Converting People Ops Insights into Talent Strategy with Asha Beirne, Rula

Talent and people teams have more shared work than most companies realize.

Asha Beirne, Senior Manager of People Operations and Systems at Rula, joins Shannon to discuss how recruiting and people ops can work together across the employee lifecycle. Drawing from her move from recruiting operations into people operations, Asha shares what talent teams often miss when they do not have visibility into turnover data, engagement scores, onboarding feedback, and workforce trends.

Asha explains how Rula built stronger feedback loops through biweekly meetings, shared data reviews, and clearer guardrails around sensitive information. She also shares how her team improved onboarding communications, raised new hire survey scores, and began using AI to reduce manual work while creating more consistent employee experiences.

Key takeaways:

1. Data improves alignment: People ops insights can help recruiting teams forecast capacity, understand attrition patterns, and support stronger hiring decisions.
2. Guardrails build trust: Aggregate data, clear confidentiality norms, and thoughtful sharing help teams learn without overcorrecting.
3. Onboarding needs continuity: A better handoff from offer acceptance to start date can improve the new hire experience quickly.
4. Relationships come first: Regular conversations between talent and people teams create space to solve issues before they become bigger problems.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:43) Meet Asha Beirne

(01:44) Why People and Talent teams need stronger partnerships

(03:00) The People Ops data recruiters should advocate for

(05:29) Using early turnover to improve hiring conversations

(06:37) Forecasting attrition with a fuller People Ops picture

(08:39) Closing the gap between offer acceptance and onboarding

(10:12) Creating a regular operating rhythm between Talent and People Ops

(12:34) Using AI to reduce workload and create space for partnership

(15:33) Balancing compliance, speed, and candidate experience

(17:00) Connecting performance data to quality of hire

(20:41) Where to connect with Asha

Transcript

Asha Beirne (00:00):
Recruiting teams are so good at building relationships and you do it with hiring managers and stakeholders and your candidates and so you will be very good at it. You just have to extend it to the people ops too.

Shannon Ogborn (00:15):
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 Opera Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you of course by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I cannot be more excited to be here today with Asha Beirne. We have known each other for a bit of time. She is currently the senior manager of People Operations and Systems at Rula, where her team owns the operational side of the people function, systems, data and compliance across the full employee life cycle.

(01:08):
What makes her perspective so interesting in how we first met is that she spent the bulk of her career in recruiting operations before making the move to the people side and that transition started as a stretch project into leading an HRIS implementation that just had her never looking back. Before her time in People and Talent, she had a stint in the Peace Corps in sustainable agriculture and she will tell you that her project management and influence and sales built then have followed her ever since. Today she really sits at the intersection of People and Talent, which is a lot of what we've been talking about today. So really excited to have you here.

Asha Beirne (01:43):
Thanks, Shannon. Hi

Shannon Ogborn (01:44):
Everyone. Well, before we get into some of the what's and how of Rula has been operating, even just talking to some of the folks in the room and at the conference today, there is a relationship strain for a lot of people between talent and people teams. Tell me a little bit about why People and Talent teams should be coordinating, collaborating, and partnering more.

Asha Beirne (02:10):
Yeah, I think collectively we all want to make sure that we have amazing talent at the company. The talent team is finding and bringing in that talent. And then I know all talent folks want to see that follow through. The excellence in the employee journey, they want to see the promises that they're making in the recruiting process be delivered when the candidates become employees and go through the rest of the life cycle of being an employee. And it helps build credibility and not to mention the fact that onboarding and hiring are really expensive. And so we want to do it right to do right by the business. So lots of reasons to partner really closely.

Shannon Ogborn (02:52):
I think the one thing that we've talked so much about is there's this real feedback loop that is missing in between when it comes to data and insights, especially in your experience making those moves from RecOps to people, how has that resonated? What data and information does a people ops team have that RecOps team might want to advocate for?

