Simplifying Recruiting Metrics to Improve Team Performance with Bryan Power, CPO at Nextdoor

What if your recruiting framework actually helped you close more offers?

Bryan Power, Chief People Officer at Nextdoor, joins Shannon to unpack the practical strategy behind their AAA approach to recruiting. With over 20 years of experience leading teams at companies like Yahoo and Block, Bryan brings a clear, structured lens to the chaos of hiring.

He outlines the AAA framework on how attraction, assessment, and acquisition function as distinct stages, each with its own metrics and challenges. 

The conversation covers how to track what matters, when to intervene, and why teams often focus on the wrong part of the funnel. Bryan also explains how his team uses a consistent but flexible process to create standout candidate experiences.

Key takeaways:

1. Offers accepted is the most important metric: If candidates aren’t joining, the rest of your pipeline doesn’t matter.
2. Three A’s help diagnose issues: Clear metrics at each stage reveal where your process is breaking down.
3. Not all candidates come equal: Referrals, sourced leads, and online applicants need different handling.
4. Consistency supports personalization: Recruiters can deliver a tailored experience when supported by a repeatable system.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Introductions

(02:42) The three As: Attraction, Assessment, Acquisition

(06:27) Balancing pipeline recruiter focus

(08:40) Evaluating sourcing channel noise

(10:17) Data for hiring alignment

(12:53) Engineering’s 90% failure rate

(16:55) Diagnosing core team issues

(19:35) Standardizing key recruiter moments

(24:31) Relationships drive offer acceptance

(28:20) Recruiters trusted beyond hiring

Transcript

Bryan Power [00:00:00]:

Risk, process, excellence, but they really make the candidates feel valued and special. Those two things don't go together well. Like, to feel special, you have to feel like it's never been done before. You're special, right? This is unique to you, but the process, you have to do the same thing so many times. A million recruiter screens for recruiters who have been there for years.

Bryan Power [00:00:20]:

Like, how many recruiter screens they've done thousands. And so, like, how do you make that not feel routine? Balancing that tension is so critical. And I think every great recruiting team I've been a part of or around, they do this. You know, they make you feel like it's an important decision when you take a new job. And so the experience, having that gravity built in, like, we understand you're making a big choice and we want to make you feel comfortable and we really want you to work here. I've never seen a great recruiting team that doesn't do that. And usually recruiting teams that aren't doing well are not doing this.

Shannon Ogborn [00:00:54]:

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 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. 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 vicious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am stoked to be here with Bryan Power. He is the Chief People Officer at Nextdoor. He brings over 20 years of experience in human resources and talent acquisition. Prior to joining Nextdoor, he served as chief of human resources at Yahoo and Block, which was formerly Square, where he played a key role in shaping the company culture, talent strategy, and organizational growth. Thank you so much for joining us today, Bryan.

Bryan Power [00:01:49]:

Thanks for having me.

Shannon Ogborn [00:01:50]:

I know that Nextdoor has this AAA philosophy and we'll get a little bit deeper into it, but I would love you to explain a little bit more about briefly what it is and then why it matters to your team.

Bryan Power [00:02:04]:

Yeah. So I should give credit where it's due. Our head of recruiting, Tony Castellanos, really put all this together. You know, a few years ago when we started working on this, we wanted to put together a way to just simplify how we think about recruiting. There's lots of challenges when you're trying to recruit at scale and so AAA Recruiting is the Nextdoor is try to take on this problem, which every company really has to grapple with.

Shannon Ogborn [00:02:25]:

Totally. So I understand that AAA has, as I guess someone would imagine, three pillars, three A's. Can you tell us a little bit about each part of the framework? Each pillar I understand there's also a true north metric and a check metric. Just kind of walk us through that.

