[Reshare] Fixing Inbound Recruiting through Titles, Targeting, and Testing with Jim Miller @ Ashby

The belief that great candidates don’t apply online still runs deep, but it’s outdated.

Jim Miller, VP of People and Talent at Ashby and former recruiting leader at Google and FullStory, sits down with Shannon to unpack what really makes a high-performing hiring strategy today. From his early days building sourcing teams to overseeing millions of inbound applications, Jim shares how experimentation, data, and the right job title can radically shift how your team finds and evaluates talent.

He explains why internal mobility should be every team’s first stop, what most recruiters get wrong about job descriptions, and how candidate behavior has changed with the rise of algorithm-driven search. 

Jim also opens up about testing bold ideas, from limiting applications to transforming online inbound into a strategic advantage, and how recruiting teams can build credibility through experimentation and measurable outcomes.

Key takeaways:

1. Candidate behavior has evolved: Inbound isn’t just noise when you get discoverability right.
2. Internal mobility is undervalued: Moving people across roles builds culture and saves time.
3. Job titles matter more than you think: Standardizing language increases visibility and accuracy.
4. Testing is a muscle: Data-driven recruiters can challenge norms and drive lasting improvements.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Hiring excellence from Jim Miller

(00:16) This is Offer Accepted

(00:42) Introducing Jim Miller

(02:40) The myth that great candidates never apply online

(06:20) Using continuous improvement to strengthen inbound strategy

(07:17) Why internal mobility should be your starting point

(10:12) Turning job descriptions into scalable sourcing tools

(12:35) Where resistance to change in recruiting comes from

(16:37) Measuring volume, passthrough rates, and when to stop

(23:42) How vague job titles quietly ruin your pipeline

(29:04) Running experiments to validate and scale recruiting strategy

(38:25) Cohort hiring as a more equitable hiring model

Transcript

Jim Miller (00:00):
So to me, hiring excellence is a connected story that starts at the end with outcome and works its way all the way back through to what was the business case put forward for why the Roche be open in the first place.

Shannon Ogborn (00:16):
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. Hey everyone. Shannon Aborn, your host here this summer. We're resurfacing past episodes you may have missed but that feel more relevant than ever in today's hiring market. You might be looking at the title of this episode and be thinking to yourself, why are we talking about inbound right now? When even by our own data and ashby's talent trends reports, inbound applications have skyrocketed, which sounds like a win until you realize that most recruiting teams are smaller than they've ever been and they're now buried under a mountain of resumes.

(01:09):
But this episode with Jim Miller, our VP of people and talent here at Ashby has truly only become more relevant with time. Jim shares how to make inbound actually work for your team. He walks through how to write job descriptions that are clear enough for unqualified candidates to opt out and strong enough to pull the right ones in. He also breaks down how simple tweaks like using search optimized job titles can make a major difference in your funnel. If you're overwhelmed by inbound or you're just trying to get sharper with less, this conversation is full of ideas. You can start testing now. Alright, let's get into it. 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. Today I have the pleasure of chatting with Jim Miller, our very own VP of People and Talent here at Ashby. Throughout his career, Jim has tackled many different roles, including operating in the recruiting space for 15 years at Google, from overseeing recruiting teams in APAC and EMEA to online channels and beyond. After Google, Jim joined FullStory as their VP of recruitment where he took full ownership of the global recruiting function systems and processes. We are super excited to now have Jim on the Ashby team and of course on the podcast with us. Welcome Jim.

Jim Miller (02:25):
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (02:27):
You have been in the recruiting space for 22 years.

Jim Miller (02:31):
22 years.

Shannon Ogborn (02:32):
Can you tell me about one of the biggest challenges you've seen really permeate the talent space throughout your career in recruiting

Jim Miller (02:40):
Challenge opportunity? It's similar to me. I think that the big thing that I've seen that the change and the challenge that folks are still trying to get their heads around it is the use of search. And when I started in recruiting, one of the very best lessons and possibly on my first great candidates don't apply for jobs. That's what I was told and I've heard that continuously through my career. And I went through a journey of being the sourcing expert in my agency days and then the sourcing expert in my early days at Google to the point where they gave me some budget and told me to start a sourcing team for Europe and then did the same thing for Asia eventually. So I was the sourcing guy going out and finding great passive talent and then I got the opportunity to take over the online channel, which is basically all of the inbound stuff at Google, all the inbound applications, but everything from job description creation to relationships with third parties where we advertise down to the resume screening and then the distribution of talent.

