Offer Accepted

Evolving the Recruiting Coordinator Role from Scheduling to Strategy with Dan Seifert, Marqeta

• Ashby

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The candidate experience coordinator role is changing fast, and innovative teams are evolving it before it becomes obsolete.

Dan Seifert, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition and Experience at Marqeta, joins Shannon to discuss how to future-proof talent teams without sacrificing quality. He outlines how his team restructured this critical role, introduced monthly feedback loops, and began training team members to transform candidate feedback into strategic insights.

Dan shares how he equips his team with AI tools, the simple prompts that surface the most useful trends, and why doing this work well drives business outcomes. He also explains how coordinators can become internal influencers, and how those skills prepare them for bigger roles down the line.

Key takeaways:

  1. AI as your co-pilot: Leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks, allowing your team to concentrate on crafting your company's narrative.
  2. Monthly feedback for consistent growth: Regular feedback fosters a culture of expected and consistent improvement, leading to better team performance.
  3. Candidate experience is a shared responsibility: Recruitment staff—coordinators, recruiters, and interviewers—all shape the candidate experience and influence hiring decisions.
  4. Upskilling boosts retention: Employee development empowers growth and retention.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:18) Meet Dan Seifert

(01:58) Why AI won’t replace talent teams

(03:10) Evolving the recruiting coordinator role

(05:19) What changed at Marqeta to spark this shift

(06:07) Aligning recruiters and coordinators to the business

(07:24) Coordinators as analysts of candidate experience data

(08:41) How to hire for strategic CX roles

(10:56) Coaching recruiters with monthly CX reports

(13:46) Quarterly updates for people business partners

(18:38) Upskilling coordinators with LLMs for feedback themes

(21:00) Building influence with straightforward data storytelling

(23:50) Offer acceptance rates and what’s driving them


Dan Seifert (00:00):

You're not at risk of being replaced by AI. Your only risk is being replaced by someone who's better at using AI than you are. Start thinking about how each role could benefit and how each role could actually do more and more interesting kinds of things if you've got the right people in seats who know how to use those tools.


Shannon Ogborn (00:18):

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 and welcome to Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-around recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am absolutely stoked to be here today with Dan Seifert. He is the Senior Director of Talent Acquisition and Experience at Marqeta, a payments technology company, and he has been in the talent acquisition space for almost 20 years and we did spend some time at Google together as well. And he has experience recruiting and leading recruiting teams at organizations and including nonprofits, big tech, biotech, and now FinTech. So he's been in all the industries and at Marqeta he's really focused on developing a lean and high-performing team of TA professionals and we'll get to sort of how that resonates here today. And you really want them to be positioned to thrive as AI reshapes and rather than replacing talent teams, but much of the work that has historically gone into talent that takes a lot of human effort. You're trying to sort of reshift that. And so that's kind of what we're going to get to today and I'm super excited to have you.


Dan Seifert (01:48):

Absolutely. I'm so excited to be here and this again feels just like such a timely conversation as we're all figuring out how AI is going to reshape the work that we do together.


Shannon Ogborn (01:58):

A hundred percent. The thing that we are going to specifically talk about today is what's been traditionally known as the recruiting coordinator role. I would love to hear first just sort of as a tee up, why does evolving that role specifically matter?


Dan Seifert (02:15):

Absolutely, and I think where it comes from is thinking about exactly how you frame this, that over time I do think we're going to see AI reshape a lot of our work rather than just straight up replace people. I think a lot of us in TA kind of instinctively know this, but just to name it, I really do think it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to make the huge decision to shift a job because of an interaction they have with a bot. I think they're always going to want to have a human partner in guiding them through that journey, but I think there are components of the hiring journey that just makes sense to automate more so that humans can do what we're uniquely positioned to do. And so when you think about the recruiting coordinator role, historically the vast majority of that work has been scheduling interviews and making sure those interviews go well, but ultimately a lot of the calendar Tetris, if you will, of making 'em happen.


Shannon Ogborn (03:02):

Yes. I'm still a little bit traumatized by my time as an RC, like when I look at a bunch of people's calendar at one time and I see all the colors, I'm like, oh my gosh.