Bryan Power [00:02:42]:

Yeah, yeah. So I'll do all three first, then I'll come back and take them one by one. So the three A's. The first one is attraction. This is about getting people into the funnel to be interested in interviewing Nextdoor and getting into the candid process. The second one is assessment, which is, do we think this person is good and are we going to make them an offer? And then the third is acquisition, which is making the offer and closing it. We've simplified it to be these three stages because they're actually different problems that you're worrying about at each part of the process. And so we try to track two things.

Bryan Power [00:03:12]:

One, we have what was called a true north metric, which is like, what's the most important thing about each one of these processes? And then we have a second metric, which we call a check metric, which is to make sure we're not leaning too hard into what this means. So, for example, when it comes to attraction, we're trying to monitor, like, how many applicants are coming in. You can dive deeper in that, say, well, where are candidates coming from? Are they coming from referrals? Are they applying online? But really, it's like, are we getting enough people into the process is what you're worried about at the attraction stage. But our check metrics is how many of these applicants did the recruiters screen? So we have applicants and recruiter screens is how we count it. Because if you have a very low number of recruiter screens and a lot of candidates, you're kind of getting tons of attention from people that your recruiters are saying, yeah, they're just. They're not right for any of these. Any of these roles. Or your recruiters could be screening people out that they shouldn't, but lets you focus on, okay, how are you getting people in the door? And then convert them into the interview process.

Bryan Power [00:04:05]:

So that's step one. Step two, assessment. We also have two things. Like the obvious TrueNote metric is how many interviews are you doing right? Are we bringing people in to meet with hiring managers, you know, after the recruiter has interviewed them? And the check metric for that is, are we making any offers? So Again, to simplify, it's like, well, we're doing lots of interviews right now. This is great. We've got tons of people interviewing. Are we making them offers or are we wasting company time by doing so many interviews that we're just hoping it comes through? So that offers that we want to make tells us what's the health of the assessment process. And then lastly, acquisition, as you imagine, the true north metric is offers accepted.

Bryan Power [00:04:41]:

You know, that's like, how many people are you really hiring? Is the goal of this whole process? And the check for us on that is what's the acceptance rate? You know, are we making tons of offers, but not many of them are converting? Again, really different problem in that third stage than what you're thinking about at the beginning.

Shannon Ogborn [00:04:57]:

Totally. I could give you a really hard question, say, if you had to only pick one, which is the one. But I, I feel like you can't really do that because they all play so much on each other and they all matter more at different times based on the problems.

Bryan Power [00:05:15]:

No, I would pick. It would be offers accepted. Okay, great name for the podcast. Because at this point, when you get to extending an offer, you have now invested a lot of time and money to get to this point. And so a terrible mistake that recruiting teams or companies make is not really focusing in at this part of the process and doing everything that you can to close the candidate you made an offer to. Because people are busy, right? They're like, I have this offer up, but I have all these other candidates to interview, all these resumes to go through. But if you take your eye off the ball at that point, it's a disaster because you hire someone, they compound value for the company potentially for years. So, you really gotta make sure this is the one you, you really pay.

Shannon Ogborn [00:05:55]:

The most attention to someone in sales managing their pipeline, right? It's really hard to keep your self focused on every part of the pipeline. And there's also sometimes where the front's looking really sparse and you're like, okay, now I got to source people. And then the middle part, you have all these people in different stages where you have to prep them. And so it's very easy to take your eye off the ball from those offer accepts. But at the same time, your company's plan, revenue plan, headcount plan, is counting on people closing.

Bryan Power [00:06:27]:

That's right. It's true. But you make a great point. Like, recruiters are always working in all three parts of this process. As a leader, like a TA lead or a chief people officer. The AAA framework lets you really look. Okay, well what are all the recruiters doing right now in each one of these phases? Because sometimes a recruiter like they're just worried about their four offers out. They kind of don't worry about the top of funnel or some recruiters don't have any offers and they're just recruiting really, really hard.

Bryan Power [00:06:51]:

And so you can't get like person to person updates and get a really clear sense of the picture. So these three buckets and these three categories really help us clarify like where's our challenge as a team? You know, of 10 or 20 or 50, this works with hundreds of recruiters. You know, if you think about it this way.

