringe at. But like, hey, at the root of it, everyone wants to excel and have this incredible team. You have to invest in them too.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:09:05]:

Like, they don't just like these teams, we don't just like pop up out of nowhere like we need. Also the coach in me is like, okay, well, I also want to know that my organization, my company is investing in my growth. I'm a whole human being. When I come to work and having that bit of investment in my skillset, my work life balance and then the day to day tools and systems that I use every day just shows like my organization cares about me and if we want to be a great team, we need to kind of invest in what excellence looks like for the team. I'm not sneaking ahead to, I know the Ashby questions, but excellent.

Shannon Ogborn [00:09:38]:

Yes, for sure. Well, I know that also in your time at HubSpot you sort of got introduced to the concept of enablement. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:09:50]:

Yeah, HubSpot was a really fun place to kind of dip into what enablement looks like in other orgs in the business, being when you start at HubSpot, you go through a two week onboarding. Every employee does. We learn all about sales operations, we learn all about marketing operations and how these systems work. And so I am continuing to be really curious on what we can borrow, take partner on with other parts of the business and bring it into recruiting because I think even a couple of years ago I took the HubSpot revenue operations certification training because there wasn't one for recruiting operations. I think there's a few floating around are being created now and then you're kind of going through this, wait, this is what I do all day. This is how I have to ask finance for additional budget. This is how I have to monetize like a cost per hire. And then this is how I'm measuring performance indicators of a team.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:10:43]:

And Rev Ops is doing this, sales Ops is doing this, marketing Ops is doing this. And so the first thing I'm trying to do when I joined many other organizations is grab lunch with some of my, I call them my ops partners and other orgs and just learn. And then you find out, like sometimes we're doing redundant things. I mean that in the best way. Like there's tools we can be using together that help the business with budget. On like a recent example is I launch a lot of trainings and I'm trying to track who's taking the trainings. I want to enable myself. I don't want that to be burdensome on me, to spend my day kind of tracking people down.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:11:16]:

Well, if you kind of just look across the aisle like other teams are using LMS systems that maybe we could borrow and just partner together. And so we're actually going to start doing that. I have a really good training development tool, another part of the business, and OPS has a really good place to house those trainings. Well, we actually just met. We can come together and borrow those tools together because a lot of what we're doing, the employee base doesn't know the difference. Like I also there's enablement for our own team, but then there's enablement for the rest of the business that's engaging with recruiting that I don't want them to have to contact switch all day long. Whether they're working with the marketing team, the legal team, the recruiting team, like they're working at one organization. How can we like reduce that cognitive load even for the employee base?

Shannon Ogborn [00:11:57]:

The other thing too with that is you can reduce tool spend so significantly if you understand where other teams are spending money on tools. Cause let me tell you, some of these tools are not cheap and it doesn't make sense for you to add another tool on. And if you already have an MLS, why not use that for recruiting? Why not make training self serve? And you know, there's so much efficiency, which is really what your ultimate goal is to get from point a to point b. So I think working with those teams is such a good tip. Well, actually I have a really burning question first and then I would love to hear more about like what sales and marketing enablement means for recruiting. What is the difference between training and enablement?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:12:49]:

Okay, I love that you asked this question, the difference between training and enablement. I do hear them used kind of in lieu of one another all the time. The way I'm trying to think of it more is like enablement is just how the entire system is going to run. Like if the people that are going to be part of it, you have the tools and systems that are going to be part of it. How do you make the train move faster, better, more reliably? Training is then a piece of that. If you're launching a new piece of technology or integrating a new tool, I think it's the responsibility of my role to find opportunities to give the team the instructions they need. Why this is important, the tools and resources to use that tool. And I think that's where a piece of training comes in.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:13:38]:

I think training falls under enablement. The other kind of like not hot take I have on it where I kind of find myself having to say a lot, like, everything doesn't have to be a training. Anytime I see like maybe an error is made or something doesn't work correctly, even myself, I'll be like, okay, we need to train everyone on this. But I think enablement is having sometimes even the tough conversation to be like, okay, is this a coaching opportunity? Is this actually a root cause of something going on bigger in the business on like, why this isn't sticking? It's not always just training. Like, we're all grown adults. Like pushing just information out at somebody and having them click through things like, has a time and a place, maybe a new skill the first time they're seeing something, showing someone a process. Like, I love using training opportunities for that, but most of the time now it's around, like experience sharing as a team, finding ways to like, bubble up really good information, wayfinding, document management, like enabling the team to like, self serve. And that's maybe where I'm kind of slowly getting to a bottom line is like, enablement is this ability to give and provide the tools and resources for a team so that they can self serve and take responsibility of their own growth.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:14:51]:

But the tools and the resources are there to find. I do see them used interchangeably, and I'm sure there's probably a lot of different definitions or someone who could define that much better than I can. But that's just how I've been thinking about it and really almost trying to remove training from a lot of what I'm doing in enablement. And training is one of the menus of options on how we are going to enable the team to be like these great players, this champion team that I talked about earlier.

Shannon Ogborn [00:15:16]:

100%. And I also agree with you that not everything needs to be a training. And also, I feel like people have a very negative reaction to the word training. So if you say we have another training on this and we have another training on that, trainings are very, very important. And one of our episodes that we released was with Lindsey from one password on internal training. And so trainings are really important, but you can't be continuously expecting people to do trainings. So what other methods of enablement can you use? So it makes total sense to me that you see training as an element of enablement or a vehicle for enablement, but not something that's like, necessarily the same thing as enablement.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:16:04]:

Just to add to that a bit too gone are the days of, okay, this is how we do things here and it's going to probably stick that way year over year over year where we could fly a team and say, hey, we're going to train you on how to do your job and you have this manual and you can go reference back to it whenever you need it. Things are just changing constantly where now we just, the enablement piece is okay, how can I give you the information you need and you're going to know where to find it when you probably need it, like five minutes before you're.

Shannon Ogborn [00:16:33]:

About to do something that, and especially in recruiting, the thing that I love most about recruiters is that people can do things a little bit differently and get the same results and outcomes that a company is looking for. And prohibiting somebody from doing something in a unique way that might work for them and their personality and their skillset is actually, in my opinion, really a hindrance to recruiting teams. So there's definitely a gray area of what do we expect our teams to do all the same and what can they do a little bit differently that showcases their personality and allows them to flex their skillset in the way they work in a way that actually helps them get better outcomes.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:17:19]:

I love that. That is such a good point. And as you're saying that, I start to think of the enablement piece I was talking about earlier with part of the role being efficiency in our tech stack and our tools and with more automation, where do you want to reduce the optionality of things? You said there are some places where we just need to do things the same way. The currency in your offer letter needs to have some standardized formats, the offices in which there's drop downs, there's abilities to just say, hey, here's your drop down of options. Let me just reduce that cognitive load so you can get your offers out. And then now we're getting more automations with those, the fields map to each other, the AI integrations in certain parts of our tools where something I'm thinking about that is with all of these ways to create efficiency in the tool, then how do we create the permission structure and the space to then say now that these things have been reduced, those unique things that make you you and make you that incredible recruiter for candidates like how do we give you the space to focus on that and remember that that is what makes your job different than a sales job or a marketing job. Everything has a people element, but there's something very unique about the recruiting element that I don't want to lose with all of the automation and efficiencies and the tools. That extra space, I hope is allowing teams to kind of put their unique fingerprints on their recruiting process.

Shannon Ogborn [00:18:36]:

The thing that I learned is if you force recruiters into doing things that's inauthentic to the way they work, honestly almost always go sideways and candidates feel uncomfortable because the recruiter feels uncomfortable. So now coming back to this sales and marketing enablement and kind of like what that means for recruiting and your experience, especially since you've like taken some of these courses and you've talked to some of your counterparts in these functions, in other job areas, job focuses. Tell me more about what you think that means for recruiting.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:19:14]:

I think there's some cool opportunities that we kind of dabble in, in recruiting, but it's really fun to talk to people in marketing ops or sales op and like, okay, what are you, like focusing on? And so something and talking with a few folks in sales ops orgs are this like just such a rigor around pipeline management. Like we have pipeline management, but these even we know, like, you work at Ashby. Like, all of the data analytics tools, like the ability for a recruiter to just look at their pipeline and have it automated. Like, one of the big things on our list is, okay, I have all this data, what do I do with it? How do I talk about this? That's another part of the enablement piece. But when you talk to someone in sales, that's one of the bread and butter things. I'm going to live in my pipeline. I'm going to live in my conversion rates and the efficiency they're looking for is how do I either up my percentage from a qualified lead down to sales, or what's my churn rate? And how does churn go all the way back up to the sales reps so that we're teaching, like end result years later? Like just living in the pipeline. Like, I can see a lot of we're starting to do this.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:20:17]:

