How Flock Safety Measures Talent Density with Ashby’s Quality of Hire Surveys

Flock Safety is a public safety technology company on a mission to eliminate crime and build safer communities. When the company began focusing on strategic hiring and talent density, they needed a way to measure and improve the quality of their hires. Moving beyond traditional metrics like Time to Fill, Flock Safety partnered with Ashby to build a Quality of Hire program that now influences everything from executive discussions to hiring decisions.

Problem: Manual Survey Tracking and Unreliable Data

Before a Quality of Hire program could even be considered, the team knew improving their overall talent operations would be vital. Flock was historically struggling with inefficient and inaccurate data. Their legacy system made collecting survey responses extremely manual and had no ability to customize the surveys it did offer. This limited flexibility hindered the team’s ability to collect information at scale. 

"We had a lovely human on our team, who every single week, had to email a Google Form Quality of Hire survey to 20+ different hiring managers. That experience is painful. No one wants to do that." 

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

The team was also using two separate tools for sourcing and ATS, leading to often incorrect reporting that made it impossible to understand how the business was doing or have meaningful conversations with executives about hiring progress.

"I wanted to move from our last ATS provider because I just thought our reporting was terrible; it never really scaled with us. The report I was sending to our CEO every week felt  inaccurate, which isn't how it should be. We believe in being honest about progress against goals and I felt like I never was fully able to be."

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Solution: Reliable Reporting that Paved the Path for Tracking Quality Hires

Once onboarded to Ashby, the team was operating more efficiently as they: 

• No longer had data reliability issues 
• Eliminated manual collection of Quality of Hire surveys
• Improved offer ownership and distribution process
• Upleveled scheduling right within the ATS

This opened the opportunity for Laura to tackle her next big idea: Quality of Hire as the north star for talent acquisition. The team was historically reliant on Time to Fill (or TTF).

“While you should absolutely have an SLA around TTF, I didn’t feel this accurately represented if you were hiring the right person for the right role. TTF makes recruiters feel that they need to fill a role in 60 days or their job is on the line when really their focus should be ‘did I exhaust all options to find the best person.’ I started having conversations with our Chief People Officer about what our actual goal is: hiring quality people who are impacting our talent density as an organization.” 

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

For many talent teams, implementing Quality of Hire is easier said than done. Flock Safety has quickly become one of the most active users of Ashby’s Quality of Hire functionality while maintaining a consistently high score. Laura, along with Recruiting Operations Manager Kevin Minchella, walked us through how they got adoption, use the findings, and what’s on deck as a result of the progress made.

Step 1: Alignment with People Teams

As aforementioned, Laura kicked off the conversation with Flock Safety’s Chief People Officer to create alignment. She believes success here stemmed from an organizational mindset around conservative hiring. 

“We have a big belief at Flock to do more with less. Rather than aggressively and excessively hiring, we have the mentality that every hire counts. This focus shifts your mindset to quality rather than speed. If you can’t solve the problem by throwing people at it, then you need to make sure that every seat you have available to you is filled with someone who is going to have a significant impact. I used this company belief to approach our greater team’s shift in mindset towards quality as the goal.” 

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Step 2: Get Started Simply and Quickly

Instead of fixating on how to measure quality, Laura believed that getting the initiative started in some form was better than overcomplicating it.

“Rather than spending a lot of time trying to figure out the exact science, we just wanted to get something off the ground. At Flock Safety, we have a bias towards action, and that allows us to be comfortable with producing a V1. Ashby made our V1 so easy. We went back to the business and said: ‘Hey we turned this survey on. It’s automatic, easy to fill out, and we want you to answer a simple question. We’re going to take your answer and apply that to how we evaluate our interview processes.’ This data is extremely actionable and that got hiring managers excited. It didn’t feel like you submitted a form and it went into a blackhole. Now we can think about phase two and what to solve for next.”

