Offer Accepted

Hiring senior leaders on gut feel is a risk most companies cannot afford. Cristina Navarro , Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Tubi , joins Shannon to discuss why traditional interview formats fail at the executive level and how her team built a structured leadership assessment to close that gap. She explains how the process was co-created with senior leadership, why prompt design ma...

Hiring managers need better support, not more documents. Kyle Gatlin , Head of Talent at Arrive , joins Shannon to discuss how his team built an AI hiring agent to guide managers through the recruiting process across 70 countries. Drawing from his background in education and talent operations, Kyle explains why accessibility, structured interviewing, and candidate experience became the foundation...

Early hiring gets expensive fast when founders skip alignment. Cassie Chao Leemans , VP of Talent at Craft Ventures , joins Shannon to share how early-stage teams can make stronger hiring decisions before scale adds complexity. She explains why pedigree can distract founders from what the business actually needs, how unclear expectations create mis-hires, and why every new role should connect back...

Talent and people teams have more shared work than most companies realize. Asha Beirne , Senior Manager of People Operations and Systems at Rula , joins Shannon to discuss how recruiting and people ops can work together across the employee lifecycle. Drawing from her move from recruiting operations into people operations, Asha shares what talent teams often miss when they do not have visibility in...

Candidate experience is one of the few levers you can fully control in hiring. Greg Marsh , Head of Recruiting at Sierra , joins Shannon to share how his team scaled from 25 to 600 employees while building a candidate experience that consistently stands out. He explains how Sierra approaches candidate obsession, why small moments like personalization matter more than big gestures, and how recruiti...

Skills-based hiring only works when teams can consistently define, assess, and develop the right skills. Alessandra Pegnim , Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Udemy , joins Shannon to share how her team built a more practical approach to skills-based hiring. She explains how Udemy validates skills with managers, identifies patterns of top performers, and uses structured interviews to make hirin...

Equity can be the difference between losing your best candidates and closing them. Hannah Spellmeyer , Chief People Officer at Slingshot Aerospace , joins Shannon to break down how recruiters can confidently sell equity and compete with larger companies. She shares what most teams get wrong, the key numbers every recruiter should know, and how to position equity based on what candidates actually c...

Hiring is changing quickly as AI tools reshape how teams build products and how companies evaluate talent. Jonathan Durnford-Smith , Head of Talent at Synthesia , joins Shannon to discuss why recruiting teams must become more agile and strategic. He shares lessons from scaling talent functions at high-growth companies and explains how AI tooling is shifting what great engineers look like today. In...

Great hiring outcomes start with great interviewers. Vanessa Paladini , Global Talent Acquisition Director at Nubank , joins Shannon to share how the world’s largest digital bank outside of Asia raised its hiring bar without slowing down growth. She walks through Nubank’s four workstreams, including structured assessments, technical bar raisers, and a data-backed interviewer scorecard. Vanessa bro...

Offer acceptance rate is the clearest signal of whether your recruiting engine is actually working. Jordan Trott , Talent Lead at Taptap Send , joins Shannon to break down how his team maintains a 93% offer acceptance rate across global hiring. He explains why this metric reflects everything from role clarity to candidate experience, and where most teams lose candidates long before the offer stage...

Recruiting teams often track hiring metrics but forget to ask the team how it feels to do the work. Will Ducey , Head of Recruiting Operations at Ashby , joins Shannon Ogborn to talk about how internal recruiter surveys create a feedback loop that leads to better tools and processes. Throughout the conversation, Will explains the balance between quantitative and qualitative feedback, sharing real-...

Clarity is the foundation of any effective internal mobility program. Angie Peterson , Talent Operations & Programs Manager at Coursera , joins Shannon to break down how her team turned employee feedback into a durable system for internal career growth. After survey data showed employees didn’t understand how to move internally, Angie partnered with L&D to diagnose the real blockers, condu...

Many teams want a better candidate experience, yet few build one that reflects the real work and the real product behind it. Tianna Johnson , founder of People Culture Talent and former talent leader at Notion, Lyft, and GitHub, joins Shannon to share how product-infused hiring creates clarity, excitement, and trust for every candidate. She explains how she introduced product touchpoints at each c...

