The Hiring Overhaul That Worked Everywhere Except Where I Cared

I once ran a hiring overhaul that worked everywhere except the one place I actually cared about.

The Data Engineering Group's funnel was leaking from every joint:

  600  applied
  150  attempted the home assignment
   30  reached interviews
   10  final round
    7  offers
    5  accepted

Six hundred in the top, five signed at the bottom, and a time-to-hire of 45 days, long enough that the strong ones took a faster offer while we were still booking round three. The home assignment was a wall: good Israeli candidates with better-known logos in their inbox would not give up a weekend for it. The first screen ran in English, which quietly told local candidates how seriously we took their site. And every hire needed a sign-off from France, which added delay and a thumb on the scale for French candidates. None of these were secrets. They were just nobody's job to fix, which is the natural state of every broken process: visible to all, owned by none.

What we changed

Almost none of it was glamorous, which is the point. We moved a manager conversation to the front, right after the recruiter screen, so someone who could talk shop reached candidates while they were still deciding whether we were serious, not in round four after the home assignment had scared them off. We wrote a real engineering brochure, because our interviewers were each improvising the same pitch fifteen times a week and grinding their morale to powder; one good artifact did that job once and gave them their evenings back. We let candidates pick between the take-home and an on-site coding session, which roughly doubled the strong people who'd finish. We built feedback guides so rejections stopped vanishing into silence: a candidate ghosted after three rounds tells ten friends, one let down well tells a different ten.

And to get any budget at all, I quit arguing in adjectives and put a number on it. I sat with the product managers and worked out the revenue we lost every month a seat stayed empty, and walked into the room with that figure instead of a feeling. A CFO who shrugs at "we're understaffed and morale is suffering" moves fast when the cost of doing nothing is the number on the slide. That translation, from engineering pain into money, was the single highest-leverage thing I did, and it had nothing to do with hiring.

What actually happened

It worked. Time-to-hire fell from 45 days to 30. Candidate satisfaction climbed into the high sevens. Spain turned into a genuine success, hired well, grew more diverse, and outgrew its office. The fully-remote team grew past what I'd forecast. France added twenty percent headcount.

And Israel, the site I'm from and the one I most wanted to win, went nowhere. We streamlined every step and it changed nothing, because the blocker was never the process. It was the salary band. The gap between what headquarters would approve and what a senior engineer actually costs in Tel Aviv ran thirty to forty-five percent, and no clever funnel, no warmer brochure, no flexible assessment on earth closes a forty-percent comp gap. I'd spent months perfecting the shape of the pipe while the actual problem was the pressure inside it.

The bottom line

Two takeaways, neither comfortable.

The one I most needed to learn about myself: a process person attacks every problem as a process problem, because that's the tool in his hand, and he'll burn a quarter optimizing a pipeline whose real defect is a number set two pay grades above him. The hardest part of any turnaround isn't the fixing. It's the diagnosis, sorting the problems that are yours to solve from the ones made of money or politics that no interview loop was ever going to touch. I got most of the way through this before I admitted which kind Israel was.

The other: diversity that doesn't exist at the executive table won't materialize in the funnel, because the people making the regional calls keep applying Paris defaults to sites they've never sat in. A company only half-committed to a region manufactures a lose-lose, and a nicer careers page just wastes everyone's time, the candidates' most of all. The overhaul was good work and I'd do all of it again. What still stings is that I should have spent week one working out whether I was up against a pipe or a wall, instead of finding out in month four.