Shannon Ogborn [00:07:06]:

I'd have to imagine because of the companies you work for and the brand awareness and positivity around it that you know the part of the check metric of are we getting enough qualified candidates can actually be kind of hard because you probably see a lot of noise around roles that are open.

Bryan Power [00:07:23]:

Yeah, I mean this is a problem that every company deals with is once you could apply online, there's no way to prevent someone from applying online. So everyone knows like the volume of applicants is always dominated by your online applications because there's just lots of people looking for work and there's a lot of people like they don't care what the job description says, they just are hoping. So you get all these inbounds that you have to kind of manage and it's so difficult to do because everyone has this hundreds of people. You have to try to get through it quickly. It's rare to find a good candidate, which is unfortunate because there are also good candidates in there. Which again is why when we are looking at this first part of the attraction, part of the puzzle, understanding how your channels, your candidate channels we call them, where do your, where your candidates come from, how those are performing is a really important thing to do because if you take your eye off say online applications, you're probably saying no to people you would hire. It's just, it's such a mountain of resumes. You just kind of like the perception.

Shannon Ogborn [00:08:19]:

The historic perception and talent is source candidates are better. I think we're moving away from that even. We had a trend report that came out that shows a really high spike in applied as the source versus referrals in sourced which are kind of in the mix as well.

Bryan Power [00:08:40]:

It's really important because you want to manage these channels differently. So like with employee referrals, every team goes through this. Like you have to take care of the person who referred them. It's such a sin when they refer somebody and then they hear back again, they don't refer again. The recruiting team gets a bad name. So you don't have to do that with online applications, but you're dealing with so many online applications. You just have to think about these things differently. Like, source candidates, also different, right? Candidates you meet at events are different. It's important for the recruiting team when you roll all this up to kind of understand, okay, if it came in this door, we need to make sure we're thinking about these things.

Shannon Ogborn [00:09:14]:

Great to hear about the metrics and sort of how to break those down. I would love to hear if we have someone listening to this is like, wow, this is great. It's simple. My hiring managers will get it, My executives will get it. It's something we can apply. How would a recruiting team apply this framework to their team?

Bryan Power [00:09:33]:

Number one, it lets the team diagnose where do we need to spend our energy right now? Like, as the leadership, we look at it like, monthly because you want things to, like, cook. You can't look at this stuff every day. You'd be looking across too much information. And recruiting. When recruiting teams are going, there's a ton of commotion. There's tons of sourcing, there's tons of interviews. Like, it's just all over the place. And so kind of monthly review.

Bryan Power [00:09:53]:

Let's just say, okay, how's this one doing? How's this one doing? And usually we come away with an answer of, okay, this is the part of the problem we need to go work on without this. What I find is when the. The hiring managers or hiring executives get involved, they just. They're like, hey, we're not seeing any candidates, you know, or like, I think you have too many recruiters. Or like, I don't think we're paying enough money. They just throw this stuff out. And so this lens, like, really lets you cut through like, one. There's like six things we look at.

Bryan Power [00:10:17]:

And they're probably going to diagnose where the issue is. And that data and this kind of, like, level of insights lets you kind of manage the relationship with hiring managers or hiring executives that are skeptics. And you can kind of really, really simply and objectively lay out, hey, this is what's going on, which prevents a lot of, like, swirl internally. And let's just gets you back to the problem at hand, which is hiring people.

Shannon Ogborn [00:10:39]:

I feel like unlike a lot of programs or changes, it feels like this one could be something not necessarily that you could implement without stakeholders. Obviously it'd be important to explain to them why you're implementing it and what everything means. But it does feel like something that a talent team could kind of latch onto and at least start trialing even for themselves, just within the team.

