The North Star Metric Every Hiring Team Needs with Liz Woodfield, SentiLink

A hiring goal only works when the team believes it is possible.

Liz Woodfield, Head of Talent Acquisition at SentiLink, joins Shannon to share how she built a single north star metric for her recruiting team and used it to drive a 60% increase in hires without adding headcount. She breaks down the framework she leans on for every role, volume, velocity, and calibration, and how weekly dashboards brought a skeptical team and leadership along.

Once the team started hitting their weekly numbers, the results followed. SentiLink hit its first half of the year goal, and Liz has kept the same system in place as the team scales into the second half, adding more layers around competency based hiring along the way.

Key takeaways:

1. Sprint hiring unlocks roles: Breaking a role into a tight weekly plan turned a year old opening into a one week hire.
2. Debriefs surface bias: Talking live catches details that written feedback and Slack threads tend to miss.
3. Hiring is everyone's job: SentiLink's leadership repeats the hiring goal at every all hands so recruiting is not carrying it alone.
4. Interviews should inform onboarding: The insight gathered from candidates can shape a stronger first few months on the job.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction
(01:00) Meet Liz Woodfield
(02:30) Why every recruiting team needs a north star metric
(03:10) Turning a CEO's gold metric into a team wide goal
(04:04) Setting a bigger hiring goal with the same size team
(06:51) The volume velocity calibration equation behind recruiting success
(08:06) Winning leadership buy in during the uncomfortable early weeks
(09:51) Building weekly dashboards recruiters actually trust
(12:01) Using sprint hiring to close a role open for over a year
(13:40) Application data gathering for results
(15:55) Recruitment goals inspired by revenue goals
(17:51) Running towards the collective but improve individually
(18:50) 7 months in, measuring what the new system delivered
(22:21) What comes next for SentiLink's hiring goals
(24:42) Where to connect with Liz

Transcript

Liz Woodfield (00:00):
Something that we're seeing a big difference with in our teams is the importance of debrief. Debriefs should be mandatory in my book. There's just so much that happens in those conversations that cannot happen in a tool or on Slack. So I think debriefs should be mandatory any and all the time. I'm a huge proponent of them.

Shannon Ogborn (00:20):
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.

(00:46):
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 on-one recruiting platform empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I could not be more excited to be here today with Liz Woodfield. Longtime connection, longtime listener, first time caller, head of talent acquisition at SentiLink. Prior to SentiLink, she held leadership roles at Juniper Square, Brev Financial, and Goldman Sachs. While her expertise is in technical recruiting, she's most passionate about building exceptional teams, creating outstanding candidate experiences, and helping leaders hire with confidence.

(01:21):
And one thing that I think is so special about Liz's experience is that she has built organizations across every stage of growth from enterprises doing 1500 hires a year to scaling startups that are really trying to make every hire with an outsize impact. So Liz, thank you so much for joining us.

Liz Woodfield (01:39):
Thank you for having me. I often joke with people that I was one of Ashby's 1000 True fans, if you know that reference. And so it feels very thrilled to be here.

Shannon Ogborn (01:48):
Yes, certainly. And a top offer accepted fan. So just absolutely delighted.

Liz Woodfield (01:53):
I think I've listened to every episode, truly.

Shannon Ogborn (01:56):
That's a lot. It's a lot of hours. That's a lot of hours of learning, but it means a lot to have you here as a listener especially.

Liz Woodfield (02:03):
Of course. Love the community.

Shannon Ogborn (02:05):
Well, we today are going to chat a little bit about sort of the power of numbers and what a North Star can do for your team, especially important now as teams are operating leaner and I know people don't love the do more with less because I don't think we're overusing it. I think we're properly using it, but just it's becoming maybe exhausting. But the reality is that's where we're at. But before we dive deep into how you all have executed that, can you just walk us back more high level? Why do you think this matters so much to teams and their success in hiring?