(03:43):
And you're talking about millions of applications per year going through that particular team. And I think one of the reasons why I ended up in that role was to try and bring all of the learnings from sourcing and turn them round into candidate attraction and see what would work. And I ended up in that role for best five, seven years I think, and I've come out of it the other side truly believing that a key element of any strategy is inbound online applications, job advertising and what that can bring. But the challenge there, there are multiple elements to it. One is volume and we can see that from the reports that Ashby are putting out, the trend reports and so on, especially at the moment how the increased volumes of applications exist, especially in the early stages of a job being advertised and volume can create problems all of its own kind, but it can also be a great thing.

(04:39):
The other piece is elements of bias that's still that bias built into not just recruiting organizations of recruiters but also hiring managers of the quality of an online applicant versus the inbound sourced person. Because it seems that everyone had this pervasive thought of great candidates not applying for jobs and it's just not true. It's also seen as a tool for more junior hiring and it's difficult to show the value for a more senior, more complex hire. I've tackled that problem a few times over the years, but when you boil it down, the key thing I think is you've got to become very, very good at continuous measurement and continuous improvement of that particular channel to get it to work for you, for your environment, for the way that your company likes to work. And then building out a model that's very connected, very aligned to use that as the kind of primary channel. And I think if you get that right and you get that measurement and that continuous improvement, right, then you can have an enormous amount of success with that channel and be much more effective, efficient, cost effective as well.

Shannon Ogborn (05:49):
For sure. As you said, a lot of recruiters just get handed this premise of online are bad candidates from X, Y, Z source are always bad. I actually believed it for a long time and I actually said it for a long time. It's interesting to kind of come around to a different talk track there, but I know you have a little bit of a unique perspective on the order of operations of reviewing candidates. I would love to hear more about that.

Jim Miller (06:20):
I'm a great believer of the science of incremental gains. If you improve every little element of a process, you get a big overall incremental gain. So to me, you've got to look at the right pathway to hire to get to the end results of what your company's looking for and very outcome based. The way I look at it in a general terms is internal mobility is your best, most effective channel to fill a role. To me, if you can fill a position with somebody who already knows the company, the culture has a bunch of the skills for the role and that leaves a seat that's more junior open, that's an easier hire to make if you have to go external. So if you can do that continuously through the company, moving people through the chairs to only leave the more junior positions open to the external hiring, you are going to hire that much more effectively as a company.

(07:17):
You also build a whole bunch of cultural capital with that. You build trust your workforce, start to really trust that you have their best interests at heart and they can have a long and fulfilling career in your company. That's huge retention company, employer experience and so on and so forth. So that's always my starting point. A fair and equitable internal mobility program where every single job is posted for at least a week internally before you go external. And it's your recruitments who are owning that process so they're not in competition with somebody on an internal mobility team because competition in that sense for recruiting, that just breaks all your efficiencies and effectiveness. So internal mobility first, then get the job description right? Doesn't matter whether you're looking at online as your channel employer, referrals as your channel, sourcing as your channel, even the internal mobility piece.

(08:12):
You've got to get the job description right, and that means understanding what the outcome is of that hire. What's the return on your investment? What does success look like for a candidate six months into the role, someone who's effective early and very successful, what attributes do they need? What skills, qualifications, experiences does that person need in order to be successful in that role? That gives you the minimum requirements of a job. That's the keep element, that's the structure of the skeleton of the story you will tell with that job description. And then you tell the story of the job, why it exists, what the requirements are, what does success look like, a bit about the company culture, potentially some examples of people who've been in the role or similar roles and so on. And people can then see themselves in the job. And those minimum requirements should be written in a way that folks can put the evidence of their experience of meeting those minimum requirements on their resume in a simple form, it makes it easy for them to write their resume to match the role.