Bryan Power [00:11:03]:

It's so important because when you're a small recruiting team, right, Three or four people, you're just. The pipeline kind of moves through and you're panicked again, you know, like, we gotta go source. And it just. You whipsaw through the different parts of the candidate experience even for just one recruiter. Like this lets you kind of figure out, okay, where do I need to spend my time? You might be over indexing on sourcing when the assessment's actually the problem. Like your, your managers are refusing to interview anybody or you're interviewing too many people. You know, like I think a lot of people come back to like, we just need more candidates. You know, like that's kind of always the suggestion.

Shannon Ogborn [00:11:36]:

It's a very common hiring manager quip, I'm not seeing enough candidates.

Bryan Power [00:11:42]:

Yeah. And they think there's just like this department store of great candidates that the recruiter hasn't stopped off at yet.

Shannon Ogborn [00:11:47]:

Meanwhile, sourcers, especially the creativity of sourcers, just bing bam, boom from every which direction, unconventional ways, like not even LinkedIn, just like scouring the Internet in like every nook and cranny. And just to hear we don't have enough candidates. This is great because you could say, actually we do have enough candidates. Or maybe we don't, right? Maybe we genuinely don't and we can address that. But it also allows you to say, yeah, actually that's not the problem. It's that you want us to hire all these people and your team isn't making themselves available for interviews.

Bryan Power [00:12:18]:

The other thing I've seen in many companies, including Nextdoor, is in the the middle in the assessment process, and this is particularly in engineering, is sometimes we don't really have this right now. Nextdoor we have in the past, the manager's like, no, we want to keep a high bar. Like we reject fricking everybody. We have like the highest bar in the industry. And they prove it by how many people they rejected get interviewed. You know what I mean? I'm like, no, we have like a 10% pass through rate. Like we're awesome. And this tactic that I found works with engineers is you say your interview process has a 90% failure rate and their engineering mind's like, failure rate, 90%.

Bryan Power [00:12:53]:

We gotta fix this, you know what I mean? And so the 10%, like kind of spoke to their ego, right? Of like, nope, no one's good enough to work here, right? And of course a lot of these engineering candidates just go to the other tech companies. Like, it's not like they're all mad.

Shannon Ogborn [00:13:05]:

I mean, everyone wants to think they have a high bar. It's a myth.

Bryan Power [00:13:08]:

They get really into engagement. So when you frame it as like you have a 90% failure rate, this is costing us hundreds of engineering hours. We've just got to either reject earlier or take more chances. But this, like, we only make an offer to 1 out of 10 people in engineering in particular is a lot of time. And so again, the assessment kind of metrics let you have this conversation with people versus like go back and source, you know, which seems to be like what every hiring committee and manager wants to do. It's just, just more pipeline. It's not about that we're rejecting 90%. It's just we know more pipeline.

Bryan Power [00:13:37]:

So I think, you know, having to optimize that with the data is a really useful tactic.

Shannon Ogborn [00:13:42]:

Yeah, definitely. The conversations with hiring managers, especially around the pipeline. I think the failure rate thing is so smart. Like it appeals to the audience that you're talking to. Whereas a lot of recruiters, for example, on offer acceptance rates, they really thrive and get excited on. I have a 95% acceptance rate and a lot of them thrive on like that positive end of it instead of the negative end of it, like, oh, I have a 15% rejection rate. And so you just have to know like the Persona that you're talking to and how you can apply it into it.

Bryan Power [00:14:17]:

It's the language. I mean, it works particularly well with, I think in engineering because it's using their language and it's not a trick. It really is true. It's like, listen, it's facts. We need to make different decisions earlier to change this number, you know, and of course you're gonna, you're gonna pass on people. You don't wanna hire everybody. It means you're passing on too many people early on, but help inviting them in to really think about, you know, how can we think about this part of the process, something we can optimize versus prove a different thing, which is we're keeping the high bar.

Shannon Ogborn [00:14:44]:

That plus if someone's gotten to the offer stage, you obviously think they're skilled or the on site stage or whatever I still call it on site despite the fact that a lot of people aren't on site.

