Transforming hiring chaos into data-driven success with Celia Sauthier

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Celia Sauthier. First of all, there was 2500 capacity. And then you said productivity. How did you measure productivity and what does this mean for you?

Celia Sauthier:
So back then there wasn’t any measure of productivity. Like the initial problem was we couldn’t rely on the data that we had in our system. People were hired like outside of our ats and so we couldn’t really track back hires. And then there were all these freelancers that were also kind of being loosely used within this whole ecosystem. So, I mean, I couldn’t really measure productivity. All I could say is, if you kind of looked at it on an aglima level, there were obviously some people that weren’t doing as much as others, but it was difficult to make that assessment. The only kind of thing that helped there is we did have to visit the headcount from what it was initially, and then it was no longer. We’re hiring 500 people, but it’s maybe half or less.

Okay, so the team that was built to hire 500 people is not going to have to hire a lot less. So that’s kind of what led us to really have to downsize that team significantly. But, yeah, just was impossible to measure productivity. Now it’s a different story, but we’re talking about back then and back then it was really challenging to do.

Thomas Kohler:
How is it now?

Celia Sauthier:
So now, I mean, the data that we use is a lot. So everything is in our ats. The hires that we make are all tracked and we also can trace it back to the recruiter and who it’s credited to. So productivity, I look at, there’s the absolute numbers, which is like how many hires per recruiter? And I don’t love that number, but it does give you a bit of a sense check of what do you expect someone that’s fully ramped up to produce. Obviously, it’s different across tech and non tech and things like that. But, you know, if you do have someone in your team that you don’t know why they’re not making any hires consistently, then that’s a first signal. But what I really care about in the team is more about the quality metrics. So kind of the pass through rates along our process, you know, the time spent in each stage, the candidate experience.

That’s really what I look at every month with the rest of the team to say, okay, well, we’re a small and nimble team. We have to use our time the best we can. And so the best way to kind of optimize for that is making sure that, you know, the candidates we speak with and the candidates we decide to pass through, they’re going to do well at the next stages so that, you know, in terms of efficiency and time, it is something that helps us also be more productive in that way. And also looking at our channels, which channels we get the biggest bang for our buck, employee referrals. Maybe for some jobs it is LinkedIn sometimes. Maybe it’s other channels out there, maybe it’s sourcing. Only in that case does it even make sense to publish the role. We always publish the role, but those are kind of the sum of the questions to look at. Also, in terms of productivity.

Thomas Kohler:
Celia and I talked about the quality of hire, how to transition from an environment where you cannot rely on data to an environment where you can backwards plan, forecast scientifically what is possible, what not, and why. And along the way, we also philosophized and discussed what quality of hire could mean, what it means for Mos, what it meant for maybe Amazon, and what was really important in terms of considering when measuring and interpreting it. So I think it’s a very, very valuable episode with very specific stories, specific insights, and just super useful for everybody in talent acquisition.

Great to have you finally on my show, Celia. So I think we met two years ago at a dinner organized by Ashby. Then we always met somewhere, never really did a podcast. Then we also did a dinner, which I organized, where we recently just met. Again, I saw you in a lot of events, and now we are finally here talking about quality of hire and what to measure, what to not measure, and why. And I really love the background you have as well for that. But maybe we can start with a short introduction by yourself to give us some context first.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Super happy to spend a bit of time with you on this podcast, for sure. So, in terms of my background, maybe that’s. So, I’m originally from Switzerland. I’m from like the french speaking region, but I haven’t lived in Switzerland for about eight years. And that coincides a little bit with kind of when I got into recruiting. So I moved to London, felt like I needed a bit of a breath of fresh air, and kind of moved from Geneva to London.

And then I joined Amazon there and I was working in tech recruiting in the crazy days of that time where we were having, I don’t know, 40 interviews per week. We were going on to these interview events abroad. It was really exciting, but it got to a point where it was a bit always the same thing. You kind of rinse and repeat, you’re always hiring the same software development engineers. It’s very high volume. So at some point I wanted to kind of shift my focus on more of like a hands off role. So I moved internally with an Amazon to a program manager role, which is typically kind of a group of people that roll out, I don’t know, automation or change management programs across the company.