Liz Woodfield (02:42):
Yeah. I mean, it's all about creating a vision and inspiring teams. In my experience, when you don't have a clear goal that you're working towards, it's really hard to rally people around what you're working towards. Work faster. What does that mean? Okay. A lot of people aren't motivated by that. So just having a North Star, having something that they know what this milestone looks like, it goes a really long way psychologically.

Shannon Ogborn (03:11):
And I know that your CEO has some sentiment around this as well that may have informed some of your philosophy around this.

Liz Woodfield (03:19):
Yeah. Yeah. He just called it his gold metric, which is how many hires we need to make. And so we set a goal for how many hires we want to make based on our headcount planning and based on our forecasted attrition. And we say, okay, we think this is how many hires we need to do in the next six months. Let's go and do it. And that's been really motivating for our team.

Shannon Ogborn (03:38):
This is a completely different conversation, so I won't go too much on it. I feel like KPIs have been canceled because I haven't had a KPI, a true KPI in so long when I feel like I went a long time with the obsession of them, but that's probably a different conversation for a different day. I'm curious because now you're at a smaller growing startup, but you did have enterprise experience like Juniper Square and Rev Financial and Goldman. What kind of gives you the confidence that a team of this size, for example, could hit a number that is higher than what it was used to doing versus a bigger enterprise company?

Liz Woodfield (04:16):
So for me, a lot of what it came down to was one, I've seen teams the same size or frankly smaller hit bigger goals. So I knew just looking at the numbers, it was very doable. But then the other thing that gave me confidence is I had a great leader that taught me recruiting is not all that different than sales. And this was a lightning bold moment for me as a recruiting leader when I realized what was the one thing that sales did different than recruiting? Data and metrics. And they had one clear goal that they were working towards, like bringing in revenue. And you have other KPIs that feed into that, but you have this North Star and they gave me confidence that with the right data, you can back into where you need to go as you set goals and set them along different milestones, weekly, monthly, quarterly, et cetera.

Shannon Ogborn (05:07):
I love the idea of bringing in different job functions to talent. I think there's a lot for us to learn. I think just inherently because of how talent has been treated historically. They don't always have the most resources or they're not the furthest progressed along. So I think having that data informed is super important. But I want to get into more of how you implemented this at SentiLink and how the success that your team saw. So just kind of at a high level, tell me about what the process was.

Liz Woodfield (05:42):
Yeah. So as I mentioned, we did our headcount planning and we had a sense for we want to do 50 hires in six months. The team had never done anything like that. 25-ish, literally half that number. And they said, we had the same tie. Our leadership came to me and said, "We had half as many hires with the same size team. How on earth are you going to do that?" And I said, "It's actually pretty simple with the data." So we looked at what our team was accomplishing each week and we said, "Okay, what's a realistic goal? We're going to stretch them a little bit. It's going to feel a little uncomfortable, but we want it also to feel very doable. How many recruiter screens can they do a week? That's the top of the funnel. And we want to focus on quality still, but how many recruiter screens do they do a week?

(06:23):
And then that will flow through the pipeline to ultimately yield X number of hires." And we did that with historical pass through rates. We just looked at where we were, built in some buffer knowing that conversion rates adjust over time up and down. And we showed that data to leadership and said, "We're confident we can get there with the same size team if we back into this one or a few weekly goals and ensure we're consistently hitting those goals." So really that's what it came down to.

Shannon Ogborn (06:51):
The way that you had explained it to me, which I think is very helpful, is this idea of volume velocity calibration. Walk me a little bit more through that and kind of what it's meant for how you're seeing that at your org.

Liz Woodfield (07:06):
Yes, I love this equation. So another amazing talent leader taught me this equation, this concept of volume plus velocity plus calibration equals recruiting success or operational excellence. And so I felt like the data gave us the volume piece, if you will. Then we said, okay, well, let's look at velocity, 24-hour SLA. And that's something I've done pretty consistently with my teams. And I set a pretty fast pace for my teams. And so I think coming in as a newer leader, I was able to set that pace pretty quickly and hold my team accountable to those SLAs. And we were able to measure them even in a lot of cases with Ashby dashboards. And then calibration, we have done through pre-briefs, debriefs, regular weekly syncs. Candidly, our team wasn't consistently doing weekly syncs with the teams before, and that's made a huge difference to ensure really tight alignment with the hiring teams.