Dan Seifert (03:10):

Exactly. And so that I think is where we can use AI to reshape the role and have it become less of just a recruiting coordinator role that is purely about scheduling and more as we're now rebranded at a Marqeta, a candidate experience coordinator role that's about curating excellent experiences that ultimately makes someone excited to join your company. And so as AI maybe leans in a little bit more to relieve you of the burden of looking at calendars, you can then start to think about, okay, how do I know what this candidate needs to experience in order to see us at our best and see this opportunity for what it could be and ultimately choose to become another offer accepted at the end?


Shannon Ogborn (03:49):

Yeah, I think it's interesting because I mean, in my opinion coordinators or what we traditionally know as recruiting coordinators have been pretty undervalued in the past and it's like, oh, they're just scheduling. I'm like, even if you were just scheduling, that is a huge experience for the candidates and for employees and it's so important. But I feel like maybe I'm getting to a hot take early, but I'm like the coordinator role is going to become more and more important. It's just going to evolve into what we're going to talk about today.


Dan Seifert (04:21):

A hundred percent. Because that scheduling, it's part of the hygiene of the hiring process. It's easy to not notice if it's all going smoothly. It's super obvious if it's not going smoothly. And so I think your best coordinators are some of your best overall ambassadors and ultimately assets because they end up making your company look great. They make it look like, Hey, this company has its stuff together. It treats people well. It respects their time. There's nothing that a candidate values more in a hiring process than speed and efficiency. I put in my work, I show up myself at your interview, let me know if I've got the job. And a core linchpin to that is how efficiently do we schedule? So that's incredibly important and I think what we can do is set up the future of this role so that coordinators can make sure that's still happening, but then also do a lot of other things that create enormous amounts of value for the company and for the candidate.


Shannon Ogborn (05:14):

A hundred percent and their careers too, which we're going to get to some of that as well.


Dan Seifert (05:18):

Absolutely.


Shannon Ogborn (05:19):

Let's frame this up a little bit of what work has shifted in the last couple of years where to where Marqeta is like, we should really rethink this. What has fundamentally changed?


Dan Seifert (05:31):

So I think the journey that we're on now really started, excuse me, at the end of last year as one of the things that we had first done when I joined last May was get the team kind of back to being business aligned recruiters. And what I mean by that is we had a recruiting team that for lots of understandable reasons, was a little bit more recal aligned and we're kind of picking up requisitions round robin. As the company got into a groove with hiring, we saw the opportunity to get recruiters back to being aligned to the product world, being aligned to the engineering world, to sales, to legal to finance, et cetera.


(06:07):

And as we did that with the recruiters, the next thing that made a whole lot of sense was also getting our coordinators business aligned. So we have a relatively lean team. So Marqeta is about 880 some odd FTEs. We do in the neighborhood of 200 to 250 hires a year.


Shannon Ogborn (06:23):

It's a lot.


Dan Seifert (06:24):

And we have a team of about 10 recruiters and two coordinators. So I think it's relatively efficient. And so with those two coordinators, we had one then aligned to product and engineering and the other one aligned to our G&A and GTM groups. And so they started to get to know those businesses, started to get to know the rhythm of hiring. We get to the end of the year and realized we have some really high performing folks in these roles, and so how do we unlock more of their potential while also kind of recognizing that AI is eventually going to make it push button receive schedule. And so what else could they do with the time that that will free up? And to me, the two really obvious things were how do we equip them to become really strong analysts of customer or candidate experience data and understand when we get these surveys, we get these NPS scores, get the comments, most importantly, what are they telling us we could do better? And then how do you start taking action on that? That's the journey that we've now been on for a few months that excited to dig into more.