Did a little stint actually, because it was during COVID that I kind of made that move wherever I joined this Covid task force at Amazon where we had to essentially build and hire anything needed for a lab to test frontline employees. So got a bit of a taste for the startup speed because we essentially did all of that in three months because we needed to test all frontline employees at Amazon. And then kind of got back into the normal rhythm of Amazon and felt, you know, after a while I had learned a lot, but I needed a bit of a change of scenery and moved to Berlin, joined a startup, which is moss. I’m still with Moss, I’m two years in and started with recruiting operations. At the time, the company had not really any interview processes, not really any checks and balances in terms of like the headcount planning. So I kind of rolled that out and then started kind of heading the TA team, which is my current role. So I’m managing the tent acquisition team at Mos in Berlin. Small team of six people. And yeah, that brings us to today.

Thomas Kohler:
I think also Moss really scaled up from zero very rapidly back then. Right. Wasn’t that the case that you really hired crazy.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, it was. I think, you know, like when I was interviewing with startups, this was like end of 2021, right? Like that was the peak, peak moment in terms of scale ups and hyper growth. And so moss, like a lot of scale ups at that time, was just growing, you know, like crazy. There were some insane numbers kind of thrown out in terms of like who we needed to hire in twelve months, but there was a deliberate focus on having someone in recruiting operations to kind of set the foundation in order for that to scale. But it was already a bit too late, I think. So when I joined, it was already, it was already really big and it was kind of on this trajectory where like a lot of other accounting companies had to course correct. And so since then, it’s a totally different company. Like, honestly, I mean, obviously a lot of people have left and a lot of new people were hired, but also how we operate, it’s so different.

We really, for example, our interview process, we call it attribute based, but it’s like skill based hiring. Right. So we have like intentional set of skills, skills that we assess in the interview process versus like a series of conversations without any sort of aim. And then at the end, you know, a sort of random decision that’s made, which was a bit of the case before. So, yeah, it feels like a completely different company, but for the better. It’s not perfect. There’s still a lot that we need to work on. I think we’ve, there’s been a massive learning curve, for sure, and me included. And the rest of the organization. Yeah, it’s really cool.

Thomas Kohler:
And when you started, let’s say, with the whole recruiting operations, focus, project or area, what was the situation and how did you prioritize it? Because I think that’s so valuable that you did that. And that also, companies hiring into recruiting operations doesn’t have to be always a full role, but it has to be a priority phase to set it up in a certain way. Yeah. What did you find and what did you then end up doing?

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s such a good point because I was having similar conversations for similar roles in other companies, and some of those companies were way larger, you know, like series C or I or even D, and they were kind of like hiring someone in recruiting operations at that point in time versus moss was a lot smaller, but kind of saw the signs and were like, we need help. It was still a bit too late, I think, but it was still something that stood out to me. And it’s also one of the reasons why I joined Moss. I was like, okay, if these people are starting to think about it in this way, then it gives me kind of a good signal in terms of how they think about hiring. Right. So that, I guess, was a really great sign and also led me to kind of join that team. Yeah.

When I joined, it was. It was so as a team of like 25 people in recruiting, which is completely insane. And it was really hard for me to figure out where to start because the data we had in our systems where we were using greenhouse, obviously, of 20 different people using it 20 different ways, all these verticals we had, like commercial, international, all of them were doing their own thing in terms of how they were structured and how they would organize work and things. So yeah, it took me a while. And honestly, when I joined, I also, my manager wasn’t there, so I was kind of like thrown into it, which sometimes is the perfect way to start. But yeah, it was super challenging. Also, I had only worked in big corporations, so it’s already a learning curve when you go from a big corporation to startup. But when you join a startup, that’s kind of like peaking and you’re trying to build a roadmap for something that has never existed. No one knows what recruiting operations is in a startup, at least at that time.

