Measuring Recruiter Feedback to Drive Process Improvement with Will Ducey, Ashby

Recruiting teams often track hiring metrics but forget to ask the team how it feels to do the work.

Will Ducey, Head of Recruiting Operations at Ashby, joins Shannon Ogborn to talk about how internal recruiter surveys create a feedback loop that leads to better tools and processes. Throughout the conversation, Will explains the balance between quantitative and qualitative feedback, sharing real-world examples from Ashby on how they’ve implemented surveys to gauge recruiter satisfaction.

He also addresses how small wins, like reducing administrative burdens, can have a huge impact on overall efficiency. Whether you’re a recruiting leader looking to implement your first survey or aiming to refine your current process, this episode offers valuable insights into how recruiters can lead to actionable change and, ultimately, create a more effective and happy recruiting team.

Key takeaways:

• Survey consistency builds trust: Quarterly cadence shows that feedback leads to real change
• Small wins compound: Simple fixes often reduce friction the fastest
• Sentiment data guides priorities: Low survey scores highlight where RecOps should focus next
• Collaboration is a solution: Engaging team members in fixing the pain points creates better outcomes

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:43) Meet Will Ducey

(02:18) Why traditional metrics don’t reflect recruiter experience

(03:13) What makes recruiter surveys so valuable in RecOps

(04:14) How Ashby runs quarterly recruiter surveys

(06:32) Structuring the survey for actionable feedback

(08:44) Understanding time-use with a 1–4 scale

(10:37) Why acting on survey data matters more than collecting it

(11:59) How Will identifies small process wins

(13:22) Organizing teams for long-term improvements

(14:15) Building trust and consistency through surveys

(16:26) The NPS score that led to a full ATS transformation

(19:10) Comparing tools using internal data

(20:07) Helping recruiters become more confident with data

(21:19) Why alerts are Will’s favorite Ashby feature

(23:57) Where to connect with Will

Transcript

Will Ducey (00:00):
You don't know what you don't know until you ask. So I strongly recommend that you bring in the surveys. And that just gives you also an opportunity to look at the data objectively and bring that back to the team so things can only get better. And I think having that over time enables the recruiting operations person to work with the talent leaders to make sure that the right tooling, infrastructure and processes are in place to have a happy recruiting team.

Shannon Ogborn (00:26):
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 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.

(01:03):
Speaking of Ashby, we are here today with Will Ducey, who is the head of recruiting operations here at Ashby. With nearly a decade of experience helping remote first companies hire smarter and scale sustainably, Will is a really firm believer in first principle thinking. He's passionate about challenging assumptions and building systems that really empower teams.

(01:22):
After years of leading global recruiting efforts, Will transitioned into recruiting operations where he blends this strategic mindset with a focus on operational efficiency, and he's driven by the belief that great teams can come from anywhere. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.

Will Ducey (01:37):
Thank you for having me, Shannon.

Shannon Ogborn (01:39):
We are going to get into some of the fun results later on what surveying recruiters can really do for improving processes. But I want to start at the beginning. A lot of recruiters have a lot of feedback about their processes, but a lot of times there's nowhere for that feedback to go. Talk to me a little bit about, just in the first place, why should talent teams consider surveying their recruiters? Why should rec ops consider surveying their recruiters when it comes to recruiting processes?

Will Ducey (02:18):
Yeah. Survey, I think, neutralizes the playing field first off. You're not hearing the person who is yelling the loudest and taking their feedback as the truth. So making it more objective, giving everybody a voice. I've experimented even with anonymous surveys so that people aren't afraid to say what they really think. There's a ton of things you can do with surveys.

Shannon Ogborn (02:38):
And I think one thing that we had talked about before is that traditional recruiting metrics, time to fill, time to hire, that doesn't necessarily reflect how recruiters are actually experiencing the process as they're doing it. Your time to fill could be incredible, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a bumpy road to get there. You have been one of the first rec ops hires, if not the first rec ops hire at several different companies. Why is this really important from the rec ops lens of surveying recruiters?

Will Ducey (03:13):
Generally, when you are the first rec ops person and you are not one of the first people within the team, you are going to have some what I call hiring debt. You're starting from minus one. And you need to quickly establish some frameworks to get to zero so that you can have more fun and start to iterate and improve, and then those results compound over time. Surveys allow you to get qualitative feedback, quantitative feedback. You can dive into specific areas that you want to know. So when you're designing a survey, you want to understand what is the sourcing process like? How is your interaction with hiring managers? What is the candidate experience like from your perspective? So diving into specifics, getting qualitative and quantitative feedback is extremely important.