Shannon Ogborn (07:24):

Yeah, I think the analysis part is interesting because a lot of people focus on the quantitative data, the numbers that you're receiving in what is our NPS score, but there's so much information and trends that you can derive from the more anecdotal feedback and it's kind of one-offs. So you're like, oh, that's interesting, they said that, or Oh, maybe I've seen that again. But then they're really doing the thing. And I feel like that's huge because people are sharing a lot about their feelings of hiring processes right now, and I think that's great because it gives us an opportunity to learn, grow and adapt, but these skills are just super important I think for the future of their career, but also the future of the organization. Then I guess my question is how do you hire someone for this type of role? What skill sets are you looking for? Because it's a little bit different honestly than the traditional worker bee that was our Cs of the past. Now we want the folks in these candidate experience roles to be more strategic and analysis driven, and that's a different skillset than I think that we were previously looking for.


Dan Seifert (08:41):

You're spot on, and I think in general, this I think should be the direction of travel for hiring for TA teams in general because I think we could do a whole other podcast about how the recruiter role is going to evolve in the world of AI. And I think the common theme for all of this is you as a TA professional are very unlikely, I think to be just wholesale replaced by a bot or an agent, but I do think it's critical that every one of us in TA gets really good at using AI to amplify our own impact.


(09:14):

And so what you need to do to find folks like that I think is find folks who of course have mastered their craft, whatever that is. So if it's a coordinator, someone who knows inside and out, all the nitty gritty details of how you actually make an interview process come to life and how you have that happen in a timely way, but then also who has a lot of curiosity about how could it be better and even more importantly, a lot of curiosity about, okay, we did this hiring journey for this candidate, how did that feel to them and how did they leave the process feeling whether they got the job or not, and what could we do to have the next candidate feel just a little bit better? And if you have someone who has that mindset, and of course the just raw intellectual horsepower to actually cut through the data, understand what story it's telling and then tell that story to others.


(10:00):

I think the other thing we're going to talk about in a little bit is coordinators can't do this alone. A big part of it is they're on the front lines of digesting the data, but then they need to serve up actionable insights to recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, people, business partners. So you also need someone that understands that at the end of the day, they're kind of the choreographer of a whole lot of activity and it's up to them to help point everyone in the right direction.


Shannon Ogborn (10:24):

Yes, choreographer, quarterback, whatever reference is needed, it's like they're the one leading the charge. I think it's awesome because I was a coordinator myself, but I've also worked with so many people in that role. I'm like, these folks are amazing, and they just are not able to exercise their full potential in the role as it exists today. So I'm super excited about what that means for the role because I mean it's the most important role I think.


Dan Seifert (10:56):

Absolutely. And just to start giving you some concrete examples, so when we came into the beginning of this year, sat down with our currently most tenured candidate experience coordinator, amazing woman named Sarah who shout out Sarah, she's fantastic. So started talking with her and to your point about career, one of the things we started aligning on was, hey, over time, where else might you want to go in the broad HR talent type world, and regardless of where you want to go, one of the critical skills is going to be data analytics and using data to drive action. And so we started looking at our current CX survey platform looking at the kind of data and comments that have provided us and started saying, okay, can we start on say a monthly basis pulling these data and sharing the reports of those with each individual recruiter? And so what we did was we got into a rhythm where she would first share them with me and our TA ops Lee Lucas. Also shout out, Lucas, he's been doing phenomenal work this week.


Shannon Ogborn (11:57):

He's the best.


Dan Seifert (11:58):

He's amazing.


Shannon Ogborn (11:58):

Love Lucas.


Dan Seifert (12:00):

And so Sarah started sharing those with me. And Lucas, what I would do is I'd usually get them on a Monday, I would get a chance to see the overall team themes. She would then share them with the recruiters on say a Tuesday, and then I could follow up with them in one-on-ones and say, look, here's where things are going really well and here's where we're seeing maybe some opportunities for some improvement, whether it's improvement by the recruiter themselves on updating candidates or whether it's, Hey recruiter, can you help advise your hiring managers to make more timely decisions so that we can get back to people faster? That sort of thing. And so we did that for a couple months and it went really well. And then because we've also I think done a good job of aligning the TA team with the HR team and went to our head of HR and just said, look, do you think there could be some value in starting to also socialize these data with the people business partners? The answer was yes, definitely.