(09:17):
If you get all of that right, it doesn't matter whether you're sending it to someone you're sourcing or whether one of your employees is recommending the job to somebody else with an employee referral or it's an online job ahead, you're going to get the right kind of response that comes back to that accuracy. The right candidate applying for the right role right now saves you a huge amount of time. Time is the one finite resource that recruiters have. So if you optimize all of this stuff correctly, brilliant. And then the next level of that optimization is the sourcing bit. Hang on a second, this guy's talking about online and job ads and now he's talking about sourcing, but it's the reverse. Who does the search when it's an online application? It's the candidate and in effect, the candidate is writing a search to find the job instead of you writing the search to find the candidate.

(10:12):
So your job ad is one too many instead of your sourcer being one too many. And that has a gearing effect that you can get too far, far more candidates. So if you get the key words right in your job description, natural language industry, standard language for job titles, and if you describe your entire tech stack so that the discoverability engines in these third party jobs start to push it to the right talent, you then get the online applications who've been driven by technology to the job because it's such a close alignment to their skills. And those folks are receiving those job adverts in their inboxes, not in their InMail. And those jobs coming into their inboxes are hitting folks who are passive talent. So in effect, you are sourcing by a different name talent who is passive, and you are turning them into active talent.

(11:09):
And that's the way you can then break the bias. And if you get that right and you measure that quality coming in, you can then make the decision about whether you need to push employee referrals or if you need to go spend the time sourcing. And that's how I then create this hierarchy all the way through. And of course with online applications, you're basically enabling anyone with the aspirational goal of working for your company to apply. They don't have to know somebody who works there already in order to get reviewed and get considered for the job and they don't have to be found by someone so they don't have to have filled up their LinkedIn profile with all the bells and whistles and everything else, but instead they can make their own conscious decision once done their research into your companies to whether or not they want to apply. And that goes a long way to helping you have a fully representative workforce as well. So it's very powerful. So that's how I think about it.

Shannon Ogborn (12:03):
In your time presenting this concept or idea of this order of operations, who do you feel like you've gotten the most pushback from? Has it been recruiters and sourcers or has it been more IC levels who are like, that's not what I know, that's not what I've heard. I know a completely different order of operations that I've operated on in the past or has it been more recruiting people in executive leadership who have brought those concerns to the table?

Jim Miller (12:35):
It's very much the latter. Hiring managers really don't mind where the candidate comes from once they see the resume and they're like, wow, this person's great. They fit my role perfectly well, creating good job. They didn't mind whether that's a source candidate or referred candidate or online in the back of their minds, they should prefer that the candidate is active and looking rather than someone that's had to be sold to by a sourcer. That's my take on it. The recruiters honestly, once it's up and running and it's working, especially if you've taught them how to optimize the job properly, so less of their time is wasted to reviewing candidates who aren't a fit suddenly realize, hang on a second, remember that finite resource is time for any recruiter for the time I spend screening compared to the time I would spend sourcing, I get a much greater return on that time if I've got the right pipeline coming in. And of course you can close it at any time to stop the volume once you've got enough data and analytics. So the group that I've had the most resistance from has absolutely been the senior leadership within recruiting who

(13:44):
Up with the same kind of generation, probably the wrong word, but that kind of group who have the same perspective and said it for a long time and never thought back to whether it was true or not, who just believed it. And a great example is executive hiring. What do you do when you want an executive? When you're in a company, you go out to a third party executive search company, the people with the network, Rolodexes and all of this kind of good stuff. And it's the same in previous companies. And let me test this because everyone's been googling for 25 years, come October, I think that's right, maybe it's 26 years in October. And folks know that they can go and look for a job and these job matching engines on LinkedIn and other products send really good fit roles to people even if they're not looking, including executives.

(14:37):
So you try putting your next CTO role out there as a job ad just to test before you go to the executive search company that you want to spend six figures with or the next CMO search or your next head of revenue, whatever the executive role is, just test it, just see what you get coming back. And I've done that a couple of times and the end results have made people go, you kidding me? We did not expect director and VP and SVP level roles to be filled by an online ad. Indeed, there's been competition with almost boutique exec search firms internally. Sometimes when I've put these methods into practice and they're like, hang on, that's my livelihood. You can't go into things like that. So it's really powerful, but you've got to be able to get to the point of experimentation and it's relatively cheap to just do the experiment for a week or two when normally you'd be going and having these third party conversations. Just hold off on that for a second just to see what you get and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Shannon Ogborn (15:40):
Yeah, especially now, like you were alluding to our trend reports on applications. More and more people are applying to jobs and certainly yes is the job market, but I think that people are even at a high level of leadership are getting used to being able to search and find roles themselves because yes, they could be working with an executive firm that is presenting them opportunities, but they don't have all the opportunities that are searchable. And so as a candidate you want to have an eyes wide open situation where you're able to find all of the roles and having the role open on the company side really allows you to have a more diverse, wider range of applicants in your pipeline as well. So I think it's

