"We started with one very tangible problem," Katja mentions. "We wanted to build data dashboards from scratch as a holistic launch pad for me as a new leader. I wanted to get a good understanding of what's happening both in talent acquisition and other parts of the employment life cycle."
In the first few weeks, Katja had her wish. "It was such a big win to get visualised dashboards that reflect accurate data up and running really fast. This was actually faster than anything I've ever seen."
Getting the data was one thing, but actually knowing what KPIs to measure and optimise for was another. This is where TalentOps Lab was really able to make a difference. By working with the executive leadership team, walking them through the data and highlighting where they saw process waste, they were able to make suggestions on how to approach the transformation.
In Katja's words: "TalentOps Lab brought us the technical knowledge and deep subject matter expertise in talent acquisition. They helped us to understand how the overarching ecosystem works, from talent marketing to tooling and data. As such, we were able to get to the root causes faster and start to build the solutions."
On the back of the strategy work, the project expanded and TalentOps Lab was asked to be hands-on with the transformation. This started with re-aligning the team so that each hiring manager had a dedicated TA Partner, rather than working with whoever had capacity when a requisition was made. This shift allowed the team to build relationships with their hiring managers, rather than operating transactionally.
From there, tweaks were made to improve the processes. Lengthy take-home assignments were replaced by live AI-assisted assessments, with other bottom-of-funnel bottlenecks removed too. TalentOps Lab also got to work on refreshing the EVP, and brought this to life with a new hero video and interview series to showcase life at Aiven.
Finally, they worked closely with the TA team directly to guide them on focusing on the right input metrics and KPIs.
As Katja says: "TalentOps Lab hasn't just delivered one-off things like dashboards, strategies or technical solutions. You can buy that from any agency. It's what has happened after that's the big thing. TalentOps Lab has taught the skills to the team. They're now enabled to go forward and do more, and run with their own feet."
On top of the TA transformation, Aiven's People team has also been flexing a new muscle. Over the past few months, there have been hackathons and drop-in clinics to help build vibe-coding skills. As such, various team members have now produced solutions themselves: from salary-range finders, to workplace organiser apps, to agents that answer Tier 1 helpdesk tickets.
Katja adds: "It's been exciting to build with AI and have someone like TalentOps Lab to really accelerate it. They've helped the team learn how to build agents, apps and automations, start to question the status quo, and then help make problem points visible to the business. They've shown them in real life how to do it, how to problem-solve, what kind of questions to ask, to accelerate further on their own. I think that's given wings to the team."
And so what about the outputs? Over the course of the past six months, all metrics have moved in the right direction:
- Screens-to-hire dropped from 15.4x to 10.7x.
- Offers closed increased from 77% to 84%, with average Compa-Ratio dropping by 0.1.
- Average hires per month increased from 1.67 to 2.33 per TA Partner.
All of these changes mean that the average time-to-hire in tech decreased from 83 days to just 35 days.
When speaking about the project, TalentOps Lab founder, Shaun Rudden, recalls: "The funny thing is that we didn't focus on time-to-hire with the team. It's an output metric and so not something that we pay attention to. Our goal was to get the team focused on inputs and conversions first, as well as looking to unblock bottlenecks through the funnel."
Reflecting on the outcomes, Katja noted: "I'm blown away. Working with TalentOps Lab has been a massive accelerator. The leap has been the biggest I've seen in my career."