Bryan Power [00:14:55]:

That's right. That's right.

Shannon Ogborn [00:14:56]:

Panel interview. There's a lot of time that's already been spent up to that point. So if someone's making it to a panel interview, they're already skilled enough and like a 90% drop off is, is really big.

Bryan Power [00:15:12]:

Or your initial screen is not tough enough. You know what I mean? And that's much less time at the front end. So you, you have to move some of the panel further into the process to make sure that that's actually an effective screen. No one just pulls people in to interview. There's. There's always some type of. Even if it's just with the recruiter. And so that, again, that helps you diagnose what's happening earlier on in the process that's leading to this number that's really inefficient.

Shannon Ogborn [00:15:34]:

One of my questions about this is, so you said you reviewed it maybe monthly with stakeholders. How often do you feel like recruiters or the people kind of on the ground doing this work are reviewing the, these metrics?

Bryan Power [00:15:49]:

Yeah, I mean, my. And I was a recruiter for a long time, so it definitely resonates with me. Each recruiter kind of knows what's going on with their pipeline. What this fixes, though, is like, when you ask recruiters, like, you're so busy, so many candidates, I got a source I got to make that you can't get a sense of, like, what's going on either. I don't know where any of them are, you know, or they're like, there's all this action. And so again, we do this monthly to be like, okay, let's like, lay it all out and where this team process output, where are we, right? And so it lets someone who, rather than trying to figure out every day, like, my heart soars and then my heart breaks. I'm like, we're winning, we're losing.

Bryan Power [00:16:23]:

Like, you. You can't get that update in real time because good recruiters are just ferocious. Like, there's so much activity and they're up and down the process dealing with their own set of wrecks. And I just found it's really hard to get a sense of what's going on until you simplify things and kind of do it on the same interval so you can see the. See the patterns that's changed. You know, a related point is it doesn't exactly map to the AAA framework. But when you're talking about running the recruiting process, I think there's basically three jobs. Coordinator, sourcer, and recruiter.

Bryan Power [00:16:55]:

And again, I know there's lots of other jobs, but if you Take a baseline what a recruiting team looks like. Those are the three kind of roles if you want things. And these are actually the only three problems that you run into at scale. You either don't have any candidates, which is a sourcing problem. You can't get your candidates through the process. Like you can't get interview scheduled, it's taking a month to get people in, which is a coordinating problem. Or you can't close any candidates, which for the recruiter really comes, comes into play. And so I've always found like you just be like, which one of these is my problem right now? It's almost always one of those three things.

Bryan Power [00:17:27]:

It's kind of what led us to start to think about the AAA framework of same thing, attraction, assessment and acquisition. But this also ties to the roles. And so because you're always like, we either need another sourcer or we need another coordinator or any other recruiter. But it changes based on what's going on with your pipeline, you know, so, so I've always found recruiters that kind of know each part of those things. Like they know, they know how to help. The best recruiters love their coordinators, they help their coordinators. You know, they don't just wait for the people to come through the pipeline. The best recruiters are also sourcers.

Bryan Power [00:17:55]:

They know how to source if they need to. And so I, what I really look for is like when the recruiting the wrecks that they're in, can the recruiter influence all three of these things? You know, help their teammates. They're kind of focused on one of those problems.

Shannon Ogborn [00:18:07]:

I just think the simplicity of this is amazing because it's easy to get overwhelmed in all the things that you should track and report on. And we need this for this person, that for that person. And when I started at Ashby, I was in a customer facing role and I was a RecOps consultant. I was helping teams build dashboards and reports. And you know, people have different reporting needs and some people are really in it and some people are just so overwhelmed on what they think they should be doing that they're paralyzed by not doing anything. And so I think this is like a very, very solid framework to accomplish hitting those areas that you talked about. And I would love to hear the results and leadership impact. If you have any stories here, feel, feel free to share but would just love to hear.