Jim Miller (16:28):
Exactly a

Shannon Ogborn (16:30):
Great thought there. So how does this fit into the concept of continuous improvement?

Jim Miller (16:37):
Well, there's two things. One, volume is obviously an issue, right? If you have too much volume coming in, then it can take up too much time. So you have to be very good at measuring and time is actually your front. So if you go and do your analytics on how many candidates do we actually need to fill a role? And the recruiting joke there by the way is one, you only need one the successful candidate, but for this case,

(17:08):
How

(17:08):
Many applicants do we traditionally need to see in order for the waterfall to come all the way down to making an offer all the pass rate calculations and everything else. So you run that first of all. Then you look at, well, how many of those do I need if I took out all of the employer referrals and all of the sourced hires that we'd made previously? Again, I'm only looking at externally filled roles. The internal mobility stuff is separate to this. How many external applicants through a job ad will I need in order to fill this role based on past data? So you get to a number and then you can calculate how long do I need to post a job in order to get that number of applicants? And that should give you a fair idea of when to stop the pipeline generation and knowing when to stop is one of the key desires of a recruiting leader for their team.

(18:06):
And then you test against it. Did we open the role, get the number of applications within the timeframe or did we get more, did I have to close it earlier? So you're constantly reinforcing that entry volume and what the accurate number is for a position. Then you're looking at the pasture rates and did they align to the historical data that I was expecting and did we make a hire? What was the outcome of the work that we did to continuously improving your model until you get it down to the level of accuracy where any particular role you can go, yep, that position, we're probably going to need to open that for six days and we think we'll definitely fill that from online. Let's go. You'll always get a few referrals and maybe a recruiter will do a little bit of sourcing and there's a distinct chance you'll fill it through internal mobility before the role even goes live.

(18:53):
But if you run the data and you do this every single time, you can look at the volumes coming in and you know when to stop. There's another side to it as well. You've got to be able to limit application. So limiting through time that the job is posted is one thing, but application rules, blocking rules, you don't want duplicate applications for the same role. And so one of the key things I learned was by reducing the number of applications a human can make during a time period, forces the person to look more at the suitability and accuracy of the job to their skills. So I'll go into a little story if I may. When I worked a full story and you had the ability to watch the journeys of people with heap maps and so on through their application journey, we found that two thirds plus of applicants really only looked at the job title. They didn't get downed into the rest of the job description.

(19:52):
Now,

(19:52):
The 30 odd percent that did get into the job description, they turned out to be the stronger candidates. So that's pretty powerful in its own right. But if you can force people to go past the job title through some kind of mechanism, like a restriction, the number of roles someone can apply to forcing them to do their diligence on the suitability of that position for them and their skills, all of a sudden you start to push out the candidates who aren't qualified for the role and you start to have a consistent pool of talent who are qualified against the minimum requirements that you've got, which means you can then be super objective with your screening and go through and push the highest quality most representative group of talent through the process for that particular job, saving you an enormous amount of time. So you have lots of different angles to do with the analytics to then do this continuous improvement. And all of it really hinges on time being a critical metric in lots of different ways. And when you get it right, you optimize the channel, you get pipeline in faster so you have a faster time to fill. They're active candidates so you get better closing rates and everyone's happier in general. And if you have happy hiring managers, you have happier

Shannon Ogborn (21:09):
Recruitments a hundred percent when everything is working full steam ahead properly, the relationships are good, the candidates are flowing the right way, everyone is better off for sure. I have to ask because I do think, and this was also my experience working at Google and talking to friends and recruiting outside of Google, they're like, okay, great. This type of situation where you're getting online applicants, right? Of course that works for a company like Google because it's Google who's not trying to apply. What is your take or how would you pose this to companies to set them up for success when maybe they're smaller company, they don't have as strong of employer brand. What is the critical piece here to seeing success with this, using this order of operation with inter mobility and then online channels first?