I think, you know, the classic quality of hire conversation, that's that, like, the sales team knows that they want to know why any customer is going to churn after two years and go back and train maybe the sales team on what they learned and build the tools to enable them so that we try to reduce the likelihood of that happening again. We're on like the beginning stages of even calculating what quality of hire means. I know you all have some surveys you can send out, but I can start to see when we start to get that? Okay, now we get to really focus on some of our funnel management and why so much of it right now for us is time based. That's the one controllable thing. The amount of people, the amount of time, the amount of interviewer resources, pipeline stuff can really be anchored in. There's not infinite time. So I loved learning from sales teams about how they're like in their pipelines constantly and looking at their conversion rates. Another one that came up too is on the marketing side.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:21:08]:

And maybe this also came from working at a place like HubSpot for a while. So this was part of our recruiting conversations. But this concept of just really knowing your customer and creating all these different Personas so that you can create like trying to scale personalization in recruiting, we want this personalized what recruiter isn't passionate about trying to create a personalized experience for their candidate? We're limited by time and resources. Brute force. Like it's tough, but kind of this like work slow to move fast mentality that I'm kind of thinking about on the marketing team. They have this framework of like building Personas. So they're going to work slow. They're going to analyze all the different types of customers or candidates and then create unique experiences for those folks to get the highest likelihood of a sale or a close.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:21:57]:

Again, I think we're starting on some of this with sourcing tools and being able to measure outreach metrics on what type of message you're sending, even the type of source referrals prospected applicants. But that makes me excited to dig in even more of creating Personas around all the various types of candidates that we might have and learning some of that from a marketing ops.org and just borrowing to eat my own dog food here. As I'm saying, learning from another organization, what can I already borrow from them? What frameworks do they already have? Can actually someone from the marketing team come and help us build candidate Personas? We don't have to do this all on our own.

Shannon Ogborn [00:22:33]:

Yeah, I think so much of what this is about is the wheel actually already exists. And I think that in a lot of recruiting teams, you're trying to build a wheel from scratch when it actually already exists, almost really likely in your own organization, if nothing, definitely outside of your organization. And you don't need to recreate all of this. Find out what is working in other job functions. This is my favorite thing about people I've talked to on the offer accepted podcast. So many people are borrowing from other job functions and it's been really successful because there's tried and true things that have worked very well for other job functions that have had more resources in the past. Like we're just now getting into a situation where there is recruiter enablement, there is recruiting operations. That hasn't been the case in the past, but sales and marketing have had those for quite a bit of time.

Shannon Ogborn [00:23:30]:

And so what can we learn and what can we take, what can we borrow and apply to recruiting? So I think that philosophy is really important because the last thing you want to do is be wasting your time with work that doesn't need to be done. So I love those considerations for recruiting enablement and what we can borrow from other parts of the business. Can you walk through some of the other big considerations that you've had top of mind as you've been working into this more enablement type role?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:24:00]:

I think what I want to be able to focus on and almost, I mean, look at the last couple years in recruiting, the dream is like, okay, can I see six months or a year ahead so that I can build long term, like we talked about earlier, build long term habits, know what day to day actions the team should take to get to an output. Because time, like the whole philosophy of even the atomic habits is the one ingredient there is like, you kind of need some time to see how the habits come to fruition, what the output looks like. And I think what recruiting has been up against recently is like, we don't have a lot of foresight. Headcount plans are changing constantly. You know, we're stopping on the brake, then we're hitting the gas. And I think that leads into making things feel just really thrashy. And I think, really? Or maybe it's not. Maybe I'm going to have to adjust and learn too, what enablement looks like in a less predictable environment.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:24:59]:

And I don't mean predictable, like something like more just around. Like the nature of the role. Like the running joke is like, it's okay, it's march, and I think I have my head count planned for the next year, but I guess that is predictable. That happens all the time. The fact that I can even make that joke is that we've all experienced that. So that is something I can predict. But I do like the idea of being able to enable the team to build resilience and habits around things that, like, we can predict the unpredictable, we can predict that things will be unpredictable. And there are strengths in all of us that we can help escalate.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:25:33]:

And I also see the other part of my role in enablement is some of those kind of less tactical pieces around growing a team, a lot around communication, motivation. Also just being really clear, like, I feel very lucky that I have a team now and have worked with some great leaders where, how do we build the trust that I can say, like, I actually think the team is really tired or this isn't working. And that's also part of enablement. It's kind of reading the room and just being like, we're not going to get the most excellent champion team because of these variables that are part of our situation right now. Even like people are taking, people should take vacation. Like, I think about even capacity planning and part of that is like, oh, great, if everyone's out for the next couple months, like, what's actually realistic and bringing that to the forefront as an enablement leader and an OpS leader with the rest of the team that I get to work with and helping the team be able to perform in the environment that they're in and not trying to pretend it's a different, maybe that's kind of what I'm bottom lining too is like, let's not pretend that we're in a different environment than what we're actually in and we can thrive in the environment that we're in. We just need to name it and like, be really honest about what we're up against.

Shannon Ogborn [00:26:39]:

The other thing I love about enablement, and this kind of came to me as you were talking, is upscaling your own team and enabling your own team will prevent you from having to hire people externally who have gotten skills externally because you're giving them the skills and you're giving them, whether it's training or other forms of enablement internally, so that you're filling those gaps so that you don't have to go out and search for a bunch of more people. Like, recruiting is going to be changing a lot in the next couple of years. And so we have to really keep our heads up and be super aware of what those changes are so that we can enable our teams to be successful in their role. How it looks today, how it looks tomorrow, how it looks in six months, how it looks in a year. Because they're all going to be potentially different.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:27:25]:

Yes. Yeah, that is a really, really good point. What roles we're going to take on and how, how the fundamental parts of our role roles will change, like in the next few years. It's a big part. That's a big part of it.

Shannon Ogborn [00:27:37]:

One of the things that you and I have talked about before which I love so much, is how do you create that self motivated culture? And that seems to be a big part of enablement and things that you're thinking about right now.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:27:50]:

When you ask me this too, it's like what even motivates me. And I think the uniqueness of what motivates everyone is a little bit different. But at the other end of the day too, this is a business. We do have metrics, we do have things that we're able to measure. Every team starts with key performance indicators and you have your KPI's for the year. That can be motivating because when you're measured against something that can be highly motivating, it also can be stressful. And what I've kind of found in enabling and using self motivation for those is when those metrics, I think are very, very, very clearly tied to what the business goals are. And those are very different, like based on where you go.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:28:31]:

But if they're tied very clearly to what the business goals are, then there's that classic why of like I know why I'm doing the thing that I'm doing. I can see ahead that the habits I'm doing every day the output aligns to the business objectives that I've seen from either, you know, our leadership team or where I know the business is going. And so I can kind of see that connection point. I've worked at places where some of those things are like, they might sit in the same category, but there's small nuances that can make a big difference. Like working in Ops. Some places I've worked, part of the performance was around, you know, maybe finance and cost savings and like diligence on not making irresponsible decisions at the end of a pipeline. Other places I've been were just highly, highly, highly competitive markets where that closing story and learning from the competition and getting some of those wins was really valued. Some of it is about volume.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:29:31]:

I've also worked at tech companies where we're like huge scale and part of it is just getting the headcount. And then therefore you can find metrics and KPI's, that measure against hitting that headcount goal. Those things all usually kind of exist. But I always feel like one is like maybe a little bit like driving the team. And when I see KPI's and stuff that don't align to that, that's where things get really messy and the motivation goes down. Okay, so I'm aiming for like this really high offer accept rate, but like, we know we're working with some of folks that are going to get four, five, six cross offers in this highly competitive market. Like, do you want me to just take the person who doesn't have, have the cross offers so that I can get my acceptance rate up or do you want me to just gather all this information and experience from the times that we do lose and be able to share that with the team? And I don't think any of these things are done on purpose. It's just human nature that if you're going to be motivated against some sort of metric or something, it's also your performance review.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:30:24]:

I get a performance review. I want to know what my criteria are, what I'm being evaluated against. And I think that's a big responsibility of leadership teams. And even in an enablement, I'm trying to like measure, like what's the team really being measured on? What does success look like for us? And then like, let's just enable the team to be able to give them everything in their power to reach some of those goals.