(12:47):

So then started working with Sarah on how do we create a people business partner cut of these data where it's going to be a little bit less about what recruiters could do better and a little bit more about what we're seeing hiring managers or interviewers could do better. And so we started sharing those reports with them, and where that's led to is we now have this, I think, really cool cadence where once a month we have what we call CX week on the team where everyone knows you're going to get your CX report from your coordinator, you're going to step through it one-on-one with your manager. We're going to review it that week in the team meeting to just talk about overall themes.


(13:21):

And then once a quarter we do reviews with our people business partners where Sarah, who's now joined by her equally amazing colleague, Jen Jang, who is looking after our product and engineering groups, while Sarah looks after GTM and G&A, we get with the PPPs once a quarter, give them their overall themes and then ultimately share that back with the business so that monthly and quarterly, both the TA side of the house and the business side of the house are trying to get at least a little bit better at stewarding candidates.


Shannon Ogborn (13:46):

Yeah, what I love about that is that recruiters know what to expect and when to expect it, so it doesn't feel like feedback's coming out of left field. They know when they're going to get it, how they're going to action it, and it's part of just continuously providing that feedback to recruiters so it feels honestly more comfortable for their experience and hiring managers. If it's hard when you have an insight about how an experience is going and if it's severe, obviously you try to nip it in the bud right away,


(14:20):

But this allows hiring managers and execs to become even better at the process as well, which recruiting can't do this job alone. Recruiting is a team sport and it requires every single person down from the interviewers all the way up to the executives, everyone plays a role and if everyone's getting data on how their role is going and they expect that to come, they're going to be in that mindset to be like, okay, this is coming this time of the month, quarter, whatever, and now I'm prepared to ingest that information and do something with it.


Dan Seifert (14:55):

Absolutely. And I think it also helps to build that culture, that feedback really is meant to be helpful. It's not meant to be a finger pointing exercise. It's meant to be, Hey, here is a concrete opportunity where we can all do better. And so for example, even sometimes just giving folks coaching on how they show up in an interview, and we saw that in one part of our organization, candidates were sharing back that they just felt like the interview was a little bit more robotic than they were hoping for. They felt like maybe someone wasn't a hundred percent engaged. And so it actually became an opportunity to go to a few interviewers and say, Hey, if you're open to it, we'd love to give you some coaching on a part of your job that maybe you only do once or twice a month, but has this really big impact on how we're able to grow your team. The reception of that's been really positive because I think a lot of folks, especially in non TA roles, don't often get a lot of coaching on external.


Shannon Ogborn (15:50):

Totally.


Dan Seifert (15:50):

Sometimes folks aren't even really in external facing roles. If you're an engineer, you're someone in legal who's often in more of a behind the curtain type role, this may be a cool opportunity for you to get essentially what feels like either public speaking coaching or engagement coaching, and we can serve that up as an opportunity to help the business do better and help you ultimately get better colleagues.


Shannon Ogborn (16:11):

Totally. It's such a growth opportunity for everyone, and I think it creates a culture of care amongst all of the people because I think a lot of recruiters have worked at organizations, whether it's their current or former where it just feels like you can't get people to care enough about what's going on and what needs to be changed for it to go better. And I feel like when you set those expectations at the high level and everyone's super bought in, it's magical because everyone's getting what they need to perform better, and ultimately the thing that benefits the most is the business.


Dan Seifert (16:48):

A hundred percent. And I think the other thing too is I know we've obviously spent a lot of this time focusing on feedback that's growth oriented and how we can get even better. There's also so much value in the affirming feedback of what's already going really well.


Shannon Ogborn (17:01):

Hundred percent.


Dan Seifert (17:02):

And again, we're really fortunate we have a really strong team both on the recruiter and the CX side. We have really engaged hiring managers and interviewers. And so we were also able to now once a quarter put together a slide of who are our top interviewers, who are the folks that are contributing the most, who are delivering the best experiences, can shout those out. We can also show the TA team, Hey, look, this trend line overall is going up and to the right. Do we think it could get even closer to a hundred? Of course. But we want you to know we're on a really great journey and we're starting to see that that's having a material impact on our offer accept rate, where we're seeing it from the beginning of this year go from 80% to about 83% on a year to date basis. And obviously that's not enormous, but that makes a big difference and it means that we're ultimately getting more value out of our overall investment in recruiting because more of those candidate journeys are turning into successful hires.


