Using Data to Influence as a Solo TA Leader

Key Takeaways

1. The shift from reactive to strategic starts with one question: stop asking what data exists and start asking what data your recruiting function actually needs to support the business.
2. Building a shared recruiting performance dashboard creates a source of truth that changes the conversation from 'what is happening in recruiting?' to 'what should we do next?'
3. The Flow, Focus, Friction framework is a diagnostic loop for teams of one: Flow addresses speed and delivery issues, Focus targets sourcing and energy waste, and Friction tackles burnout and interviewer overload.
4. Applying the framework at Kit reduced time to hire from 45 to 29 days, lifted candidate experience scores from 50 to over 80, and raised quality of hire to consistently above 4.2 out of 5 — all within six months.
5. Introducing real target hire and start dates — and connecting hiring timelines to actual business need — is one of the simplest and most impactful changes a solo recruiter can make.
6. Scope expands when data proves impact. Taking the time to build systems, define KPIs, and own what 'good' looks like positions a solo TA leader to take on broader strategic and people ops work.
7. You don't need a RecOps team to operate like one. Start small, iterate, and let the data tell you where to go next.

Transcript

Note: transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies.

So I'm Emily, senior recruiter at Kit. Kit is an email marketing platform for creators. And you might be thinking, why is a recruiter doing a rec ops track? And it's because I'm self-taught. So today, I'm going to be walking you through my journey of becoming a data-driven TA leader and how that transformation changed, not just how I recruit, but how I show up as a strategic partner.

So two things that we're gonna be covering today. First is how I became self-taught in recruiting ops and how that led me to make decisions confidently with data. Second is a framework that I call flow, focus, friction. Remember that. We're gonna come back to it. These aren't just concepts, they're actually how I triage problems and make recommendations back to our business.

But before I talk about dashboards and metrics, I want to set the scene, and maybe some of you can relate. Show of hands again, who else here is a team of one or on a small recruiting team? Yeah? Okay. Well, you're in the right session because I joined Kit as the only recruiter. I still am, and not to sound too dramatic, but I had no idea what I was doing.

We didn't have recruiting ops. We didn't have KPIs. We had no clear owner of data, and that was suddenly a me problem. When hiring was happening, but it was all instinct-driven and based on vibes. So for a while when I had to figure this out, I felt very overwhelmed and challenged. The reason that I felt this way is because I came from much larger TA orgs, right? Places for dedicated support for all of these things. And then I got to Kit and I thought, "Wait, I need to define that myself." I didn't even consider myself a data person. I was googling things that I now feel fluent in, or like we all do nowadays, I was asking ChatGPT. And for the first few months when I had to figure this out, I felt intimidated. So here's what happened every time an executive leader at Kit asked me, "How is recruiting doing?"

Step one, I would painstakingly pull all of our data from our old ATS. Step two, I would manually calculate metrics with a literal calculator Step three, I would then try to translate that data into a readable report in Notion. Step four, no one read the reports, which was sad. And eventually I just stopped doing it, not because I didn't care, but because the ROI of that entire process that I just walked you through was zero. And yes, you heard that right. It took me six-plus hours, and the ROI was zero. 

And this is where I was. I didn't know where to start. I didn't know what mattered. I didn't know how to connect data to a narrative that our business actually cared about. But here's what I've since learned in talking with other recruiters that are in a similar situation as me, is that this is incredibly common, right? This wasn't a me problem. I'm curious, has anyone else felt this way before? Yeah? Yeah. It's a systems problem until I decided to fix it. So the shift happened for me when I stopped asking what data exists, and I started asking, "What data do we actually need as a recruiting function to support our business?"

So we built a recruiting performance dashboard at Ashby. It looks just like this. And for the first time, there was finally a shared source of truth. The conversation changed from what is happening in recruiting to what should we do next, and how can we become more proactive instead of reactive? The KPIs that you see, I defined them, and we set real goals for the first time as a business, and that was the moment that I decided owning what good looked like.