Jim Miller (22:06):
Well, the internal mobility is key first of all, because it then gives you the less complex, more junior positions to hire externally, which always helps. The other piece is that discoverability and optimization part. So when I joined FullStory, I went and put this methodology into place and in the long term it was successful, but I remember having a call with a company that was selling a SaaS product around customer experience and they based their pricing on application volumes, reasonable way of modeling the pricing for a company doing that. And they knew how big we were as a company. And I got a second take when I told them how many applications we were going. They were like, how many? I was like this many. And they were like, but that's off the charts for a company of your size, how are you? What? And of course it would've meant that their product was super expensive for us as a company. We didn't end up going there.

(22:59):
So they have to get back and refilling their pricing model. But it comes down to some relatively simple steps. First of all, the job title make it industry standard because the same lesson I learned all the way back in 2001 when I'm trying to optimize these job descriptions to hire contract software engineers in London, the same algorithms are still in use. The job title alignment to either a search or a matching on a profile carries the most weight. So if someone has done the job and calls themselves whatever they call themselves and that matches the job title, that job will get pushed to them more often and be more accurate.

Shannon Ogborn (23:42):
And let's be honest, people are taking real creative liberties as of late with job titles. It's like, I couldn't even tell you based on this job title what the job does, and you then look at the job and you're like, that is not even close to what I thought that the job would be.

Jim Miller (23:59):
So job titles is hugely important, but then so key words, I mentioned Tech stack earlier. I'll give you another example. Two departments had exactly the same job globally, two different parts of an organization. One group took the recruiting strategic decision to write at the bottom. You must have experienced coding in any fourth generation coding language. Like we are very open. We don't mind what you code in, we just one great coders, you'll come, you'll be able to do anything. The other business group to the recruiting decision to write a list of the fourth generation coding languages that they might be interested in, the group that chose the list hired the same profile 10 times faster than the other group, including getting referrals from people who did the job in the first group and knew they were hiring that couldn't find the job themselves when they were searching for the one to refer their friends to.

(25:03):
So their friends were getting jobs in the other department. And this person came to me, this head of recruiting for this department said, I need your help. I need sourcing support on this job. And I'm like, well, we don't need to any problem hiring that role elsewhere. What's the issue? And I went down, I just went line by line, oh, look, here's your problem. When people search for Java or c plus plus and the other skills or job title or whatever, they're finding this job that your job does not appear because it's still working the same way. It's the same thing with Buddha and Logic. If that keyword is not on the profile, that profile will not be returned in your search and recruits forget that. So you've got to make your role discoverable. So one of the things I put in place at Full Story was every single job had the whole tech stack as part of the boilerplate, and that helped with discoverability because if someone put Kubernetes in their search, it would come up even if that wasn't a core requirement for the job, it just helped with the discoverability. So now you've got,

Shannon Ogborn (26:07):
Isn't it amazing though that in the example that you gave the other team was making an effort to be like, we're open to all languages and it actually ended up hurting their pipeline because it wasn't discoverable. Like you're saying,

Jim Miller (26:23):
You've got to understand the mechanics behind these things and how they work in order to put a strategy together that's effective. You're better off writing relatively long lists of different synonyms in effect or variations of a particular name or type of technology. Then you are just giving very open language because of discoverability and it's accuracy of application. So discoverability, job titles, keywords, they're critically important in driving pipeline. So then if you get all of that right, if you've written the story right with the right structure, the right ingredients, all of a sudden the matching engines start to push your job out to more people and your application volumes start to increase because your job looks attractive. You've told the story, you've explained what success looks like, you've got great transparency about the kinds of work done. You've got examples. I mean, go and look at one of the job ads that a b car, a VP and co-founder, a VP of engineering co-founder writes a fantastic example of storytelling through a job description,

New Speaker (27:25):
Start

Jim Miller (27:26):
To drive your applications. It doesn't matter about your brand. The job description will hook people in and then they'll go and research a brand and then they'll apply. And those extra applications, although they might not get hired for the role, you can only hire one person per open headcount are going to build your database for the future, and they're going to be the folks who can shortlist and build relationships with and do the real kind of strategic sourcing, the stuff that people dream of. I listen to Benji's podcast and he's like, people need to be strategic and think about the long term and build the pipeline across roles and have company mapping and all of that good stuff. You can do all of that if you build the pipelines right the first time you go to market, rather than redoing everything every single time. Again, it's all elements of continuous improvement and measurement and redefining your strategy and getting the incremental gains all the way.