Shannon Ogborn (03:51):
And my understanding is that you have implemented this process of starting recruiter surveys in multiple places, which is awesome. When it comes to the implementation of that, can you talk to me a little bit about, at Ashby, when you started this, what was actually implemented?

Will Ducey (04:14):
So we look at establishing a quarterly survey for the recruiters and sourcers within the team, and we want to specifically understand their pain points. And so we have an NPS style question, and then we have a numerical question scale. We have opportunities for them to submit feedback as well on the qualitative side. But from there, we identify projects and initiatives, and then we work on those improvements throughout the quarter, and then we share those results and send the next one.

Shannon Ogborn (04:40):
That's the name of continuous improvement. Now getting into the how, I think there's probably a lot of teams that want to do this, but they're not a hundred percent sure where to get started. So just want to walk through a little bit of, if you are executing a productive talent team survey, tell me a little bit about the cadence and that structure. Yeah,

Will Ducey (05:06):
The cadence, you don't want to send it every month. There's likely not going to be enough improvement areas in a month's time to do that. So I pick a quarterly, it's four times a year. You reduce the survey fatigue from everything else that's being surveyed within the organization. And then the cadence allows us to ship meaningful improvements and then to remind them. I think it's important that you look back and that you say, "Hey, this is how things used to be. Remind them of what you shipped in the three months and then send that survey again." And then that shows them that the feedback is enacted on as well.

Shannon Ogborn (05:33):
A hundred percent because one of my toxic traits is I have a horrible memory. So if someone asked me when something was implemented, it could have been six months ago, but I thought it was last week. It could have been a year ago, but I thought it was two years ago. It's so hard to keep track of those things. So I think the prompting, I think you told me before the survey actually really helps them understand what was changed in that timeframe.

Will Ducey (06:01):
It's always good to remember what things used to look like, how bad they were, and everything becomes a new status quo for us and it's important to look back and celebrate the wins along the way.

Shannon Ogborn (06:13):
Yeah. Heavy emphasis on celebrate the wins for sure. In terms of the survey questions and the focus, just kind of getting more granularly into what types of questions you added and why you added them, can you walk me through those and why they're important to have in there?

Will Ducey (06:31):
Just as we want to know the hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction. As a recruiting operations person, I want to understand the recruiter and sourcer satisfaction. Are they happy with our processes? Do they hate it? Will they tell other teams about it? If not, then we can improve things. So we definitely use the NPS style question. We ask specific questions about our process. So we look at our end-to-end process all the way from role intake and kickoff to managing candidates to the offer closing process. Every organization is different where they invest time, they might have hiring managers more involved. And so giving that holistic view to the recruiters and asking them for specifics within each stage of the process enables us to find where they're spending way too much time, where they're not spending enough time, where they're being effective and successful, and then how we can ultimately change things for the better for them.

Shannon Ogborn (07:20):
What I love about that too is that not only do you get good information from the survey, but I know this sounds silly, but the rec ops team and the talent team have to know exactly what they own in order to survey the right things. I think people actually lose track of how many activities talent teams are doing, and this is a good way to take evaluation of that as well before you're even getting the responses. Very

Will Ducey (07:47):
Much so. Ashby's very unique in that we have hiring managers delivering offers to candidates. And so when I survey their recruiting team, it's consistent that they don't spend too much time and they don't spend not enough time. It's perfect for them, and we should really understand from a hiring manager perspective where their pain points are so we can make improvements for them.

Shannon Ogborn (08:05):
Yeah. And I think that's also why it's not an easy copy paste. I think someone couldn't necessarily copy and paste another organization's recruiter survey and put it into theirs because every company owns different things.

Will Ducey (08:17):
Yes, very much so. Sometimes there is some standards in the industry that may or may not be best for the industry. So I love when people rethink about their surveys and actually redesign a process that works for everybody.

Shannon Ogborn (08:28):
100%. I am curious to hear more about the quantitative side and the scales used. So it's a one to four scale. What are we targeting and how are we designing this scale?