(07:57):
And that's getting us where we need to go so that we're not in limbo on a role and we have very clear direction in order to land a hire.

Shannon Ogborn (08:06):
You had mentioned that you came in and you're setting this framework. I would love to hear more about leadership's response to this because I mean, I don't think anyone's complaining if a new leader comes in and they're like, "You're previously doing 25 hours, we're going to do 50." They're probably like, "Yay." But maybe some concern in the back of their head

Liz Woodfield (08:25):
Like,

Shannon Ogborn (08:25):
"I don't know if the math is going to math here."

Liz Woodfield (08:28):
That's exactly what was happening. People were cautiously optimistic, you could say. And again, I just had to keep pointing back to the data. And I will say it took a minute because we all know that you don't fill the top of the funnel and then they're hired the next day. So we filled the top of the funnel and then it took six weeks-ish. We had a company offsite for a week in there. It took six weeks-ish to start seeing the hires translate and to start seeing the consistent volume come through. And then we've maintained that volume and velocity since. But yeah, there were six weeks there that were super uncomfortable where I was getting some push to go hire another recruiter. We need to hit these hires. The business needs it. Well, you've already committed to

Shannon Ogborn (09:10):
It.

Liz Woodfield (09:11):
We've committed to it. It has to happen. And so I said, give it time. It will happen. And it helped that I think I'd seen this work before and I was able to speak to that as well. Just trusting the data, trusting the process. That was kind of the theme of that time as I brought leadership along. But my team was skeptical too, Shannon, I'll be honest.

Shannon Ogborn (09:29):
I would be as well if suddenly my goal is like, okay, we need the same quality, but we need to move faster and we need to hire more and we're going to do it with the same team. But I think that's where the leadership component of how the talent leader is communicating is super important because that is who you're putting your trust in that we can do this. What did the talent team, your recruiters need visibility into to

Liz Woodfield (09:57):
Feel

Shannon Ogborn (09:57):
More confident about hitting that?

Liz Woodfield (10:00):
Yep. So we build our recruiter dashboard, the metrics that were most important to me and to each of them individually. And so there was the team component and the individual component. So they could each see how we were doing holistically and for themselves. And we talked about it every week in our team meetings and our one-on-ones. So they knew we were serious about this. We were looking at the data regularly. And what's nice is it was a conversation. If we were off track, what was going wrong and how do we bring it back on track? What needed to happen there? So a lot of it was just giving them the data. They did not have the data before, believe it or not. They were just kind of shooting from the hip and it was working out for them. So why change it? But we were able to make things even more efficient and bring in more great hires through data.

Shannon Ogborn (10:44):
Yeah. Tell me more about what was in the dashboards or what people felt like they needed to be successful. Because obviously when you have this North Star metric, that's great. You know what you're working towards. Everyone is aligned. Like you said, sales, revenue. For recruiting, I've actually seen multiple. Sometimes it's offer acceptance rate and it's not actually hires where it's like, we want to hire the person in the quarter. I've seen it measured in so many different ways, which is fantastic. But what do you feel like your team benefited the most from?

Liz Woodfield (11:15):
Honestly, just starting super simple. I feel like that's kind of been the theme since I joined SentiLink, back to the basics a little bit. So I've started simple. We're introducing new areas of focus on a pretty regular basis, but our initial dashboard was really weekly recruiter screens. So they had this visual of week over week, how many screens they were doing and we were doing as a team. Weekly outreach because that obviously fuels the number of recruiter screens they're doing. And in some cases they needed more or less depending on their role portfolio. And then offers and hires. That's what we focused on to start. I just said, "There's lots of inputs here and let's focus on this to start." And then we've started to fine-tune now, looking at their individual pass-through rates and looking at other data, but that's the starting point.