Shannon Ogborn (28:19):
Absolutely. I think this is a really game changing concept because you're really taking what people know to be the recruiting process that they're so used to working at, working with within their company, and you're saying, Hey, let's do this a little bit differently. But the biggest piece is to, I think getting buy-in is really this test and failure and test and success and being able to present those results. How has that played out for you in this test and failure? You said you love AB testing. Tell me more about that. What have you seen be successful in implementing these strategies and then using testing mechanisms to make your case for using these methods moving forward?

Jim Miller (29:04):
I think being brave and asking you for forgiveness later is one thing that stood me a good when I was on the other side of the Atlantic to anyone senior enough to tell me no, that always,

Shannon Ogborn (29:13):
That's your emoji, Jim.

Jim Miller (29:15):
I think you just have to go about it in a, I want to do this. Here's how I'm going to measure success. This is the hypothesis. If we fail to prove the hypothesis, that is not a failure on my behalf or my team's behalf. That is just being able to put that hypothesis into a closet and leave it there for a while and not have to worry about it or talk about it. So proving or disproving that hypothesis now, if we prove it to be correct and the outcome is what we hoped or even better, fantastic, we can continue with it. Here's how we're going to measure it after launch. This is the logical reason why we should do this. This is the reason why you should care about this, the emotional reason for the change, and here's how we're going to measure it, improve or disprove the hypothesis that suggests we should do this and implement it and facilitate it with you.

(30:18):
If you get those three elements right, the logical reason, the head, the emotional reason why someone should care about it, the heart, and then the facilitation and measurement piece, that's the feet. If you ever want me to draw the diagram on a whiteboard, head, heart, feet, shout out to Kim Wiley who taught me that in the very first face pick Google training folks, fantastic model. Still use it today. So that's the way that I think about it. And if you can then articulate what you're looking to do there, show the measurement and give the timelines of when you're going to measure based on different milestones you put in place. Oftentimes people are like, Hey, no problem. You've got this. We can always go back. That's easy. But they also see the value in putting a hypothesis away somewhere.

Shannon Ogborn (31:02):
Yeah, I think as a recruiting function, one thing that I think a lot of recruiting teams haven't felt necessarily empowered to do in the past is to really challenge what we know as the recruiting process. Just like sales runs, tests, marketing runs, tests, what's to say that as a business unit, recruiting shouldn't be doing the same thing? And so I think through my conversations with a lot of people as I've been doing the podcast has been like, what can we take from other parts of the business? Things that they do, like tons of AB testing, what can we take and do that's going to set us up for success, make our recruiting teams more successful, get us a seat at the table that's seen and heard. So yes, I love all this. So we talked about continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is a part of hiring excellence based on our hiring excellence framework. Would love to hear what does hiring excellence mean to you in that context or otherwise?

Jim Miller (32:12):
You already actually touched on it, sales have this incredible infrastructure around what successful sales are. There are so many different ways of doing it, so many different models and training courses and so on and so forth. But really it is deep preparation and research before anything actually happens and everyone is focused on the outcome. Marketing is the same. You build a demand gen engine in marketing and you've started off with deep math and you know exactly what your outcome is going to be and then everything else comes into play in the middle. Just do the same thing over and over again, different times. It's like no recruiting can have the same level of diligence built into it. Excellence built into it. You have to focus on the outcome. I've said it a couple of times already, what does success look like from this hire? What do you expect someone to produce after six months?

(33:16):
We're in the startup world, right? You need people who are going to be effective early. So to me, hiring excellence is starting at the end result, which is success of the hire way after you hire them, working it back through understanding what the offer needs to look like, all of the qualifications, experiences, everything else for that candidate, which then comes back into the structured interviewing to make sure that your entire process is objective, which comes back to screening against those key minimum responsibilities that someone has to have in order to have that success, which makes your screening objective. And then that makes the story cohesive and connected in the job description between success and outcomes and the minimum requirements comes back through to why the role should be opened in the first place and helps the finance department understand the impact of why that headcount should open and what you're going to get, and then who's going to be held accountable?