Asha Beirne (03:16):
Yeah. When I was in RecOps, there were a few areas of data and information that I was advocating for. And then when I moved over to the people ops side, I learned that there's actually so much more data that I shouldn't have had access to. And so I'd love to share with the audience today what some of that is because it's so important for us to all advocate for what we need. And coming over to the people side, I realized, oh, there's some things I didn't know that I didn't know and I would've advocated for it differently. So some of those things are diversity data to help set recruiting diversity goals, understand what's possible for diverse interview slates, things like that, turnover data. We put together a turnover metric for employees with less than one year of tenure to better understand not that we had a problem, but to understand where those types of things are happening and why.

(04:12):
And so there's that feedback to improve the hiring process. Let's see engagement survey scores. It really helps with selling so that talent teams can sell really credibly what areas or teams have strong scores, what they're good at, and use that to storytell better with their candidates.

Shannon Ogborn (04:32):
Yeah. And I know that these things, it doesn't necessarily mean these data points are areas of pain. It means they're areas of opportunity. So even if you're incredibly good at retention, could we do even better? So it's not like, "Oh, we're below industry standard. We need to get this up." It's like, what opportunities can we continuously look to and connect on so that we have that? And one of the things that you did mention is insights on turnover and some of the things that you've done there. I know that it has been an interesting time for turnover for a lot of companies, whether that be because of layoffs or there are folks that are moving on to new opportunities just because they are looking for different growth. When you think about how this resonated at Rula, tell me a little bit more about how you all were thinking about it.

Asha Beirne (05:29):
Yeah. So before I came into the role, we were thinking about turnover as a whole. So what is our turnover rate quarter over quarter by department or some of those kind of traditional cuts that you see? And I introduced a turnover metric specifically for employees with less than one year of tenure. And this metric is specifically for us to talk with the recruiting team about and help them understand, help both of us really kind of that collective accountability on, okay, where are there opportunities to improve here? Are there patterns with teams or hiring managers or is there not? Is it just a one-off because people are people and that means they can be unpredictable and is there nothing to correct for? So by paying attention to this information, we can then translate it into the kind of pocket of opportunity.

Shannon Ogborn (06:19):
For sure. And you had mentioned previously something about recruiting is constantly talking about forecasting and how that played a big role into thinking about the turnover metric and what recruiting would need to know or do in relation to that.

Asha Beirne (06:37):
Yes, exactly. So us providing turnover data allows us to forecast better on what hiring we need to do. But I will also say that coming into the people upside, I have tried to pull more of that recruiting style mindset and skillset of being really good at forecasting and putting that into the people side. So how can we think about, okay, what is our expected attrition? So not just a lookback but also forward looking and that can help us in various org planning ways. It can help with recruiter capacity planning, things like that. When I was in RecOps, I was the one making guesses on what our forecasted attrition would be and that forecast is so much better when you have a more complete picture from the people ops team.

Shannon Ogborn (07:29):
What information were you helping the talent team to understand in terms of reasons of exits? Because I'd imagine it can potentially get a little bit dicey between information you can give, what you can't give. How do we give the talent team the information that they need, but not so much information that we are out of compliance or we are sharing information that is private to the person who exited?

Asha Beirne (08:00):
Yeah. High level information is really kind of where we stay and that is an improvement from where we were before where it was completely locked down. And so I think also making sure the whole entire people department understands the confidentiality that comes with some of this data. I mean, some of the other things I mentioned earlier, like the diversity data, which would share in an anonymized way and then things like engagement survey scores also anonymized these are things that are sensitive. And so it's about using it, seeing it in the right aggregate forms and then being thoughtful about how you apply it.

Shannon Ogborn (08:39):
I also feel like there's this very big gray area and gap between the offer acceptance and start date where there's just a lot of information missing, things fall through the cracks. Has that played a role at all for you all?

Asha Beirne (08:56):
Yeah. When I came over to the people ops side, I learned that the talent team has a really great voice in their recruiting templates and the way recruiters talk to candidates and sell the company. And then they would move over to onboarding and the email columns were less exciting, a little drier and we weren't prepping our new hires for the onboarding experience the same way our recruiters are so good at prepping new hires for the recruiting experience. And so what I did was took that voice and took that preparation mindset and put it into our onboarding comms. We actually found that we got a one point increase in our new hire survey scores out of a 10 point scale before versus after. So that was pretty impactful.