Will Ducey (08:42):
So there's a one to four rating. One means they are spending way too much time, two is too much time, three is just the right amount of time, and four is not enough. And so the formula I have within this sheet aggregates everything to a three as just the right amount of time. And so anything that is less than a three, I think as an aggregate, the team is spending a little bit too much time on it and anything that's above a three, we know that they're not spending enough time. And so I look at the lowest scores, which is generally somewhere in the two range, and then the highest score is 3.3 and above. And then I think about, okay, how do we give them more time back? How can we improve this as a process? And that generally gives me four or five areas.

(09:22):
Right now in the industry, we know that applicant volume is huge. So most people are complaining about application review, maybe too much time on talent screens, and then maybe not enough time on the market mapping that's consistent from what I've seen in the surveys at a few different companies now.

Shannon Ogborn (09:37):
For sure. And it gives you those things to act on. I guess one thing to emphasize that I feel like is really important is don't survey people if you're not going to actually do something about it, which I know sounds so simple, but I've worked at tons of organizations in the past where they did all these surveys. It's like, we want to hear your feedback. Here's the feedback. And then it's like, okay, what did we do with the feedback? We just sat on it. It's like, yeah, we know it, but we're not doing anything with it.

Will Ducey (10:07):
Yes. I think it's fun even just compiling the results. I brought this to the recruiting team because we had our Q4 survey and it was in the last week or two that we reviewed those results. And if nothing else, it leads to a discussion where what is broken? How do we fix this? And it enables people who are not struggling in that area to maybe become a mentor to the other team members to say, "I'm great at this. How can I help you? " Or whatever that might look like. So even having a discussion is better than just taking feedback and nobody ever sees it and it's a black box.

Shannon Ogborn (10:36):
Yeah. The mentorship piece is actually a really interesting outcome here and I think great because you're not just relying on you as the solo rec ops person or even a rec ops team to solve all the problem areas. You are actually leaning on the experts from the team who may be excelling in those areas to coach others. And that's actually a really good use of the feedback that I didn't think of.

Will Ducey (11:03):
I always love when questions for me don't come into my DMs, but they actually go into our HelpRackOps channel because then I don't need to solve it or maybe somebody has a better solution than I would've proposed in a direct message. So I think the more you can get the team comfortable sharing their challenges and problems with the larger audience, the better solutions we're going to have. I'm going to learn something, the team's going to learn something, and then maybe we even build better features because of it.

Shannon Ogborn (11:28):
Definitely. That's actually one of the biggest pros. I think our product team probably gets a lot of feedback from our own internal team on how teams are using the product, which is amazing. But in terms of how feedback is acted on, tell me a little bit more about what you are paying the most close attention to and also how you're reviewing the qualitative feedback, because that's just obviously another layer to the system.

Will Ducey (11:58):
So the recruiting process NPS score just gives me a general sentiment. Are we getting better? I'm hoping that is actually moving from wherever it started to better on the NPS. If it's getting worse, then we might really need to have some focused attention more than we already do. The qualitative feedback, I generally put that all into a document. I open it up to the team and I will start commenting and asking questions, "What do you mean by this? Or is this a quick solve? Would this help?" And there's some just general quick wins. One example, we have a offer deck that goes out to marketing candidates and it's nice and nifty and there's places in that 14 slide deck that need to be updated with the name and the compensation or whatever. And it was just so simple just to put a bracket in there and say, "Do a command F, find that bracket, and that will tell you everywhere where you need to change it.

(12:43):
" So that's a simple win that is no longer an administrative burden on the recruiting team when they need to send this. It's just, this is where you need to adjust it. So simple wins, finding those, and then just compounding and keep building on the more bigger long-term initiatives.

Shannon Ogborn (12:57):
Yeah, it's not always about creating these wildly big programs around these things. There's so much low-hanging fruit where teams might previously feel it's, I love the phrase, even though it's morbid death by paper cuts, but you're feeling death by paper cuts. And if you can just have a few less of those quarter over quarter, it adds up to huge incremental gains.

Will Ducey (13:21):
Absolutely. Yeah. And we can't forget about the longer initiatives. And I think it's important to enlist the help of the people who are deeply passionate about those subjects and get tiger teams together. So maybe it's a sourcing initiative. It doesn't have to be just the sourcers. Maybe there's some recruiters that are passionate about it that can bring a fresh perspective. And so on those bigger initiatives, make sure that you're assembling a team, that you're getting a project plan in place and you are delivering on those. So there are small wins, quick wins, and then obviously longer term things you can iterate and improve on.