Shannon Ogborn [00:18:52]:

And mostly the reason we ask this is because it's a lot easier for people to go to their leadership team and say, hey, not only does this work for Nextdoor or not Only does Nextdoor do this, but this really works for them. How has it worked for you?

Bryan Power [00:19:06]:

I mean, we love it. I'm very proud of the Nextdoor recruiting team. I think they really, really operate at a very high level. And we've been using this now for a couple years. And what I've seen is we include everybody in the recruiting team. We share kind of what's going on. And what happens is people start to understand better how their role in the bigger process, like, fits in to the big picture. And then more importantly, they know there's these certain moments in the process where they're actually really high impact and they know what types of things they're supposed to do in that moment.

Bryan Power [00:19:35]:

Like, we talked about the offer accept. Like, there's like a playbook we run when we have extended an offer to somebody that, like, now, you know, the sources can like, oh, that's really interesting. The recruiters do it this way. So we, we really try to standardize a lot of the things that you do at the different parts of the process, which is good because again, there's so much commotion in recruiting. You don't want to have to think about what to do when there's this dynamic thing that's happening where there's competition for your people and you have to go as fast as you can, but then you're not sure, so you got to go back and talk to them again. This is happening, like, across tens, hundreds, thousands of people at these different companies.

Shannon Ogborn [00:20:08]:

Conversations start to. I know as someone who had done IC recruiting for several years, sometimes the candidates just kind of start to mesh together, and you're like, wait, did I talk to this person about this? And there's. I talked to this person about that. And maybe I'm getting these two confused. And so you go back and you rely on your notes and you rely on the process that you know that you did. And if you did everything, I think it's really important for recruiters to be able to express themselves individually and, like, have their own style. But style is different than process.

Bryan Power [00:20:39]:

And the other thing is every candidate's different. You know, we should treat them all like individuals. You're not kind of like moving packages on a conveyor belt here. You have to kind of connect with them on an individual level. But you benefit from, like, a repeatable motion. Like, how are you deciding if a candidate is good? That shouldn't change, even though the candidates do. And so if you're zooming in again on the assessment part of the process, you're like, hey, last week you said this was important. This week you said this is important.

Bryan Power [00:21:05]:

All recruiters have had to deal with this at some point in their career. But, you know, okay, I got to lock this down. I got to make sure we're asking the same criteria of every candidate I bring through, or else they're gonna say, oh, I changed my mind on what I wanna see in the pipeline, so just go source more. Again, all recruiters know this. Like, it's always about, why haven't they just found more perfect candidates? And oftentimes that's really not actually the solution. This really brings you back, back to what's going on.

Shannon Ogborn [00:21:28]:

Yeah, definitely. Any fun stories where you've seen this really resonate or sort of change a motivation of a hiring manager that you can think of?

Bryan Power [00:21:40]:

I mean, I mentioned one. I think it comes up. The pattern that comes up all the time is hiring managers just think recruiters should just go get more candidates when in fact, they're not asking the right questions. Or, you know, you make an offer to someone they thought was really good and they're like, yeah, let me know when they accept. And they don't have the right ownership mentality. Like, hey, they're going to work for you, dude. Like, get involved.

Shannon Ogborn [00:22:01]:

Yeah, no. It's surprising how many hiring managers don't reach out to someone when they get an offer.

Bryan Power [00:22:05]:

This is what I mean. And so you have to know what to do at the offer accept stage, like, how to mobilize the company to like, max power on this moment versus fumble it. And then they'll say, oh, we'll just go get more perfect candidates. That's like, I don't know what else you all want to spend your time on. You know, it really does help teams map out, like, what's their playbook at different parts of the puzzle. You know, one thing that's kind of, again, the simplicity was really important to us to be able to diagnose like, the problems, but it doesn't really talk about the candid experience. For example, that's something we also talk about every month, but it's more kind of. We use survey data.

