Week 1: orient and observe

  • Sit in on 3 interviews across different teams. Don't speak — observe rubrics, hiring manager style, time spent.
  • Read the last 6 months of hires. What worked? What didn't?
  • Meet every hiring manager 1:1 for 30 min. Goal: understand their style and pain points, not pitch your process.
  • Audit the ATS. What state is it in? What's been neglected?

Week 2: identify the bottleneck

Pull data:

  • Time-to-hire by role
  • Offer-accept rate
  • Source effectiveness
  • Pipeline conversion stage-by-stage

Find the single biggest bottleneck. Resist the urge to fix everything.

Week 3: pick one fix and ship

Don't redesign the whole funnel in week 3. Pick the one bottleneck and ship a specific improvement:

  • Slow scheduling → introduce shared interviewer calendars
  • Low offer-accept → re-benchmark comp
  • Bad pipeline conversion → rewrite job descriptions for the worst-performing role

Week 4: communicate

  • Present the metrics dashboard to the hiring team.
  • Set goals for the next quarter.
  • Communicate any process changes clearly with rationale.

What NOT to do

  • Switch ATS in your first 90 days. The cost of migration almost always exceeds the benefit.
  • Make everyone use new templates and rubrics in week 1. Adoption fails.
  • Promise a hiring miracle. Set realistic expectations grounded in data.