Shannon Ogborn (13:51):
100%. One of the things that we talked the most about previously was how much doing these surveys, if you do them not only with the right intent, but with the right action after, how that really drives consistency and trust, how have you seen that grow and change when you've brought this process into a talent team?

Will Ducey (14:14):
Yes. So you can start surveys anonymously and then anybody can send anything they want. Hopefully you've established a team culture where you can have it non-anonymous so that people can share feedback honestly. This is not used for retribution. You want people to speak their truth. You don't want them to inflate the NPS score or anything else or tell us things that are going well that are not. So I think it's important that people have a consistent trust process with us as the surveyors and that they have open access to the results as well. Things are going to constantly change. They're going to ebb and flow within the recruiting lifecycle. There might be a huge change in the economy, and then we see a spike in application. So application review might've been going well and now we're seeing that it's not. So then you can look at your tools, process whatever you can.

(14:57):
So don't expect every result to get better over time. They're going to ebb and flow, and I think it's important to realize that. And another thing you can do on the entire landscape of it, I love to take an average of it and see if that's changing much over time. So if their average is three, that's a generally a good sign.

Shannon Ogborn (15:14):
Well, I also think this is a testament to, and I think this will resonate with a lot of Brett Ops people. Just because a metric has changed doesn't mean you know why it has changed. You have to make a lot of intentional effort to dig into the results and understand what is different, why is it different? The raw data's not going to tell that to you. It's like you're saying the perfect example about the general economic changes, applications might spike which could cause friction. Is the friction because something we're doing or is the friction because something that's out of our control and what is in our control to make the change is it's not, you can't just always look at the data and be like, let's jump to a solution because you don't know what the underlying problem is without digging into it further.

Will Ducey (15:59):
Yes. It's also funny when you add new team members and their perception. So you could add five team members to your team and the survey results change dramatically, but they don't realize the existing of what it was three months ago. And so you can segment out by tenure at the company as well, but there's a lot of things that influence data and it's important not to say, this is the specific reason, but to be open and get the team's feedback on how to make it better.

Shannon Ogborn (16:24):
Totally. There's a lot of small wins examples that I know have come from this, but there's also one big example that you had at a previous company about how much an NPS changed over time. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the survey said, what you did to change that and what the end result was?

Will Ducey (16:46):
Yes, of course. This is the reason this survey exists in its current form. We were about to move our applicant tracking system and do a huge transformation. And so we wanted to understand how is the team feeling about this today? Because we just put our careers on the line saying, "We need this product and tool and we want to make sure that we're getting better and the recruiter's lives are improving." So we had this survey, it was completely anonymous. Our NPS score started as a 33, which is in the good category, not great, but good. And so we said, "Whoa, we got a lot of work to do. There's a lot of things ahead of us to get into the excellent category. We think we can do it. Oh, and by the way, we're going to accelerate hiring so massively and double the size of the recruiting team while doing the ATS transformation." Fast forward nine months, kept serving the team on that quarterly cadence with the people who took that initial survey that were at a 33, nine months later, our NPS score for them was in 82.

(17:38):
With all the new team members, we were at a 77. So we moved to Ashby ATS and greatly accelerated our recruiter's love for our processes, our tooling, and how we were hiring.

Shannon Ogborn (17:51):
And I think that speaks to some of the underlying stuff too that we were just talking about. There are things that are tool related, there are things that are not tool related, there's best practice, and then there's a tool that can be a catalyst to best practice. If you have terrible best practice, a tool will save you from nothing. But I think a lot of people are experiencing that death by paper cut situation in some of their tools where they're just not quite getting what they need. And that's when you look into the underlying data and say, "Okay, maybe it is the tool that actually needs a change, not necessarily the process itself."

Will Ducey (18:28):
In these surveys and in the experience, you are going to look at your tools, you might want to run out there, you might look for various point solutions. One of the things that we had done previously is we were looking at the volume of applications and we thought, how can we properly prioritize the people we should be speaking to? And so we went out and looked at a tool that helped us with the application interview. And then ultimately we were able to do a side-by-side comparison when Ashby rolled out their AI application review and we found that the Ashby results were much better than the other tool. So we didn't get into a long-term contract without better tool. We gave them feedback, we left them better, but ultimately we were able to bring everything back to within Ashby and that gave us the results we were looking for.

Shannon Ogborn (19:08):
Amazing. Love, love the AI application review. In terms of some of the changes you've seen internally at ASHB, tell me about that.