Shannon Ogborn (09:48):
Getting deeper into the how, because I think what is helpful for people to understand is like, okay, I agree, right? There's these gray areas, there's these gaps, we need to create a better relationship between our talent team and our people team. How was that actually done? What was the first thought of starting with data availability and things like that?

Asha Beirne (10:12):
I think it starts with the relationship building with Talent Ops. So we started meeting biweekly, we went from not really talking or communicating, just kind of ad hoc for little emergencies here and there or things that would come up and instead made it a more of a regular cadence and that allowed us to surface issues before they became issues and things that we could kind of smooth over, find a better process for, and just kind of talking on that regular cadence. And I think it's both sides learning more about the other function and then also learning where there's overlap and opportunity to partner better.

Shannon Ogborn (10:47):
Yeah. When it comes to the cadence in which you were sharing information, what did you land on there? So you're meeting biweekly with the team, but then you were also sharing this turnover information on a semi-regular basis. How did that look and how did you come to that?

Asha Beirne (11:04):
Yeah. So we share out people and headcount people analysis with our company leaders on a regular cadence. And so we also use that as an opportunity to share internally as well among the people teams. So every six months is the cadence that we came upon. I think that was right where things have actually happened in that period of time versus if you're going too frequently and there's just not really information to surface. And then we look at turnover for forecasting, like overall turnover so we can do better on our recruiter capacity planning on a quarterly basis, but looking out fixed plus months ahead.

Shannon Ogborn (11:42):
I feel like that is so important to have these feedback loops because without it, talent could be stretched super thin and just knowing when to gear up I feel like is huge. And a lot of companies don't have that right now. They have a strained relationship or the company has gotten so wane that they don't actually have the time to get the data and then do the retros and then share the information out. And so it can be definitely really, really hard to do that. And I know you mentioned a little bit about this before, but I do think it's important to double down on the guardrails and not over-correcting because well, one, obviously you want to keep morale good between the two teams, but also like people are people, there might not be situations sometimes there isn't really a clear answer or it's not a trend.

Asha Beirne (12:34):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think you mentioned the strained relationships or the strain and just everybody being stretched really thin, which is like a reality everywhere, right? Aren't we all so busy? And I think I've been trying to think about some of the ways AI is like reducing the burden on my workload and making me more efficient and then thinking about, okay, how can I repurpose that time to think about breaking down some silos that happen when I'm really heads down and partnering more with the talent team so we have better visibility on both sides how we can partner

Shannon Ogborn (13:14):
Speaking of AI, which I think that at least the way I'm seeing a lot of the AI things now is like AI can be a part of but not apart from, if we're always thinking about it separately to our work functions instead of integrated into, I think we start to overthink things, but I know that you all have used AI and that's had an impact on how you're doing these things. We'd be curious to hear how you feel like AI has impacted this work in particular.

Asha Beirne (13:45):
Yeah. Well, with regard to the feedback loops, I think the biggest win is we partnered to build a bot that answers employee questions on anything people related. And so that's anything recruiting related, anything HR related and we're seeing less questions come into our inbox, which is huge. So that's a big one that has kind of unlocked some time for us and also gives back to people, our hiring managers, our employees, because they can get their answers quicker.

Shannon Ogborn (14:18):
I know that one of the other things you mentioned earlier was around tone of communication. I'd imagine AI also makes it easier to say, okay, here's our tone of communication for talent and the comms, the templates that they have built, how can we create a voice that comes across? Talent has the same voice as people and have you used it in that capacity?

Asha Beirne (14:43):
Yes. Yeah. So AI did our drafts and our comms and helped kind of shape up that continuity and experience from the recruiting process all the way through onboarding and beyond. So that's been, I think, really helpful. We saw the improvement in our new hire survey, which is great and so something for us to just kind of keep using as we evolve our comms.

Shannon Ogborn (15:11):
Definitely. You mentioned one of the results, which was increasing the onboarding survey score by a whole point, which is super impressive. I mean, that usually takes a lot of time to make that improvement, but what else have you seen even if anecdotally since you all have created these feedback loops and you're really working on that partnership between People and Talent?