Shannon Ogborn [00:30:45]:

Yeah. Like you said, alignment is so important. Like, and that's when people start to get really frustrated because why am I sprinting towards something that you're telling me in the end doesn't or didn't matter? And so if you don't create transparency about why there's alignment, people will start to read in between the lines and create their own. And that's absolutely not what you want. You do not want people to be creating their own storyline and path. It should be so clear that people don't need to do that.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:31:14]:

Yeah, and like you said, there's this theory that I could never really name. And then recently our head of people just named it. It's like, oh, I knew this, this law, but it's called good heart's law. And what it says basically is that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. And what they kind of mean by that is when there's these really great examples of, you know, if, you know, you have to make 1000 widgets, that's the goal they gave me. Have to make 1000 widgets. I have to make 100 prospecting calls this month. Why? And if they don't know, why don't.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:31:48]:

The bigger impact is great. I can make you a thousand tiny little widgets that take me like 2 seconds to make. Cool. Done. Did the project. There's another really funny example of like, okay, we're going to put a bounty on cobras, right? Like we have a cobra. There's too many cobras in the, in this, like, area and we're going to put a bounty on them. And you get x amount.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:32:07]:

You get $5 for every cobra that you're able to find and kill. Well, you know what you could also do? Start a cobra farm. And you can just breed as many cobras as you want. You can sell them all. And it's like a funny thing, but I think about it a lot with like, metrics and KPI's. I think the funniest, you know, it's like offer accept rate. Like, if we don't know why we're doing it and we're not okay with maybe not always hitting it. Like, you learn a lot.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:32:32]:

When you don't hit the KPI, you learn a lot. And so I try to just like, think of this model sometimes, too, when we set, like, seemingly arbitrary goals, like, they have the best intention. We want to clear the cobra population, they're dangerous or something, but they take these weird turns and they cease to become a beneficial measure for us to actually get us to this champion team. This why?

Shannon Ogborn [00:32:54]:

Yeah, those unintended outcomes, if you're not clear, can actually take things in a completely wrong direction. So definitely, I love hearing about that. That's a really interesting, interesting.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:33:06]:

Take a quick Google search is pretty interesting. Or Google search some images or some fun cartoons on good heart's law. That's where the Cobra example came from.

Shannon Ogborn [00:33:15]:

Okay, that's gonna be my homework. You alluded to this earlier, but kind of taking a big step back, getting a little bit out of the weeds here. Hiring excellence is something that we talk a lot about at Ashby and I always love to hear, because even though there can be some definition around it, I always love to hear what hiring excellence means to our guests, especially over their career and experience.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:33:38]:

Oh, my gosh. I think my answer to this, Shannon, has changed so much. And now having been in rec ops and in these roles for a while, and by no means some seasoned, like, you know, some, like, expert in all of this, but I'm just leaning a lot more into excellence is kind of what we talked about earlier. It's just like the daily things that we know work like that is excellence. Just like any athlete is going to go to practice every day, they're going to throw the ball a thousand times, they're going to know what the muscle memory feels like. They're going to overanalyze something that happened to the point where they can, like you were saying, the bike example, where the dirt on the chain of the bike could actually reduce the time by, like, a fraction of a second. But that takes diligence. And so hiring excellence, I think, falls into, like, diligence and routine, doing the less glamorous things.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:34:26]:

But doing them well over and over again does yield us the results we're looking for. I really think that it does. It's, I mean, I put on, we put as a team right now, we're putting every month, it's like a data hygiene day and it's a documentation day. And we'll try to find ways to make it more fun, but it makes our lives a lot easier that we just dedicate the day and we make sure our documentation is up to date. It's organized, our data in our applicant tracking system is clean, and it looks good, and we just do it. And it's the working slow to go fast type of mentality that just sets us up for success and excellence on the team.

Shannon Ogborn [00:35:02]:

Yeah, I mean, have you ever noticed the things that we want to do the least are oftentimes the most important, like the data hygiene stuff. It's like, uh, I just really don't want to go look at these thousands of people, you know? And it's, it's a lot because it's a big mental load at the end of the day. That's what's going to decrease your time to hire and time to fill. That's what's going to increase your candidate experience. So all of these things, they're small. They add up, and they may not be your favorite thing to do, but they need to be done. And so the faster that we can just, we can get them done with quality, the better outcomes we're going to have.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:35:39]:

And to your point on motivation, then you get to see the results. When you see the results, you're motivated. And that's kind of like the atomic habit thing. When you start to see it, then you get motivated and it becomes a flywheel and you kind of keep doing it. And a little bit of a tangent on that, too. I loved what you were saying earlier, too, about enablement and upskilling the team for the future so that we have the skillset. There's probably also people on your team that like to do that kind of work that are like, let me put on a podcast. I'm going to clean that up.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:36:06]:

And, like, you kind of just like, rotate chores and that's like the simplest thing on, like, data hygiene. But there's people that are probably like, get me in front of that candidate and let me tell you everything about this company or let me find out their motivations and there's other folks that are like, let me at the top of that pipeline. I'm going to find efficiencies in doing this. And I see my role as kind of like figuring out where all those skills are. And we probably all need a baseline because we all work in this industry. It's a job. You need your baseline. But then who has strengths in all of these areas and bring that team together because you're going to be more powerful as a team.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:36:41]:

Expecting us all to be able to do everything at excellent level is probably not realistic. So I'd like to lean more on the overarching team and finding people who do have those strengths.

Shannon Ogborn [00:36:50]:

Yeah. And coming full circle on people being able to do things in their unique way. Like you said, some people love to do those cleanup tasks. They get like great satisfaction from it. So why not let the person do that thing? And like you said, like there has to be baseline. People need to know all of these areas. That doesn't mean they have to be an expert in that area. That doesn't mean they have to love that area and where you can plug people in who feel very passionately about it, the quality of work will skyrocket significantly.

Shannon Ogborn [00:37:20]:

So, yes, love all this. Agree. Use people and let them flex to what they feel really confident and good at. I think that's a huge motivator for recruiters. Okay, we are at the last question. I feel like you and I could talk about hot takes all day and you probably had a hard time picking just one. But I would love to hear what is your recruiting hot take?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:37:47]:

Okay, I did think about this a bit and then in the theme of what we were talking about, I kind of own the same through line, but like, a little bit of my hot take is that recruiting is becoming a bit more of a process management field if we don't watch out than it is a talent advising role. Maybe it is a bit of good hearts law where we can now measure everything. You know, we have all these incredible tools every day. There's a new email I'm getting about how there's an enhancement on automating XYZ that allows you to spend a lot of your day clicking around and managing a process and shepherding talent and hiring managers and emails and tags and notifications, like through a process. My hot take on is like when I see these things come through the piece. The other side of the coin that we haven't filled in yet is okay by saving yourself an hour of this, let me actually offer you maybe a training on. Then let's go back to influencing. How do you influence as a recruiter? Some of those powerful interpersonal skills are just not at the forefront.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:38:48]:

They're probably not the money makers right now. They're not selling the widgets and they're not selling the add ons to your tech stack. But that is the gap that I'm seeing is the great processes that we can come up with and the efficiencies. There is this hole of great. Then how do I get the team back to really good listening and communicating and empathy and reading between the lines of a resume and building a candidate story? I am not by any stretch saying recruiters cannot do that. They are really, really good at it. I think what I'm saying is the real estate within our time and job descriptions I don't think is. I think we're kind of losing that value a little bit.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:39:25]:

So that's my hot take, a little bit less process management, a little more talent advising and respect for that. On the recruiting side, it's hard work, 100%.

Shannon Ogborn [00:39:33]:

And I think too part of it is like a symptom of the times. But what you don't want as recruiters, recruiter enablement, TA leaders, is that that skill or that muscle, you don't want that to atrophy when it's not super relevant right now, but it will be. It will be very soon, we all hope, I think. And so how can you maintain a skill that you're not using as much in your day to day so that when it does become relevant, more relevant again, you have it and you're ready?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:40:13]:

That is a really great way to word it. It's not going away. Things are going to pendulum swing and they're going to have to show up in a different way. But I love what you said. You don't want that to atrophy.

Shannon Ogborn [00:40:22]:

I think we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and anthropic?

Stephanie Baysinger [00:40:28]:

Yeah, you can reach me on LinkedIn anthropic career page. But yeah, I'd love to hear from folks and yeah, reach me on LinkedIn.

Shannon Ogborn [00:40:34]:

Amazing. Well, I cannot thank you enough for joining us on offer. Accepted. I really appreciate you spending the time with us. I think these will be really valuable insights and get people's minds going and thinking a little bit differently than we have been traditionally taught to think. So thank you so much.

Stephanie Baysinger [00:40:52]:

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Shannon. This was so fun.

Shannon Ogborn [00:40:56]:

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.