Shannon Ogborn (12:01):
Have you seen the impact on any specific roles? Does any specific role come to mind since you've put this forward?

Liz Woodfield (12:10):
Yes. So one of the other concepts I introduced to the team as we set these goals is this concept of sprint or batch hiring, which is just let's set a clear goal for a role and figure out what it's going to take to get there. And one thing I love about Ashby is the amazing progress to plan dashboards. We use those all the time to forecast what we're going to need to do to hit a goal. And so we had one role in engineering that had been open over a year, which I'm embarrassed to say, but it's true. And multiple people had touched it. And people joked that it was a cursed role, quite frankly. And I had a recruiter that was super hungry. She was newer, she was eager. I said, "Okay, fresh perspective, batch hiring. I think this is the equation we need to tackle this." So we built a progress to plan dashboard.

(12:57):
We said, "We want to hire this person in two months. What is it going to take based on historical data to get there?" We had to dig a little bit to find the right historical data because it had been open for so long. But we did, and we hit the goal within a week of that timeframe, which was pretty incredible. So there's a bigger story to that. I'll leave it at that. But that was another really powerful unlock for the team to hitting our hiring goals.

Shannon Ogborn (13:18):
I definitely am a strong proponent of batch hiring and cohort hiring. We do it at Ashby. And it's interesting because a lot of people think that cohort hiring is for junior roles or

(13:31):
More higher volume roles like support, but it can work equally as well for. We use them for even our niche marketing roles, which is every role in our marketing team, but we use them for our marketing roles too. And these are thoughtful knowledge workers and you dig into the data, you're like, okay, how many. It even goes back to how long you keep the role open for. How many applications do we need? How long do we think it's going to take to get that number of applications? And it's all these data endpoints where you're like, "We can actually trace this back so that we know what the input should be."

Liz Woodfield (14:02):
Yes, 100%. And I mean, I'll tell you, part of what we were looking at when we were doing the batch and sprint hiring is we would test out different timeframes to say, okay, what's realistic? And also what's realistic on a weekly basis? Because these dashboards will break down like you need 17 recruiter screens a week. And so we'd say, okay, that feels doable. But when we tried to do it in a month, it was like 30 recruiter screens a week. Okay, well, we don't feel like that's probably realistic really with our team size of what we need to do. The team's also okay if they don't have this person in a month. So that's how we kind of decided what the right timeframe was as well so that we could lock in a goal. And then once we had this clear vision of here's what our weekly goals are, we hustled and we did it.

Shannon Ogborn (14:42):
I love a good work back plan because also I think the North Star is important, but I think the team also needs to have some insight, even if it's not like your goaled on 17 phone screens, you must hit that. But if you can work back and you're like, okay, we're not hitting it. So we're supposed to do 17, we only did 12. So we kind of know where it's broken. Even if that's not a goal per se, you still need to have knowledge and insight into what you're shooting for.

Liz Woodfield (15:15):
Totally. I completely agree. And when you have those weekly goals and they're broken down in such a digestible way, you're able to. Psychologically, you just know. You don't even need to look at the dashboard to be like, "I'm behind for where I wanted to be this week." And then the dashboard helps validate that. And then like you said, you can figure out what it's going to take to get back on track.

Shannon Ogborn (15:33):
I know I've said this before, so you've probably heard it on here, but it's like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? I'm sure it's the same for salespeople when it's like you have a $2 million revenue goal and they're like, "Okay, well, how do I do that one deal at a time?" It's just you have to be able to break it down so it feels less overwhelming to people on the weekly basis. But I'm curious, so you have these input goals, but when you think about the goals of the actual hires, does each individual recruiter carry a goal or how does that work for you all?

Liz Woodfield (16:07):
Yeah, they do have a goal, just to be clear. I did not focus on it. We did have visibility for the team to see. And so we'd flash it up occasionally. People would see how many hires different people had. It's so apples to oranges. When I have a recruiter focused on tech versus a recruiter focused on go-to-market or business, it's just not apples to apples, and they don't have the same goal either. So from that perspective, I really just focused on the one golden metric and the team goal. And for our team, I feel like that also really helped to create a healthy culture where we were working together in collaboration. We were all shared this clear vision for what we were working towards. So when someone was out on PTO, which they should, and I have been a big proponent for my team of take the PTO and log off.