Asha Beirne (15:33):
We're able to be a little bit more nimble. I think I come into the People Ops function with an understanding of balancing compliance with some of the things that recruiters think about a little bit more like speed and candidate experience and things like that. And so I think I come to my role with more of a pragmatic approach to balancing all of that and thinking about the trade offs. So we can handle exceptions to a start date or process and kind of work quickly with the needs of the business and the needs of our candidates because it's different for everybody.

Shannon Ogborn (16:14):
Have you gotten any feedback from the talent team or recruiters like, "Okay, we're so glad we have this information because we were going to hire 10 engineers this quarter, but now we're preparing for these backfills." Have you heard anything from them on how it's impacted them?

Asha Beirne (16:33):
Well, we did look retroactively at our recruiting forecast and it was accurate. I am not actually sure how it felt on the talent team, but I imagine it felt better because we had forecasted accurately. So at least I hope

Shannon Ogborn (16:50):
I'm sure it was. What does this look like moving forward? What else are you all working on in this feedback loop as you look into the next six to 12 months?

Asha Beirne (17:00):
I heard a lot about today. The conference is quality of hire and we have a lot of performance data and there's that kind of lack of feedback loop of us giving or marrying up that data with how candidates are doing in the interview process. And so that's really the next thing that I want to do is kind of connecting that data and finding what those correlations are to continue to improve our ability to hire top talent. Yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (17:29):
It's definitely a knowledge is power thing where I remember being a recruiter and feeling like, "Oh my God, I'm so happy this candidate started." And then I had no idea even in aggregate how they were doing and having that information even anonymized and all those things really enables you to say like, "Okay, we are connecting these two experiences and we can feel more confident about how we're moving in a data forward way, but also just in a human way, I think. " And especially with all of AI that's going on, I think having this information helps you hire the right humans because at the end of the day, you want to hire the right person for the right role, but there are impacts to people's lives if it doesn't work out. So it's good to have that front of mind, I think, just from a human perspective.

Asha Beirne (18:24):
Yeah. I felt that gap myself when I was an interviewer on a panel at a former company and we ended up hiring my top pick and then this person was no longer at the company a short time into their tenure and it was so disorienting for me because I considered myself a recruiting expert. I could not believe that I would have vouched for somebody that didn't make it that far into the company and I was not privy to any information, so I had no understanding of how I could improve or learn from the experience. So that's kind of the personal experience that sort of drives the shift a bit.

Shannon Ogborn (19:07):
Amazing. Well, any last thoughts before we get to our final three question?

Asha Beirne (19:12):
No, I hope our listeners are advocating for the data that they need

Shannon Ogborn (19:19):
And the relationship. I think based on what I had heard today, I had talked to a couple of people about what we were talking about and they're like, "Oh, I wish I had a better relationship with my people ops team." Or we're so disconnected that we don't ever talk to each other like you were saying, just we have no meetings together, never discuss the elongated experience between being a candidate and being a new hire and being an employee. So I think that just makes a lot of movements. I guess do you have any advice on any last advice on creating that relationship?

Asha Beirne (19:52):
Yeah. Well, I think recruiting teams are so good at building relationships and you do it with hiring managers and stakeholders and your candidates and so you will be very good at it. You just have to extend it to the people ops too.

Shannon Ogborn (20:08):
Yeah, it feels natural. I mean, I feel like in the external world, people are like, "Oh, people ops in HR are talent." And I've told my father-in-law a hundred times when I was a recruiter, he's like, "Well, you're in HR." I'm like, "No, I'm not in HR. I'm in recruiting and they're very different." And I think that it's appreciating the differences to work together.

Asha Beirne (20:32):
Yes. And I think marrying the strengths and me learning from or bringing the strengths from talent over to people ops and vice versa.

Shannon Ogborn (20:40):
Yeah. Amazing. Well, we are coming up on our time here. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Asha Beirne (20:47):
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Asha Beirne, and you should all follow Rula because we are doing some really amazing work connecting patients to mental health providers. So follow both on LinkedIn.

Shannon Ogborn (21:01):
Amazing. Well, thank you for joining us at Offer Accepted. I think the relationship between talent and people is so important and I hope people get that and are able to implement some of this for their team.

Asha Beirne (21:12):
Thanks, Shannon. Really appreciate being here and chatting about this topic.

Shannon Ogborn (21:17):
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.