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.