Bryan Power [00:22:41]:

We're always trying to create a really powerful experience for our candidates. We get a lot of great feedback on that. But again, this framework was really about the machine. How do you get a lot of candidates through a consistent process, swiftly and efficiently, and what's the outcome? But again, it's not, it's not everything. But to your point, like, there's so much data you can get lost in this stuff, if you don't try to really simplify, like what's the most important thing, which part of the process to pay attention to. And that's what we've done.

Shannon Ogborn [00:23:07]:

Yeah. It's not to say that these are the only things that you should be looking at, but it is to say these are three things that you should be looking at so well. Taking a really big step back. A lot of what we talk about at Ashby is hiring excellence. And I feel like we got into a little bit of it here, but I would love to hear, when you hear hiring excellence, what does that mean to you?

Bryan Power [00:23:29]:

Well, I think of the Nextdoor recruiting team personally, but one thing that they do really, really well, like I'm very proud of, is they are able to kind of work through a system like this, like just process excellence. But they really make the candidates feel valued and special. Those two things don't go together well. Like, to feel special, you have to feel like it's never been done before. You're. That you're special, right? This is unique to you.

Bryan Power [00:23:55]:

But the process, you have to do the same thing so many times. You know, a million recruiter screens for recruiters who have been there for years. Like, how many recruiter screens they've done? Thousands. And so like, how do you make that not feel routine? Balancing that tension is so critical. And I think every great recruiting team I've been a part of or around, they do this. You know, they make you feel like it's an important decision when you take a new job. And so the experience, having that gravity like built in, like, we understand you're making a big choice and we want to make you feel comfortable and we really want you to work here. I've never seen a great recruiting team that doesn't do that.

Bryan Power [00:24:31]:

And usually recruiting teams that aren't doing well are not doing this. People just feel like a part of a process. There's no follow up that feels unique to them. They're just getting templates, that type of thing.

Shannon Ogborn [00:24:41]:

And you can't underestimate how much that has an impact on offer acceptance. There was a lot of recruiters I worked with at Google who were very much machines and they did great, right? Like they hit their goals and, and everything like that. But I far surpassed some goals because I made relationships with candidates. And the amount of candidates I had that come came back to me a year or two even later and said, hey, I know I didn't accept the offer then. I only had a couple of declines. But they're like I really want to work at Google. Can you help me get back into the process? And it's no hard feelings, right? It's like, yes, like, I was kind to you, you were kind to me. And now you were a decline. And now you're an accept as someone who declines today could easily be part of your company tomorrow. And I know that recruiter screens can feel like kind of a slog, especially when you're just like back to back. But when you get onto that call, that person is experiencing that one time. Even though you're experiencing it ten times a day.

Bryan Power [00:25:40]:

Yeah. And I think again, you have to do a lot of the same things over and over and over again. And it's just relentless and it requires a lot of energy. I think that's why so many recruiters are high energy, because they have their reservoir to be able to deal with this unending challenge. It just never stops. And so you need. You need some juice to be able to come through that. But they don't make people feel transactional.

Bryan Power [00:26:03]:

Right? Even though they have all these transactions they basically have to do. And I totally agree with you, the best recruiters, it's just like you're going to accept someday. You know, maybe. Maybe it's not today.

Shannon Ogborn [00:26:13]:

Maybe it's even at your next company. I've had that happen before, too.

Bryan Power [00:26:15]:

Exactly. And I think new recruiters don't kind of appreciate this. They like, okay, decline. I'm on to finding someone new. Which you obviously have to do. But good recruiters kind of like, no, that was. We got all the way to the end with this person. I'm going to be checking in six months from now.

Bryan Power [00:26:28]:

Do you like your new job? Because so many times they don't. And like, no. I really wish I'd taken that offer, but I was embarrassed to call you. I'm so glad you called me.

Shannon Ogborn [00:26:34]:

Exactly.

Bryan Power [00:26:35]:

You're like, you can fast forward to the end if you can resurface one of those candidates. And I think all the best. Like, they tend to be more seasoned recruiters. They never let up on a really good candidate. Like, they just keep the line in forever. You know? And that's why they go to a new company. They can fill roles quickly cause they just have these relationships.