(16:53):
Yes, you were a one-person team at one time and you couldn't log off. You can now. We have a team of six. We want you to take that time and unplug. Someone else can step in and we all benefit from doing the work for each other. That's the type of mindset and mentality I want for my team. So I feel like having a team goal for us is most effective, but it's also important to measure on an individual basis and for people to strive to improve things for themselves too. So we do focus on that as well.

Shannon Ogborn (17:23):
I've definitely worked on talent teams where if you are out of office and someone closes that candidate, it's an attribution battle. And it's like, who's going to get ownership? And that I think is the culture component because if I have someone covering for me, but when they were out, the person who covered for them got the attribution, they're going to want the attribution. And it's just kind of like a slippery slope even if you did 90% of the work, 10% of the work. It's such a hard thing to keep in mind to create a culture around the collective. Exactly what you're saying. How do we run towards the collective, but also improve ourselves individually?

Liz Woodfield (18:05):
Yeah, completely agree. I've seen the exact same things, which is why I focus a little less on the individual. I've had a lot of friends work at big tech companies that tell me about this type of culture of just heavy competition. And I don't know, that's just not the type of culture I want to cultivate or I personally want to work in. So far, so good. I think we've created a really healthy team culture where we work together.

Shannon Ogborn (18:30):
Well, I think it creates the opposite of what you're doing creates a culture of fear instead of a culture of. It's like excellence out of fear instead of excellence out of collaboration and teamwork. And I think long-term, what you're doing suits a lot better.

Liz Woodfield (18:48):
Yeah, completely agree.

Shannon Ogborn (18:50):
Well, you have been at SentiLink now for seven months?

Liz Woodfield (18:56):
Yeah, go eight-ish. Go

Shannon Ogborn (18:58):
Eight-ish. Seven, eigh-ish months. What have the results like?What have the outcomes been since you have implemented this sort of North Star metric?

Liz Woodfield (19:10):
We hit our goal this first half of the year, which was really exciting. Amazing. So that was a 60% increase from what the team did same size last year. Like we talked about, a lot of people didn't think we could do it and we did it. So that was a really exciting moment for our team. And we actually were able to celebrate in person together last week at our company offsite. So that was really fun. And the team's consistently delivering on weekly goals. I think we're really in the fine-tuning stage now where we're spending a lot more time in our one-on-ones looking at pass-through rates for their individual roles, looking at where the drop-off is, what's broken, what's working, what's not, and really finessing things. Starting to invest more heavily in competency and skills-based hiring, which we have some of. And there's actually a lot that we're doing quite well, but there's a ton of opportunity there to continue to mature that process.

(19:56):
And so we're just now starting to add the layers and take it a few steps further. And I feel confident we'll just continue to be able to do more with the team that we have as we consistently deliver on these goals and introduce more automation and operational excellence.

Shannon Ogborn (20:12):
I'd imagine too, there's a greater predictability, especially as you're gathering more data. Because I think one of the missteps that happens is that if people implement something, but they don't have a good data structure around it to measure it,

Liz Woodfield (20:29):
You

Shannon Ogborn (20:29):
Just actually don't even know if it worked or not.

Liz Woodfield (20:31):
Yes, I completely agree. And we have our forecasting dashboard. We literally look at every single week as a team. I reported on it every single week to our leadership team. Literally every single person in the company knew whether we were on or off track. And that's the same as we're moving into the second half of the year. We're doing that exact same thing. It worked really well. And yeah, it's all about -

Shannon Ogborn (20:53):
But hiring is a shared goal, so everyone should know that. It's like, yes, 50, the number was your North Star, but it also is kind of like a company goal. The company, everyone is responsible, especially at the stage that you guys are at for achieving that. Recruiting can only do so much of the lift. It's a team sport, it's a team effort.

