Treat Hiring Like a Product with Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen
#20

Treat Hiring Like a Product with Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen

Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen never planned on a career in HR. She spent four years as an elementary school teacher, seven years at an aerospace company, and the last decade building the entire people function at ed-tech company Prodigy Education, where she now serves as Chief People Officer. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about borrowing a page from the sales playbook, literally handing her recruiting team a copy of the HubSpot Sales Acceleration Formula and mapping the hiring funnel stage by stage, why she believes the best recruiters treat hiring like a product, and how her team screens for culture fit without sliding into similar-to-me bias. Sarah-Jayne also shares how team heat maps and quarterly squad health checks help her figure out which teams are actually delivering, and the mindset shift, from survey fatigue to lack of action fatigue, that transformed employee participation at Prodigy.
 
Takeaways:
  • Treat recruiting like a product. The best recruiters and recruiting teams stay in constant experimentation mode instead of getting attached to how things have always been done. Testing, learning, and iterating raises the bar over time, both for individuals and for the whole function.
  • Borrow the sales playbook for your funnel. Sarah-Jayne modeled Prodigy's recruiting pipeline on HubSpot's Sales Acceleration Formula, tracking every stage to see where candidates drop off. The right number of interview stages isn't fixed, it moves with the labor market, so revisit it as hiring conditions change.
  • Culture fit isn't about hiring people who remind you of yourself. It's about finding people who will thrive in your environment and make the people around them better, and it should be assessed through conversation, not resume screening. Train dedicated people to spot it consistently, the way Amazon's bar raiser model does.
  • Survey fatigue is really lack of action fatigue. People keep answering surveys and giving feedback when they see leadership actually act on it. Follow up, communicate clearly, and hold managers accountable, and participation follows.
  • Give AI-assisted work a pass, as long as candidates can speak to it. Let people use AI on take-home projects or case studies, then use the interview to focus on whether they truly understand and can explain what they produced.


Quote of the Show:
  • "The best recruiters and the best recruiting teams treat hiring like a product." - Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen

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