Yeah, it was really tough. I think I got a lot of help at the time from also there was a strategy team. It was very focused on essentially our commercial positions. We kind of could see that it was breaking. Obviously, it’s our revenue engine, so if we don’t get that right, like, the rest is going to be challenging. So there was, I guess an initial focus to say like, we need to fix commercial. So, meaning like our sales positions, which are mainly kind of sales development representatives and account executives because we’re hiring all these people and we’re hiring, we’re onboarding like tens and 1020 people every month, but we’re just not seeing them becoming productive and some of them are just starting and then failing and things.

So it was the first thing to fix. And when we looked into the interview process, yeah, they were, you know, there was no intention in terms of like, what are we exactly assessing? What’s the hiring decision based on? What are the skills that this person really needs to have apart from trying to hire people that have that experience before, which, you know, if you have experience doing sales, it doesn’t mean you’re any good at it and it doesn’t mean that you’ll be good at it, you know, again, yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
And if you have the right experience, right for the right for the right idea customer to sell to for the right industry, for the right market and so on. You mentioned several points now which are really interesting. First of all, there was 25 recruiters, a lot of capacity, and then you said productivity. How did you measure productivity and what does this mean for you?

Celia Sauthier:
So back then there wasn’t any measure of productivity. The initial problem was we couldn’t rely on the data that we had in our system, so people were hired outside of our ats and so we couldn’t really track back hires. And then there were all these freelancers that were also kind of being loosely used within this whole ecosystem. So, I mean, I couldn’t really measure productivity. All I could say is, if you kind of looked at it and an aglima level, there were obviously some people that weren’t doing as much as others, but it was difficult to make that assessment. The only kind of thing that helped there is we did have to visit the headcount from what it was initially, and then it was no longer, we’re hiring 500 people, but it’s maybe half or less. Okay. So the team that was built to hire 500 people is not going to have to hire, you know, a lot less. So that’s kind of what led us to, you know, really have to downsize that team significantly and. But, yeah, just was impossible to really measure productivity.

Thomas Kohler:
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Celia Sauthier:
Now it’s a different story, but we’re talking about back then and back then, it was, it was really challenging to do.

Thomas Kohler:
How is it now?

Celia Sauthier:
So now, I mean, the data that we use is a lot. So everything is in our ATS. The hires that we make are all tracked. We also can trace it back to the recruiter and who it’s credited to. So, productivity, I look at, there’s the absolute numbers, which is like, how many hires per recruiter? And I don’t love that number, but it does give you a bit of a sense check of what do you expect someone that’s fully ramped up to produce. Obviously, it’s different across tech and non tech and things like that. But if you do have someone in your team that you don’t know why they’re not making any hires consistently, then that’s a first signal. But what I really care about in the team is more about the quality metrics.

So kind of the, the pass through rates along our process, the time spent in each stage, the candidate experience. That’s really what I look at every month with the rest of the team to say, okay, well, we’re a small and nimble team. We have to use our time the best we can. And so the best way to kind of optimize for that is making sure that, you know, the candidates we speak with and the candidates we decide to pass through, they’re going to do well at the next stages. So that, you know, in terms of efficiency and time, it is something that helps us also be more productive in that way. And also looking at our channels, which channels, you know, are, we get the biggest bang for our buck, you know, employee referrals, maybe for some jobs it is LinkedIn sometimes, maybe it’s other channels out there. Maybe it’s sourcing. Only in that case does it even make sense to publish the role. We always publish the role, but those are some of the questions to look at. Also, in terms of productivity.

Thomas Kohler:
And what was the timeline that you get from? You cannot rely on your data. You don’t know how to measure productivity to now work very focused, backwards plan based on the capacity you need to fill and what resources you need, if you have enough, if you have the right skill set, what is expected from everybody, and then plan accordingly. So what did you actually do and how long did it take?

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, honestly, I think it took. It took a year. I think, you know, I don’t want to say that this is how long it takes for everyone, but for us, because we had to essentially shift to skill based hiring, we had to also structure our interviews to be structured interviews, and create these interview guides, and then train managers and so on, and then also train the rest of the team on how to use our ATS better. It took a year for really the team to completely pivot in terms of practices and data. So that’s our personal story. I’m sure you can make that pivot a lot quicker, but we had a lot of things to fix to help us also get there. I think there’s the data problem, but it’s always kind of hand in hand with how structured and predictable are your interview processes. So I think you can fix one, but you’ll always have to kind of also look at the other things that are part of how you gather data.