Will Ducey (19:18):
So I would say in general, most recruiters and sourcers, data is not always their strongest suit. So asking them at Ashby specifically to bring data to leaders who know our tool so well is a stress point for recruiters. And so we're trying to build reports and dashboards that have the filters and everything that they need so that they can go to our leaders internally and say, "Here's our data. What are you seeing? How can we make this better?" And our comfort within the team around data analysis and everything has gone from a 3.6 where they weren't spending enough time on it, closer to a three. I think it's at the 3.1 right now. So our internal teams are now more comfortable, more familiar with data, how to bring those into the conversation, and they know they do not have to be the expert. They can still work with their department leads and ask what's working for them and what we can improve.

Shannon Ogborn (20:05):
I love that because I think it's really important to remember that no one person can be an expert at everything. A lot of people can be an expert at anything, but not at everything at the same time. And I think the folks who love the selling, the closing, just building the candidate rapport, that's where they like to spend a lot of their time. And they might not be as into creating dashboards and building reports as some of the folks on rec ops are. There's a lot of recruiters who love data as well. So it's that enablement piece of getting people what they need and being able to meet people where they are so they can be more successful in the system that you have set up.

Will Ducey (20:48):
Yeah, 100%. And one of my favorite features within Ashby, not specifically related to data, but is our alert system. I don't want the recruiters trying to remember every single thing that we've agreed to and all of it. So if they're out of an SLA, send them an alert, have them action it. You don't have to shame them in a channel. They know and they'll learn over time. And then we've created this beautiful operations dashboard for them so that they can go in there and check the status of everything that they need to action and have confidence that they're not forgetting anything.

Shannon Ogborn (21:17):
Totally. As a forgetful person, alerts are very helpful for me. Before we wrap up and move to our last couple of questions, is there anything you wanted to add for surveying recruiters, whether that be results or just kind of encouraging people to do this?

Will Ducey (21:38):
You don't know what you don't know until you ask. So I strongly recommend that you bring in the surveys, and that just gives you also an opportunity to look at the data objectively and bring that back to the team. I've heard specific examples within our industry where the recruiters love this tool. They can't live without this tool. But if you survey the team on that tool, they might have a negative NPS on that tool. And so things can only get better. And I think having that over time enables the recruiting operations person to work with the talent leaders to make sure that the right tooling, infrastructure and processes are in place to have a happy recruiting team. Because if you don't have a happy recruiting team, you're not going to have happy candidates, you're not going to have happy hiring managers, and ultimately that's a pain point and friction you don't want to deal with.

Shannon Ogborn (22:24):
Period. Keep them motivated, keep them happy, keep them heard. I think a lot of talent teams or talent people have felt left behind in the past, especially when it comes to things like tooling or efficiencies and people just want to be heard. They want to know that you've understood them, that you get them, that you care what they think, and that you're not just placing a process or a tool or a system in front of them before asking what their thoughts are.

Will Ducey (22:55):
Absolutely. And when somebody says they have a problem, if you go design the problem without engaging with them, they're already going to feel a little bit slighted. So maybe that's another best practice. If somebody's complaining about something, bring them into the question. They might not be the expert and they might say, "You know what? I don't have enough interest. I just know this is a problem for me, " and they might bow out. But give them that opportunity, bring them into the team, create small teams, focus on those initiatives, and you're going to have happy people just because you heard them and they know that you heard them.

Shannon Ogborn (23:23):
100%. Well, we are going to get to our last couple of questions here. These are now on our extended version on YouTube. So if you want to hear more about what hiring excellence means to Will, what his recruiting hot take is, and one thing he would tell his early career self, please head to YouTube. Well, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Will Ducey (23:48):
LinkedIn's a good place. And I also have a website, willducey.xyz. I publish articles infrequently, but they are definitely intended to make sure that you're thinking you'll not find most of those posts on LinkedIn. And always reach out to me. I'm happy to connect and learn more about you as well.

Shannon Ogborn (24:05):
Exclusive content. Well, Will, thank you so much for joining us on Offer Accepted. I think genuinely that every single talent team should be surveying their recruiting teams, their recruiters, their sourcers, and other folks who are involved in hiring. So I think this is going to be really helpful to people who are trying to move in that direction. So thank you.

Will Ducey (24:28):
Thank you so much for having me and letting me be a part of this.

Shannon Ogborn (24:33):
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.