Liz Woodfield (21:16):
Yeah. Our motto is always everyone is on the recruiting team, which is exactly what you're saying, Shannon. That's one thing I think our leadership does very well is we've made it abundantly clear in our company goals for this year, one of our goals is to build the team and every single person is responsible for that. And so it's not just me talking about it. It's our CEO and all of our other leaders talking about it week over week at our company all hands in various forums of, here's where we are against our goal. What are each of you doing to input to that goal? Which is also really cool. It really creates this healthy sense of group accomplishment. Yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (21:50):
Yeah. Well, I'd imagine too, there's no better trust-building exercise than saying you're going to do something and doing it.

Liz Woodfield (21:59):
Yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (22:00):
I'd imagine that has improved for you all too, because it's like you've now built the trust of your team that what you say and forecast is what's going to happen.

Liz Woodfield (22:09):
Yeah. One of our corporate values is follow through, right? So it's like we are following through on what we've committed to do with that broader goal, but then also all of the input goals to that.

Shannon Ogborn (22:20):
Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Woodfield (22:21):
Yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (22:21):
What does this look like moving forward? What iterations are -

Liz Woodfield (22:26):
In play?

Shannon Ogborn (22:26):
In play. Yeah.

Liz Woodfield (22:28):
I mean, I think for us, the main thing going forward is just I want to continue to create as much predictability as we can around forecasting and what our team can output, what we can do. There's definitely more that we can do with our capacity plan and modeling to further refine it and mature it and make it more robust. I like to keep things stupid simple as much as possible because I think that's often what resonates, especially at the board and leadership level. But there's definitely more that I want to start to sophisticate in how we think about metrics and how we plan and whatnot. But honestly, I'm quite happy with how it's gone so far. A lot of my focus going forward is how can we improve our conversion rates? How can we start to fine tune other parts of our process that will only help us to yield even more hires for the work that we're already doing at the top of funnel?

Shannon Ogborn (23:19):
Right. Well, I'm very impressed. Very impressed with your work at everywhere you've been. But I think there's something to me that's so special about doing this at a high growth startup and just the impact every hire has. And every hire is so critical and so important. And it's not to say that if you work at a large enterprise like we both have, that every incremental hire is just nothing, but there's just something about knowing that's a person that's mission critical to hitting your business goal.

Liz Woodfield (23:53):
Completely agree. Yeah. It's really rewarding in a high growth startup to see the people that you bring on board and see their first win, see everything they can accomplish in such a short time. One of the people we hired as a new grad even shipped code in his first week. You don't hear stories like that at a large enterprise, generally speaking. I could tell you stories for days of just the outsized impact. That's also a story for another time, but my whole team would tell you the same thing.That is absolutely one of the most rewarding parts of what we do.

Shannon Ogborn (24:22):
Yeah. Just love startup land.

Liz Woodfield (24:25):
Me too. Me too.

Shannon Ogborn (24:27):
Amazing. Well, we are going to get to our final three questions. These are now on our YouTube extended version. So if you want to hear what hiring excellence means to Liz, her recruiting hot take and one thing she would tell her earlier career self, please head there. Well, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Liz Woodfield (24:45):
Honestly, LinkedIn, like everyone says, that's where we're at. Find me on LinkedIn. I always love new messages in my inbox, so welcome any outreach. Love connecting with people in person. If you're ever in Salt Lake City, hit me up. I will be there. And I travel a decent amount to you. Would always love to meet new talent leaders. So anyway, find me on LinkedIn.

Shannon Ogborn (25:03):
Amazing. Well, I think that this is going to be super helpful for both ICs and leaders because teams are really feeling the squeeze right now. And I think that means they're trying to put in a more is more model, like more metrics, more data, more observation, because there's so much access to it. But I think that this conversation just really reminding people to ground it in a single truth that everyone can get behind is going to be super helpful. So I really appreciate you joining us.

Liz Woodfield (25:31):
Yes. Thank you so much for the great conversation, Shannon.

Shannon Ogborn (25:34):
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.