2025 was a year of real change, not just in tools or trends, but in how recruiting teams showed up. In this special recap episode, host Shannon Ogborn looks back on the conversations that defined Offer Accepted this year. The common thread among the highest-impact teams across all episodes was not the pursuit of the next big thing, but a clarity on fundamental priorities. They achieved success by...

How do you keep hiring quality high while the company scales globally at speed?  In this episode, Shannon sits down with Maggie Landers , VP Talent at Harvey , to walk through the values interview program that keeps a fast-growing AI company aligned. Maggie shares how Harvey turned three simple values, simplicity, decisiveness, and “Job’s Not Finished”, into a global, standardized interview that a...

Cultural context can make or break your ability to close top talent across regions. Alexandre Corbin , Head of Talent Acquisition at Tabby , joins Shannon Ogborn to share how his team adapted recruiting strategies to local norms while scaling one of the Middle East’s fastest-growing fintech companies. From launching operations in Egypt to navigating hiring compliance in Saudi Arabia, he explains w...

Bringing in early career talent is more than a pipeline play; it’s a catalyst for business transformation. Corey Twitty , now at Zillow , joins Shannon Ogborn to unpack how he built Netflix’s first emerging talent program from the ground up. He explains how to challenge deep-rooted hiring habits, build trust with skeptics, and design programs that align with culture and business needs. Corey also...

The candidate experience coordinator role is changing fast, and innovative teams are evolving it before it becomes obsolete. Dan Seifert , Senior Director of Talent Acquisition and Experience at Marqeta , joins Shannon to discuss how to future-proof talent teams without sacrificing quality. He outlines how his team restructured this critical role, introduced monthly feedback loops, and began train...

Hiring teams often focus on filling roles fast—but what if your employer brand could do the sourcing for you? Jeff Moore , VP of Talent Acquisition, Operations and Workspaces at Toast , joins Shannon to share how his team scaled employer brand into a strategic lever for talent. Jeff explains why recruiters need to act more like researchers, how he has built flexibility into TA organizations, and w...

Hiring is one of the biggest responsibilities founders face in the early stages, and closing the right candidates can make or break your company’s trajectory. Harriet Walker , Head of Talent at SuperSeed VC , joins Shannon to share her Five Cs of Closing framework: Clarity, Credibility, Connection, Continuity, and Commitment. She highlights why closing is a discipline that begins from the first ca...

Candidate fraud isn’t just a recruiting problem. It’s a company-wide risk, too. Ari Garcia , Global Recruiting Operations Lead at Quora , joins Shannon to break down how hiring teams can partner with security, leadership, and with tools like Ashby to address fraud without compromising the candidate experience. With nearly six years at Quora, Ari brings a systems-focused lens to solving cross-funct...

Hiring plans rarely survive first contact with reality. So how do you lead when half your headcount is unplanned? Tommy Hansen , Head of Recruiting at Juniper Square , joins Shannon to share how his small team hired over 300 people in a year—despite 40–60% of those roles being unplanned. He explains how redefining “planned” vs. “unplanned” headcount changed how recruiting partnered with the busine...

What shifts when recruiting leaders show up as business leaders first? Adam Ward , Founding Partner at Growth by Design Talent , joins Shannon to explore how recruiting teams can evolve from service providers to trusted advisors. With a background leading talent at Facebook, Qualcomm, and Pinterest through massive growth, Adam shows what stakeholder engagement looks like when done well. He outline...

Hiring the right people can feel like a guessing game if your process isn’t structured. Heather Doshay , Partner & Head of Talent at SignalFire , joins Shannon to explore the impact of structured interviews on hiring outcomes. She explains how unstructured interviews often lead to bias and why creating a consistent, repeatable process is essential for building high-performing teams. Heather ou...

Ashby’s $50M Series D marks a shift in how the company is thinking about product, customers, and the future of recruiting. In this episode, CEO Benji Encz returns to share what led to Ashby’s latest milestone. He and Shannon talk about the strategic timing of the fundraise, the growing role of AI in recruiting, and how to balance tech with a human touch. They also unpack why quality of hire matter...