(34:17):
Hiring manager, the VP who's requesting the role, all of that piece. So to me, hiring excellence is a connected story that starts at the end with outcome, successful outcome and works its way all the way back through to what was the business case put forward for why the role should be open in the first place. Recruiting is just a bid in the middle of that, but if you don't do those outer pieces, then once you get to your recruiting process from job opening to offer acceptance, that bit cannot be as successful as it could be without the pre-work and the end piece there. So that's what it means is hiring excellence and you can put that into place any way which way you want for the company that you work for.

Shannon Ogborn (35:03):
Absolutely. And recruiters and recruiting teams, they're some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. I know that the capability of creating sophistication like other business units is possible. It's just this enablement and the ask for forgiveness of like, I'm going, I'm just going to give it a go. And even if you have a failed test, it's not a failure. It's just learning. Moving forward. I hope that recruiting teams can heed this advice and hopefully move a little bit closer to that hiring excellence. Last question. My favorite question of all, what is your recruiting hot take

Jim Miller (35:42):
My recruiting hot take call. The job, the right job title is this thing. If it is a software engineer, call them a software engineer. If it's an account executive, call them an account executive. Anything in between, it is the thing. What is the industry standard? If the backend of your systems have to go off and do some kind of code matching thing between the structured job titles in LinkedIn, which are natural language and industry standard back across to whatever you are calling the thing, then you've done it wrong. Just call it what it is, don't be creative, you'll get much better results. It is the single biggest incremental gain you could possibly have in terms of a process improvement. And it's really easy to sell to whoever you have to influence, but just call the job what it should be called and you'll have so much more success.

Shannon Ogborn (36:47):
A hundred percent agree, because like I said, I've seen some very out of left field things in the wild recently, especially for customer success managers. I find I'm like, just call it a customer success manager internally. It's a completely different game. Maybe internally you call your team something entirely different, but when you're trying to get people who have these skills and capacity and have worked in these capacities before and they can't tell what the job may entail from the job title, you're not going to get the results that you want. Even though it's kind of like your feel good moment of like, well, we're not just customer success. We're X, Y, Z. The feel good moment doesn't surpass the need for quality application. So

Jim Miller (37:37):
Definitely

Shannon Ogborn (37:38):
Something to consider. I

Jim Miller (37:39):
Should also add to this, call yourself, the industry standard thing for the job that you did. Don't

(37:47):
Don't

(37:47):
Have to use the language that you were given by the company you worked for. No one is going to come at you if you call yourself X and you had some fancy title with unicorns in it internally, right? Call yourself the industry standard on your resume and on your LinkedIn profile. That way, all of these engines, these simple tools that have been created and the algorithms are 20 odd years old as I've been describing, they will match you and help you find your next role. It's critically important in times like this.

Shannon Ogborn (38:25):
Yes, a hundred percent agree. Amazing. Well, I think we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and what you're up to? At Ashby

Jim Miller (38:37):
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I often post about Ashby features that are coming out and how I think about using them, which is often very different to the intended usage. So if you're an Ashby customer, that's quite helpful. I do do some content creation, not as much as I'd like to. There's a blog posts out there, why I joined Ashby in the first place. It tells you a bit more about me and my experience and journey. There's some posts about leading without authority, how I got into a leadership role in the first place, and things folks can do and there's a lot more coming. And often times I'll have touched different elements of content. So follow Ashby on LinkedIn, that's the number one thing to do, and you'll see everything coming from all of us, and there'll be bits in there that I've contributed to or articles under my name as well and more to come in the future.

Shannon Ogborn (39:23):
Amazing. Well, Jim, I really appreciate you being with us on Offer Accepted, and I know that you have lots of good advice to share, so excited to see that come to fruition as we build more content in Ashby. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Jim Miller (39:40):
Thanks everyone. Bye.

Shannon Ogborn (39:43):
This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an a TS should be a scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics With your at s Scheduling, sourcing, and CR M 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.