Bryan Power [00:26:52]:

That was not about this one position. They worked on this one time.

Shannon Ogborn [00:26:55]:

Agreed. Can I say, I just love how much you pump up your talent team. It's really amazing to have a leader who just believes so strongly in what somebody is doing and supports the talent team. It can often be a thankless job. And so to have someone who's like really backing you up, I think it, I'm sure it means a lot.

Bryan Power [00:27:16]:

That's great. They know it. I love them. They are an awesome, awesome team.

Shannon Ogborn [00:27:19]:

Well, we are our final question. I love this question because especially for people who have been in the industry for a long time, you've seen a lot of ups and downs. I would love to hear what is your recruiting hot take?

Bryan Power [00:27:31]:

Yeah, so it's definitely tied to my own story is, you know, recruiting is a really well-defined job. Like you know, if you're doing it well or not. In a lot of jobs at bigger companies, you're more kind of woven with a lot of other people doing things. You don't get the same feedback. Recruiter that made 12 hires in a quarter knows they did a pretty good job with no hires in three months, knows they need to pick up the pace, whatever how hard it is. You just know this and that's, that's a real benefit of the job. What I found when I was a recruiter at Google, you know, 150 years ago, is that recruiters are really trusted by the managers they're working with because the manager like really needs them to come through to help them build their team. And what's not as obvious to a lot of senior recruiters is because this is when you should think like this is they won't let you help them with other problems organizationally because you have this trust.

Bryan Power [00:28:20]:

You know, you're kind of with the team, but not on the team. And too many companies there's like this broken recruiting versus HR thing. You know, it's so dumb and it's structural. You have people in HR are kind of like, why does everybody love the recruiters? You know, I have to do all the hard conversations and they just want to talk to their recruiter. This, I've seen this at so many different companies. It's definitely not the people team at Nextdoor. But what, what I my hot take guess is recruiting can expand out and solve so many other business challenges, but we tend to be so heads down to have to go make that next offer. You don't see that that opportunity is really, really there.

Bryan Power [00:28:53]:

And that trust is hard to come by. Not a lot of people in the org are as trusted as the recruiters because the people you hire like you're their first relationship at the company. It's almost always positive. And so I, I think recruiters should really look at like, okay, beyond doing the job, which is really clear, fill the roles what else can I do to make this company or this culture successful because they're in such a great position to do it?

Shannon Ogborn [00:29:15]:

Yeah, you are the brand. Recruiters are the brand and act accordingly, you know. Well, I think we're coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and Nextdoor?

Bryan Power [00:29:26]:

Yeah, I'm not big influencer, you know, but I think follow me on LinkedIn. That's kind of where I say stuff and post stuff. You can find me speaking at places like Transform, and that's what I'd say.

Shannon Ogborn [00:29:36]:

And Nextdoor, is it just nextdoor.com?

Bryan Power [00:29:41]:

Nextdoor's nextdoor.com, yeah. My email is power@nextdoor.com. My LinkedIn.

Shannon Ogborn [00:29:44]:

Such a flex.

Bryan Power [00:29:45]:

Yeah, yeah. And I have my full name. Bryan. Power Bryan with a Y is my LinkedIn handle as well. This is what happens when you've been in text so long. Like, these things started I was there when they launched, so I got my name on almost all of them.

Shannon Ogborn [00:29:55]:

Oh, it's such a. It's honestly such a satisfying thing to get a great email when you're an early employee.

Bryan Power [00:30:01]:

Totally.

Shannon Ogborn [00:30:02]:

I love that. Well, I can't thank you enough. I think this is going to be really great for. Especially for people who are kind of struggling to make sense of what they should track and why they should track it and how they can communicate that out. So really appreciate you joining us.

Bryan Power [00:30:14]:

Thanks for having me.

Shannon Ogborn [00:30:16]:

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.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.