What do you do with that data? If you have a consistent interview process and you have more or less the same stages, it’s a lot easier for you to make these working backwards plans because they’re similar across most of your roles, and you can look at them and compare them across different roles as well. Whereas if you have every single role has its own version of an interview process, it’s a lot more difficult. Yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
Especially gets a bigger problem once you get bigger. Right? Because suddenly the request is not, hey, we need to open these five roles. Okay. You can talk to everybody. Everybody knows each other. Communication flows in a way that you can take it case by case. Once the request is, oh, we actually need 500 more roles, then you need to understand on a macro level or overall, what does it mean in terms of interview capacity? What does it mean in terms of also maybe onboarding capacity? What does it mean in the budget? How many recruiters need to be allocated? Where, how many managers do we have? How many recruiters do we have. What’s the pass through rates, right, to backwards plans. When do we need to kick off? Which role? How long does it take to kick off? How long does it take for a candidate to enter the funnel? How long are the candidates in the funnel, and how many do you need to end up with a certain number you need to hire and when are they starting and when are they onboarding and onboarding and ramped up. Right. So that’s a different way. And if you don’t have one process where you say, at least for certain role groups, it’s similar and identical and everybody is trained on the same level, you just will fail.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sometimes just the path to, like, you know, recruiting metrics or data is actually one of, you know, a lot of other things that need to happen for sure. So, yeah, it’s not easy and it’s not like a quick, a quick fix for sure. And then you need some checks and balances. Like, also, we, we have a weekly kind of audit of our data. So if there’s, like, stuck that candidates that have fields that are empty or are in a stage for more than two days, then we have these alerts to be like, let’s just keep it clean. We changed ats over time. So we used to call this, and this is actually someone that used to be in my team that kind of coined the term, but we had, oh, what did it, we called it greenhouse clean house Fridays, and now we call them Tidy Ashby Fridays. So we use that. That makes sense to clean up our queues and make sure.

Thomas Kohler:
How did you incentivize your team that they understand that this is valuable? Because I saw this in many companies being the case, like admin or cleanup or whatever it is. And then it was more a bit the annoying hour you need to spend time and the blaming hour, and, oh, this person missed that. So you feel bad, right? How did you make sure that people like to it and also see the value in it?

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m. I’m pretty confident. Then when we started doing that, that there was probably the messaging and how we positioned it was probably not clear enough to recruiters. I think it’s when you start kind of using this data and you kind of discuss it as a team and you look at it every week and you look at it every month. So we have this kind of, like, weekly cadence of looking at these pass through rates, high level. You know, we don’t spend hours on it, but we kind of look at it every week and we comment on it and then we have our review every month to look at them. I think when the team starts seeing like, okay, well, this is what we do with this data.

It’s then something that we discuss. Like, there’s an imperative there to work off something that’s accurate because there’s also a bit of, I guess, accountability on the line. If you have your pass through rates that are out there in the open, you want to make sure that they’re really correct. And, you know, nothing is more annoying that if, you know, you’re, you’re a recruiter and I’m still hands on and you look at, you know, last week you had three intro calls and you’re like, no, I had ten, you know, and this is my actual pass through it. Like, I think it’s, it helps with understanding the value of it, but for sure, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not easy. And I, and I think that’s one way it’s helped us is just because we use that data on a weekly and monthly basis and we use it to make decisions and we use it in our working backwards plans and we share it with stakeholders. So it’s very visible and it’s very transparent. So it’s in your interest that whatever is put out there in the world about you or your candidates is accurate.