Shannon Ogborn (17:55):

Keeping interviewers motivated is probably one of the most important things like a talent team can do because they are part of the backbone of the success of interviewing your hiring 200 people a year, which means you're interviewing X number times that. And that's a lot of interviews and that's a lot of interviewers that need to stay engaged and motivated, like you said.


Dan Seifert (18:22):

Exactly. I really do ultimately look at something like an offer accept rate as just an indicator of the health of the process overall, and are we ultimately showing up as the kind of company people are excited to join? And a huge part of that is how people feel treated during the process.


Shannon Ogborn (18:38):

Absolutely. The other thing that you had talked about, and we were talking about it a little bit, was in terms of upskilling and development of these experience coordinators introducing AI tools and LLMs to sort of process the open-text survey.


Dan Seifert (18:55):

Yes, absolutely.


Shannon Ogborn (18:56):

Tell me more about that because I think this is a really important point now that we have access to all these tools, how are we upskilling our teams in those areas to become efficient at not just looking at quantitative feedback but also qualitative feedback?


Dan Seifert (19:11):

Such a great question because I think especially for companies where you're maybe trying to do this at an even bigger scale than we're at a certain point, you can't just expect your coordinator team to go reading all these comments and actually come back with the most useful insights. And this again, I think is where AI is reshaping rather than replacing. And so the way that we've approached it is, okay, whether it's for the monthly recruiter updates or the quarterly business updates, coordinators gather all the comments and then run them through one of our in-house LLMs. Obviously shout out to candidate security and privacy, do not use external ChatGPT for things like this.


Shannon Ogborn (19:48):

Yes, please don't.


Dan Seifert (19:49):

So use whatever you're allowed to use in-house and then run that through and just say, can you tell me, say the top five positive themes and the top five constructive themes from the comments that I got this month or this quarter. And then each month and each quarter, I think the CX folks are getting sharper and sharper at their own prompt engineering and are asking better and better questions. But I think top five positive, top five constructive is a great place to start. And then you see where you go from there. And of course you as a human are still going to have to do a lot of the editing and revising and figure out which of those are the most useful and the most actionable. But I think for example, if some comments, for example, were just grumpy that they didn't get the job totally, they're always going to have some of those, and that's a perfectly valid feeling for under candidate. It's not necessarily always the most actionable for the recruiter or the hiring manager, but if you are seeing things like, Hey, I was told I would get an update this week, it took me a week longer, or, Hey, I was told that this process would take four weeks, it took two months. What's up with that? Those are things that we can then bring back and say, look, I think we might have an opportunity here either to tighten up our follow-up comms or to just realign with hiring managers on what they think their process reasonably should take in terms of time.


Shannon Ogborn (21:00):

Well, then you can start bucketing themes into themes as you start seeing a themes evolve, and then you can see what's going up and down thematically in positive or constructive, and you can turn that qualitative data into quantitative data and people can ingest it easier. So I think this is such an amazing skillset, and it sounds like you all have really developed this role that combines the human judgment with technology and you're sort of, I don't know if I love the word future proofing because I don't know if there is a true future proofing, but I do think that you all are creating agile professionals that this not only suits them for the role that they're currently in, but even if they went into a different role in talent or if they left talent entirely, this functionally is an incredible skillset for them. And I think everyone likes to feel seen by their company enough for them to care to grow their career.


Dan Seifert (22:01):

Oh, absolutely. And I think what this again ultimately does is hopefully positions our amazing CX folks, to your point, to rise and thrive in the people function if that's where they want to be. I think whether you're, because so much of this comes back to is sentiment analysis, and so whatever stakeholder your group you're talking about, whether it's in this case candidates or maybe you move at some point into a role like learning and development and you're trying to understand current employee sentiment about the learning opportunities they're getting, or you eventually move into an HR business partner role yourself and you're trying to understand workforce engagement better knowing how to use AI and all of that. And then more importantly, knowing how to use AI to equip you to be the influential storyteller that then gets people to change their behavior.