Fast-forward to today, CNPS rating candidate experience has gone up, time to hire has dropped, quality of hire is up, and these are all improvements that we saw in about six months. That's it. And I'll talk more about how we, like, got there in just a sec. But what I wanna leave you with right now is that these aren't vanity metrics. They're proof that data is actually working. 

So engineering is our highest volume role like it is for many SaaS companies, and last year was our most critical hire. It's because a third of our engineering team turned over, so we had to get really granular quickly. So I built a focused engineering dashboard to partner more effectively with those leaders. This became our shared decision-making tool. Instead of me giving updates ad hoc and hoping that they landed, we were having real conversations about priorities, pipeline, and when to open roles based on business need. These types of dashboards, they have helped me build trust and operate with more intention.

Okay, so now the part to take you home. Remember this framework? I used to diagnose it, diagnose recruiting data as a team of one. I call it flow, focus, and friction. It's not a checklist, it's a diagnostic loop. Each category targets a different kind of problem, and for each one, I follow four simple steps. I identify the pain, review the data, try something, and then I measure the outcome.

So let's walk through each one. So flow is about speed, experience, and delivery. Our pain was that we were missing target hire dates. We had candidate dropout. We had roles open for sixty-plus days on a regular basis. Our time to hire and time to fill were way too long. I was interviewing thirty to forty candidates just to make a single hire.

So I went to our data, and I saw that time and stage, pass-through rates by stage, were where the biggest drop-offs were happening. So then we implemented Ashby's scheduling automation, we reduced the number of interview stages, and we used the AI-assisted application review in Ashby, which helped me top spot candidates faster instead of drowning in thousands of applicants.

The outcome is that candidate experience has gone up from fifty, fifty to over eighty. Quality of hire has increased. Time to hire has dropped from forty-five days to twenty-nine days. This all happened in a matter of six months after we implemented Ashby. Focus is about targeting time and energy waste.

Our pain was that we had an ineffective sourcing strategy, and to be honest, we just didn't have a real recruiting strategy. I was spending money on job boards and agency, and agencies without knowing where our best hires actually came from. So again, I went to the data. I looked at hires by source and quality of hire by source.

We implemented automated quality of hire surveys sent through Ashby, and based off all that data, we set an OKR to make four of ten hires from top-performing sources. The outcome is that four of ten hires now come from top-performing sources, and quality of hire is consistently above four point two out of five.

Friction is about burnout and balance and overload. Our interviewers were sick of interviewing. They were declining panels, missing feedback forms. I'm sure many of you can relate, and just fatigued from interviewing too many candidates that weren't the right fit. So I looked at interviewer load, open roles per function, and time and stage to understand where that pressure was actually coming from.

We tried expanding our interview pools and we introduced real target hire and start dates, which sounds simple, but for me, that changed everything because we actually got intentional about not opening roles on a whim and actually connecting hiring timelines to actual business need.

That also meant for me, like being honest about what I could actually own as a sole recruiter, as a team of one. The outcome is that we have a much higher percentage of on-time hires and interviewers who are genuinely engaged to support hiring again. No more reminding people to fill out the feed- feedback forms. The trust in our recruiting function has gone way up

So here's where I've landed. Because I took the time to build these systems, define KPIs, and actually use our data, I've been able to show up as a str-true strategic partner to Kit. Not just reporting on recruiting, but actually diagnosing it, recommending changes, connecting headcount decisions to business outcomes. And the best part is that my scope is expanding because of it. I'm now taking on broader people ops work, not despite being a team of one, but because of what I've been able to build as a team of one. 

You don't need an entire devops team to do this if you don't have one. You just need to start building, iterating, and experimenting, and this framework is how I've been able to do that.

And I want you all to know if I can do it, you can do it too, and I hope this gives you a starting point. Thank you so much.