Thomas Kohler:
I try to call this way of recruiting, scientific recruiting, because everything is measurable, everything is based on hypothesis. Because if you plan, plan backwards, it’s nothing more than a hypothesis of what you most likely need to deliver to fill the need. Right. And then you also need to underlie it with data. And you also need to be fundamentally, not just rely on past data, but you also, on the way of doing it, gather data and iterate the hypothesis that it’s getting more mostly realistic. Right. So this is what I call scientific recruiting and what you also try to do. But I think that’s just one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it. Okay. The outcome ultimately needs to be valuable for the business. And this could be measured in the quality of hire. And we just had a bit of a discussion around it previously, but now maybe we talk about the quality of hire, how you measure it, how you think you measure it, and what’s difficulty in doing so, because it’s not easy.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, quality of hire is tough. And I, when I was at Amazon, there was a whole like, team of data scientists and researchers working on this. And they still, when I left, which was two years ago, they hadn’t figured it out. And that was one way to go about it, which was, like, very scientific. They were kind of trying to consolidate, you know, objective data, which for this case, it was developers. So they were looking at, like, I guess, the quality of the code that they submit, and they were trying to consolidate that with, like, a manager evaluation and, like, a 360 and things like that. And so I don’t know where that went. But, you know, it’s just to say that, like, I don’t think anyone has fixed this yet.

And big companies are, big companies are no exception in terms of quality of hire. So. And it’s so. And at moss, we haven’t figured it out yet, like, to be very transparent. It’s something that’s kind of come up as one of our objectives this year is to come up with some sort of indication of quality of hire, and it’s coming up so much more now. I just went to an event a few days ago where this was kind of mentioned as, like, this one metric that has replaced, maybe, I don’t know, time to hire used to be a big one, a few a year or two back, because it was all about speed, at least at Moss, and it was about, like, how can we get, you know, how can we be quick? How can we, you know, have, have the best candidate experience? And now it’s a lot about quality of hire. So, okay, you’re hiring these people. How do I know that the hiring decision that I’m making now is better than it was a year ago? And that’s the question that I get from, from my leadership, is we moved to skill based hiring.

We’ve implemented all these structured interviewing practices. Tell us now, is it making our hiring decisions better? And it’s hard to put a number on that or a hard metric to say, well, yes, the quality is higher. And so that’s, I think, least for me, is where there’s the context of this quality of hire kind of imperative now to say, like, let’s start measuring it. I love that we’re going into quality of hire and we’re not sticking to just the recruiting metrics. So I love that we’re talking about, like, hiring people that can be successful, hiring people that bring something to the organization and not just fixated on our recruiting processes. Same with attrition, by the way. Like, it’s not to say that it should always be attached to recruiting, and recruiting is accountable, but we should be always thinking about, like, the impact we have as a, as a TA team in terms of who we bring in and how they’re successful and so on.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomas@pplwise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it.

And also, I think a big aspect are the managers right? Because they ultimately make the hiring decision and they then also lead to people. And I think that’s an aspect which should be way more holistically considered in the whole employee journey, independent from just recruiting only, but also then the overall lifecycle of an employee. And I think this really needs to be intertwined. And companies that have good management, I think, do way better in recruitment if they also have, of course, a recruiting culture and so on. But this is usually part of managers job, to recruit and to hire. Right. And to get the best people and then to also really find a way on how to find them and retain them ultimately that they have a certain value for the overall company. And this is hard, it’s tough. And I think if it’s not holistically going well, then it’s a problem. And you cannot blame recruitment for a bad hire, for instance. Of course, it should be responsibility there, but it should not be blaming.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. We’re there to, you know, to guide them towards the best outcome and bring in best practices, but there’s shared accountability for sure. And so I do also, I don’t like also the term of, like, quality of hire because it’s, you know, it’s not just about hiring. Right. It’s about like how this person was onboarded. Also, how did the hiring manager get to this hiring decision? Decision? So I don’t love the term either because it’s the quality of the hire versus, I guess, the quality of not just hiring, but, you know, the onboarding and, you know, the scope of the role and the manager involvement and so on.