(22:48):

I think to your point, the AI is helpful in making this workflow possible. You wouldn't be able to analyze all these comments every month without AI, but then the key is with all the time folks are saving with AI, use that time to put together a really tight three to five slide deck that has one or two really crisp action items that you want the team to walk away with that month and then be able to share those in a way that has them excited to do it. So if it's like, Hey, this month we just need to focus on every single week, send out those updates. Even if there are no update updates, here's some tips and tricks on how to do it, and then following up the next month. I think what's also been really powerful about having a monthly cadence is then Sarah and Jen are able to come to our team and say, Hey, y'all, great work. Last month our NPS score was this. Now it's five points higher, and we're actually seeing in the comments I felt like I was getting timely updates. So you then create those positive loops that then helped give you the momentum you need to get them to do the next thing better.


Shannon Ogborn (23:50):

A hundred percent. And you've teased some of the results. One is which Canada NPS is trending upward, which is great, and the other is that offer acceptance rate has approved from around 80 to around 83%. And I know that it doesn't probably scream that's a huge change, but it actually is a huge change because you're getting this incremental growth that, and you're setting things into place that will only continue to increase that up. Are there any other results that you're like, I just, I'm super proud of this and the team and I got to get it out there?


Dan Seifert (24:24):

Yeah, I mean, I think the accept rate is the ultimate one because again, that is resulting in the team itself performing more efficiently, but also being seen as even more valuable by the business. But I think what this has continued to help us do is just build the credibility that this team can go after any given target that our business partners give us and nail it. I think other things to me that I'm excited about are not, time to hire is not the most important metric by any means. Quality of hire is so much more important and that's worthy of a whole other conversation, but seeing the fact that we're getting more efficient at being able to fill more roles swiftly with great talent is I think part of this as well because we're giving candidates a great experience, getting them to a decision point more quickly. Seeing our net promoter scores starting to move up from the eights into the low nines and a lot of parts of the business is really exciting. But again, I think when I look under the hood of that accept rate, what I'm really excited about is that if you break it down by tech versus business, I think in the industry around 73% for tech is fairly standard, and our accept rate for tech is around 80%. And then if you look across the tech industry for business roles, the typical benchmark is in the high seventies to around 80%, and we're sitting at around 86% for our business facing roles.


(25:44):

And so it's exciting to see that it's also broad-based success across the business and that the benchmark for each type of role is something that we're also starting to exceed pretty consistently. And that's what I keep feeding back to the team is that this is working both to the CX folks, like great job. You are in fact guiding us in a new direction. You're adding a whole other kind of value to the business that is going to be, in some ways even more important than nailing the scheduling fundamentals that you've already gotten so good at. And then from there to the recruiters, it's like, how do we keep learning from this so that we keep delivering an experience that has folks really excited to join us?


Shannon Ogborn (26:21):

Absolutely. I love all of these results and just like a big congrats to your team. I also love that you hyped your team up so much. I think it's really important for leaders, talent leaders especially to do that in this time. Now we're going to get to our final three questions. I always am excited about these. If you are a former listener or you've been listening for a while, these used to be embedded in Spotify and Apple. We've now moved these to our extended version on YouTube, so check them out there, follow us on LinkedIn. We'll also post them there, but we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work and your team's work?


Dan Seifert (27:06):

I think LinkedIn is the easiest. I'm just Dan Siefert. If you search Dan Siefert at Marqeta, I'll pop right up. Always happy to connect with folks.


Shannon Ogborn (27:13):

Amazing. Well, Dan, I cannot thank you enough for joining us today, especially in this very freaking cool studio in Boston.


Dan Seifert (27:20):

Super cool. This is incredibly professional.


Shannon Ogborn (27:22):

Super cool. And I think that this will get teams thinking a lot more about what the future of their team looks like and how they can take some of these learnings and apply them to their team. So thank you so much for joining us.


Dan Seifert (27:36):

It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.


Shannon Ogborn (27:39):

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.