Male Voice: Hello and welcome to Eightfold Radio. Sarah Hallahan leads technical recruiting for Adroll. Since adopting Eightfold about eight months ago, Adroll’s technical recruiting team has come to rely on it on a nearly daily basis. And Eightfold’s nurture campaign functionality has already lead to some serious recruiting wins. Let’s listen now as Joanne McDougald speaks with Sarah about how Eightfold has changed life for her team.

Sarah: So I lead technical recruiting for Adroll Group, and I’ve been with Adroll for about four and a half years now. And I came to know Eightfold through our director of global recruiting, Daniel, and he was really the visionary behind it. He got to know some of the founders and introduced us to, “Hey, we’re going to pilot this. Go use it.” And so we’ve been using it for about six to eight months now, and so I’ve become a real big fan of the platform to the point where my technical recruiting team is using it nearly daily. But yeah, that’s how I got to know Eightfold.

We just hired a data science engineer who rejected an offer three years ago and became reengaged in our process, so that’s a big win for us. And we’ve used their nurture campaigns to engage different DNI communities and just past candidates in general. And so far the feedback and the enthusiasm from the team has been through the roof, and even our hiring managers are like, “Can I get a seat so I can create nurture campaigns?” Hang on, we have an employer brand to protect. We can’t just have you just sent whatever you want to previous candidates or new candidates.” So yeah, I love recruiting tools. I geek out on it, and to see how impactful Eightfold has been it just makes me excited to see what they can do. Yeah, it’s been a great tool, great platform, and I can just see great things for Eightfold moving forward.

Eightfold: In my experience – I work in marketing, and a marketing tool can suck up a half of an FTE, quarter of an FTE just to manage it. What’s been your experience with Eightfold in terms of the commitment to the tool?

Sarah: So I’m a recruiting manager. I don’t normally recruit, but I’m now on a search, and my first tool was Eightfold. And with that I reached out to 20 people, 50-50 female-male, and I’ve had about seven phone calls from that outreach. So I think that speaks a lot to effectiveness in time savings, and that was with maybe an hour of time, and now I have seven phone calls. And so my hope is that these phone calls will progress, and we’ll see where it goes. So in terms of time savings and investment it’s just a matter of getting to know the platform and use it, and it’ll become your best friend.

Eightfold: Simplicity, ease of use and then results.

Sarah: Results, yeah.

Eightfold: So what I’ve heard a lot is that the open rates are off the charts because you’re engaging with people that did engage with you, know your company and have shown an interest in the past. And other platforms have just left those people abandoned.

Sarah: Yeah, so this is what happened with our data science engineer. He declined our offer because we couldn’t offer him more opportunities at the time. And then we could, and we completely forgot about him, and that’s completely on us. But with Eightfold we were able to reengage him and say, “Hey, let’s interview again. We now offer remote, and this is going to be a wonderful experience together.” So yeah, it definitely reminds us to go back to the people who are interested in us. Just because they weren’t a fit yesterday doesn’t mean they’re not a fit today. So it saves a lot of time. It improves candidate experience, and it helps hiring.

Eightfold: Amazing. So I heard you say you reached out to 50-50.

Sarah: Yeah, so for example, three kind of key diversity goals that we have, and we don’t try target for diversity, but we do try to expand the pools and increase the chances of hiring more people from different walks of life and different experience. So for tech in particular we are aiming to increase our hiring by 25 percent for women in tech. And other than that we have a pretty diverse mix of people. So for example, I targeted 50-50 female-male just to see what would come of it. And it’s leading to some interesting insights. It’s leading to some bigger questions that I’m looking forward to taking to the Eightfold team to see if they can help me with that. So yes, we do have those goals, and Eightfold and the features in there have made it easier to identify people and target broad from the beginning so that you’re not trying to solve a problem later on, and it’s too late to solve that problem.

Eightfold: Yeah, I think some of the other folks that we’ve talked to tonight are with giant corporations that have maybe legacy and institutional biases that were unintentional, and really it’s a way to overcome that. And I think that’s so powerful.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s fantastic because even just getting involved in sourcing and being more intentional in how we find and engage candidates, whether it’s previous candidates or new candidates, it’s opening up a conversation. “Okay, well, we’re engaging with all these people, but they’re not getting through the funnel. Why is that?” I’m like, “Well, have you checked your biases at the door?” So it leads to unconscious bias training, and it leads to standardization of interviews, which is something we’ve been involved in in tech recruiting for Adroll right now. So it becomes a dialogue opener, and it just ends up resulting in a lot of brainstorming.

Okay, how can we make this a better experience for candidates? But then how can we also have a good conversation around, “Is this going to be a fit for what we need as well?” So it’s amazing how one thing can lead to a larger conversation. And then from that you end up engaging in other activities and other programs, and it all ends up being a holistic part of that plan. So Eightfold has definitely launched those conversations in some places and has led to additional conversations for things we need to think about moving forward.

Eightfold: Recruiting has had maybe a metronome, sort of, of how you’ve done this. It’s just been this beat. I’m going to get these numbers in. I’m going to do that. It sounds to me like it’s really changing your workflow and the way that you’re dealing with what’s possible in the company.

Sarah: Yeah, so there’s definitely a beat. What I preach in my team is, “Look at your pass-through rates. How many candidates do you need at the top of the funnel to get to a hire? Where’s the drop off going to be? Okay, well, you have people dropping off from face-to-face to offer. Why is that happening? Are we miscalibrated? Is there biases creeping in there?” So it definitely changes recruiters’ mentality to be more talent partners and advisors in terms of, “Okay, how can we make these pass-through rates healthier?” But then also if I know I have to do 20 recruiter screens to get to a hire, how can I diversify that? How can I make sure there’s an equal amount of people from different communities that are being represented so that we can be more aligned with what we see in the world around us and give people fair chances?

Eightfold: I love it – fair chances. That’s a great takeaway. If you were to share Eightfold with a colleague and tell them a little bit about what your experience has been, can you just give me a quick sound bite about what your experience has been and what you would share with them?

Sarah: Dive in and embrace it. If you use it well you’ll find a great timesaver, and you’ll build quite quickly and make hires from it. So embrace it.

Eightfold: Embrace it. Thank you so much for joining us for Eightfold Radio, and with that we’re going to let you go back to dinner. Enjoy the party. Thank you so much for coming to the Eightfold kickoff party.

Sarah: Great, thanks for having me.

Eightfold: Thank you.

Male Voice: Thanks for listening to Eightfold Radio. To find out more about Eightfold, please visit us at Eightfold.ai and be sure to listen to our other episodes chronicling the experiences of Eightfold’s customers and partners.