Thomas Kohler:
And the constraints you have.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, exactly as well. Yeah. So where we are starting, and this is still kind of very early days, but we first want to figure out, like, what is quality for moss? You know, what is a quality higher? Is it someone that does the job better than people that are in that role? Or is it someone that adds, that has skills that no one has in the organization? Or is it someone that brings something that we don’t have in terms of, I don’t know, perspective or culture or whatever? So I guess we have to start with that, and then we also have to start with what is quality in a product manager role versus an SDR? It’s not the same thing. And so it’s quite hard to find a sweet spot between, I guess, a simple way of assessing quality of hirever, but also one that has the nuances of an SDR versus a product manager. So that’s what we’re trying to figure out now. We also, to your point, around, like, people, managers, we also know that if we send them a survey now and ask them, like, are you happy with your hire? We’re not going to get anything. That’s insightful. So, you know, how do we get this data? And then what do we do with it is also a big part, part of where we are now.

It’s just like we’re in this discovery phase and scoping it out because there’s so many questions that you kind of need to get a bit of clarity before you go onto the open and ask managers or send them a survey about quality of hire. I know there’s some tools out there that kind of offer that function, but for us, it just wouldn’t work to just send this survey. Managers need a bit of education on it, and we need also to learn a bit better, like how they would assess this quality.

Thomas Kohler:
And it needs certain validation, in my opinion. Right. So if you would not validate what’s there, because I think of it in three attributes. One should be the overall strategic contribution to the company. It doesn’t have to be always strategic. It can also be tactical or operationally, but I think it just needs to have some company layer then. Second, I think it needs to have a cultural layer in terms of is it value adding for the team dynamics, does it fit as well? And is it not something toxic? And the third aspect is something functional. Right.

Do the people also learn from it or are they functionally doing many things so good that overall there’s positive impact on the company’s success? And then the questions always how to measure it, right? And again, as you said, in product or sales or tech or general admin roles or customer service roles, it’s all different. I think you need to have several quality metrics for different functions and also for different company phases, and then it will just changes. And it is dynamic. And the problem with it is it’s dynamic, but it also takes so much time to measure it. So what is the right model for you exact use case at the moment? And what do you believe in? Right. Because I think it’s also a question of belief. And then the managers, the overall business, the talent acquisition team, the business partners, whoever is involved. I think everybody needs to be validated as well against each other for the rating, if it’s really making sense.

Because if you get your. In your performance review in your rating, a key metric to say, hey, you are measured by the quality of hire, then of course, no manager will, even if it’s the case, say, oh, I did a not quality hire because maybe it impacts your performance and your pay.

Celia Sauthier:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s so true, that part around, like, beliefs, because we started to have these, like, exploratory conversations about, like, what do you think it takes to be, you know, a highly performing and highly valued team member in the company? And when you have these conversations, you realize the, like, underlying belief system of the leaders and the hiring managers because, yes, there’s the performance per se. In some cases, it’s quite. It can be quite straightforward to measure. If, you know, someone is, like, generating revenue, then, you know, that’s a part of the performance. But then there’s the whole underlying belief about, like, what’s the quality of hire? Is it someone that, you know, works a lot and doesn’t care about the hours, or is it actually someone that, you know, brings, you know, brings something to the team, you know, can lift the team with their. With their demeanor or they’re very good at, like, coaching others. And so when you have start having these conversations, you kind of realize, okay, there’s this whole other part of, like, what you believe is, like, a quality hire, which is very different across even, you know, leaders in the same company.

And so that’s quite also. That’s an extra challenge. And in those beliefs, sometimes you’ll find some biases that you also have to address, you know? So, yeah, it’s hard. It’s tough, and, you know, I’m not here to say we found a solution, but I know that it’s a common challenge with this quality of hire.

Thomas Kohler:
Let’s do it like this. Once you have a solution, we do another podcast talking just about how you figured it out.

Celia Sauthier:
Okay? Yeah, yeah, let’s do that. I’ll tell you, like, how it’s going and, like, what are the challenges and what’s working well, what isn’t, for sure. Yeah, yeah. In a couple of months, we can do that.

Thomas Kohler:
Cool. See that? Thank you. We are already at the end. I really enjoyed the conversation. Very insightful. A lot of stories, a lot of insights. I really appreciate your time and have a great weekend.

Celia Sauthier:
Awesome. Thanks, Thomas. See you. Bye.