Mike Joyner

Equity compensation is a complex but critical recruitment vehicle that tech companies use to attract talent. For private companies, many utilize equity more heavily to offset their cash spend. 

To capture our learnings and share best practices that you can immediately implement, we've developed recruiting playbooks to be your go-to resource in different stages of growth.

We run an ongoing benchmarking survey focused on recruiting team size and operating metrics to surface valuable trends and common practices to help inform strategy.

If you received an email today announcing that your company has filed its S-1, would your recruiting team know what to do? Do you know what an S-1 is? From our experience, that email has been followed by, “YAY, we’re finally going public!”, immediately followed by panic inducing questions like, “what are we allowed to say to candidates?” or “how do we pitch a job opportunity if you can’t talk about the value of an offer?”

While AI took center stage, conversations among TA leaders were heavy on team engagement, recruitment ROI, and innovative approaches to getting the work done. A sense of cautious optimism around hiring growth in 2024 spurred engaging discussions on how TA teams are meeting the reality of achieving business needs with limited resources. Specifically and not surprisingly, many leaders shared that their priorities are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of their teams without the option of growing team size. This continued focus on doing more with the same team or even fewer resources has put a renewed spotlight on recruiting operations and understanding what changes will actually have an impact. 

At the end of each year, we launch a benchmarking survey on Recruiting Productivity and Operating Metrics focused on recruiting team ratios, recruiter productivity, req loads, time to hire, diversity recruiting goals/tracking methods, cost per hire, and quality of hire. It’s been a tumultuous year for recruiting teams, so we were interested to see what has changed and what has not.

It’s been a fun several weeks where we’ve had an opportunity to get back to connecting in person with many of you. We hosted talent in person community events in Nashville, Raleigh, and San Francisco and a virtual event last week. We’re so energized by the work all of you are doing and hope to continue finding ways to bring the community together.

There were two significant events that occurred late last year that set off compounding impacts across the tech community. The first was Twitter abruptly laying off nearly half of the company and setting off a series of deeper cuts across the industry. The second was the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which quickly became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history… until Threads launched this year that is. The net impact for many recruiting leaders has been the expectation that their teams will need to do more with less. As with prior tech cycles and platform shifts, a burst of new tools have come into the market while existing vendors are racing to innovate. All with the promise of driving higher quality and greater efficiency across the recruiting process.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve met with some talent leaders that have had to significantly downsize their teams and are now faced with a lot of unpredictability and variability in hiring needs since they’re completely dependent on backfilling attrition. While other talent leaders we’ve talked to are at companies with healthy balance sheets that can retain more resources on their teams, but in the meantime are redesigning roles and reevaluating performance metrics given fewer roles needing to be filled in the short-term. Here are some takeaways from those conversations:

What does it mean to influence with data and drive operational excellence?

This time of year is often the most challenging — you’re trying to stay on track to hit your hiring goals while in parallel trying to look ahead to anticipate and plan next year’s hiring plan. Here are our tips on how to juggle these parallel realities as a recruiting leader:

We can’t predict how markets and the economy will change in the future. But, we do know that downturns are ALWAYS followed by expansion and growth. 2021 was an extreme example of how quickly things can change. Here are five things to prioritize during a market downturn

While compensation shouldn’t be the sole factor when evaluating opportunities, we understand that it’s an important consideration when making such a big life decision. We ran a compensation benchmarking survey focused on recruiting leaders at high growth companies.

Common themes for what Recruiting Operations teams are focusing on in 2022

Results reflecting benchmarks collected in November, 2021.

We’ve heard from recruiting leaders in our community that have struggled with what to do when their company announces that it’s going public. Whether you’re anticipating this reality soon or it’s still a hope at some point in the future, we thought it would be helpful to share tips from our experiences of navigating this challenging time.

What we learned from surveying 80 technology companies representing different stages of growth, industries, and geographies about their diversity recruiting practices.

What we learned from bringing a group of recruiting operations leaders together during a pandemic.

A well-defined sprint creates urgency and accountability, a feeling of speed and momentum, and most importantly a shared purpose.

3 Insights & 5 Emerging Strategies to help others as we all work through these uncertain times together

There are no playbooks for what we’re experiencing in this moment, which means that we’re all in this together to figure out how we navigate through the fog of uncertainty.

Some tips for adjusting to remote work to keep you energized, feeling connected, and avoiding the feeling of isolation, which is definitely a real thing.

COVID-19 is forcing us to innovate new ways of working together and move toward a style of recruiting that we never would have otherwise embarked upon.

We have shot out of the cannon these past couple of months in the best possible way, and I wanted to take a moment now to reflect.