Legal, Finance & People · Chapter 4 of 4
Recruiting and people operations
Technical recruiting is the largest people title here, and it is measured like a funnel.
Recruiting in technology companies is a pipeline job with a conversion problem, which is why the postings expect instrumentation rather than relationship management alone.
- Know the funnel numbers. Sourced to screen, screen to onsite, onsite to offer, offer to accept. The stage where you lose people tells you what to fix, and most recruiters cannot state their own conversion rates.
- Time to hire against quality of hire. Optimising the first alone lowers the bar, which is the failure mode every hiring manager has seen.
- Offer acceptance rate is the sharpest diagnostic. A low rate means compensation is off, the process took too long, or the candidate experience was poor — all fixable and all invisible without the number.
- Technical credibility matters. A recruiter who can tell a backend engineer from a platform engineer, and who understands what the team actually needs, sources far better than one matching keywords.
- People operations is increasingly systems work — onboarding, levelling, compensation bands, performance cycles. Multi-entity, in 83% of these postings, which makes every one of those harder.
What differentiates in an interview
Bring your funnel with its numbers, and one thing you changed that moved a specific conversion rate. That is a systems answer in a function that is often assessed on activity.
And have a view on the bar under pressure — what you did when a role had been open five months and the team wanted to lower it.
What an engineer should understand about how people decisions get made
| Process | What actually drives it | What engineers get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Levelling | A written definition of scope and impact per level, applied comparatively | Assuming it is about tenure or technical skill. It is about scope of impact, and it is judged against peers at that level |
| Performance review | Written evidence, gathered over a cycle, usually calibrated across a group | Doing good work and expecting it to be seen. Calibration is a room where someone argues for you from notes — if your manager has none, you are argued for badly |
| Promotion | Evidence you are already operating at the next level | Waiting to be given the opportunity. Almost every ladder requires demonstration first, which is uncomfortable and is the actual rule |
| Compensation | Bands, market data, budget, and position within band | Assuming performance is the only input. Position in band and budget cycle frequently matter more in a given year |
| Managing out | A documented gap, a genuine opportunity to close it, and no surprises | Believing it is arbitrary. When it looks arbitrary the failure is usually that nobody said it clearly enough, early enough |
The single most useful thing to internalise is calibration. In most organisations, your rating is not decided by your manager alone — it is argued in a room of managers comparing people they mostly have not worked with, from written summaries. The quality of that written summary is a large part of your outcome, and you can materially improve it by keeping your manager supplied with specific, dated, quantified evidence throughout the cycle rather than in the final week.
What to actually do about it, without becoming tedious
Keep a running record of what you did and what changed as a result. A few lines a week. Not for performance theatre — because you will not remember March in November, and neither will your manager.
Include the second-order items, which are the ones that vanish: whose design changed after your review, what the team stopped doing, what did not break because of something you did. These are the evidence for senior levels and they leave no artefact of their own.
Ask directly what the gap is, and ask for it in the terms the ladder uses. ‘What would I need to demonstrate to be operating at the next level?’ is a fair question with a real answer, and a manager who cannot answer it is telling you something important.
Do not confuse being valuable with being promotable. They are different, and the most common trap is being so useful in your current scope that moving you is expensive. That is a good problem and it does not resolve itself.
And on compensation specifically: the strongest position is a written, specific, external data point for your level and location, raised outside a review cycle. Raising it during the cycle competes with a budget that has already been allocated.
Check yourself