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Step 3: Determine Survey Specifics

The main decision the team had to make was the sequence in which the Quality of Hire Survey would be sent to hiring managers. While Ashby’s built-in solution comes pre-set at 30, 60, and 90 days, this can be easily customized. Flock Safety opted for a different sequence through discussion with People partners. Given the HRBP’s quarterly business reviews with executive leaders, the team landed on sending their Quality of Hire Surveys as follows: 

• 90 Day Mark: If a hire results in a low hiring manager score within the first 90 days, this signals to Flock that something went wrong in the recruiting process and needs to be reflected on with that hiring manager in the next role kickoff. This leads to discussions around: did we test for the right attributes, did we invite the right interviewers, did we have the right profile, and so much more.
• 6 Month Mark: By six months, a low score could be the result of an inaccurate job description, lack of clear expectations, a skills gap or misalignment of working style. 
• 12 Month Mark: A year in, Laura believes a negative score could indicate burnout, disengagement, or a plateaued performance. This forces us to look deeper and ask if we are providing enough challenges, growth opportunities, and impact. On the other hand it could show a more systemic issue such as inadequate training or ineffective management. 

The results so far are driving more teamwork across talent and people groups. 

“[Quality of Hire] has begun serving as a good metric for areas to get the People team involved and insert a performance management conversation directly with the hiring manager. That’s where all this data enables us to collaborate well with our hiring partners.”

— Kevin Minchella, Recruiting Operations Manager at Flock Safety

Step 4: Automate Data Collection

Ashby sends out the Quality of Hire Surveys automatically per the determined cadence and comes built in with a 1-5 rating. In addition to this rating, Flock Safety includes a simple question: If you were rehiring for this role today, would you rehire this person?

While Kevin joked Ashby’s automated reminders to fill out the survey bothered some hiring managers at first, it also enabled speed and adoption. 

“What's nice about Ashby is how low the lift can be for employees to use some of the features. Getting buy-in [for Quality of Hire] is the toughest part, but when it comes to the actual workflow, it feels simple. Ashby automates the service and the persistent notifications don't stop until the employee fills it out.”

— Kevin Minchella, Recruiting Operations Manager at Flock Safety

Laura, who prior to Ashby had to use incentives such as gift cards to encourage survey fills, echoed Kevin’s sentiment.

“The easiest part is the automation. Not having to worry about emailing a list of hiring managers every single week and tracking that back in Google Sheets is amazing. Manual work can be a huge hindrance in starting something new. It requires a person to dedicate hours of time so to be able to ‘set it and forget it’ is a game changer.”

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

And it seems to be working as Flock Safety sees a majority of their Quality of Hire Surveys completed within a day. 

Step 5: Regularly Share & Discuss Results

The other driving force behind hiring managers quickly submitting surveys is the consistency with which the talent team shares back findings. It’s easy to think you’re just filling out a survey for the sake of process versus progress, especially for what Laura calls a more foreign concept like tracking quality hires. 

“Creating visibility into your work is the best way for any recruiting project to get buy-in. People want to see results. Even when I’m hiring for my own team, I want to see the Quality of Hire number tick up. I find it extremely insightful when we’re hiring someone and I get to see what did or didn’t change from 90 days to their six months to their one year progression. If I see the number tick down, it’s telling me something’s not working inside our team — are we training interviewers correctly? Could I be doing something better as a leader? With Quality of Hire data you’re having a lot more insightful conversations, but you need to let hiring managers see that this is possible.” 

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Overall, the insights enable the greater Flock team (hiring managers, recruiters, and leadership) to spot patterns, isolate bright spots, and focus energy on solving for the areas that have the potential for the most outsized impact. With a few cycles of data under their belts, the team is seeing the impact on how stakeholders are driving their hiring processes. 

“Hiring managers have a lot of agency over the hiring process and the profile we’re looking for. The introduction of Quality of Hire alone has them thinking holistically versus just at the starting point. It’s opened up more continuous conversation where they’re taking insights from how well they did in hiring one person into the next role opening.”

— Kevin Minchella, Recruiting Operations Manager at Flock Safety

Laura also reports on Quality of Hire weekly to their CEO in addition to the read outs during the quarterly business reviews with all of executive leadership. In her weekly report, she addresses:

• What are our numbers across the board?
• Which teams are in the yellow zone? If so, why?
• Who’s in the green zone? 
• Is there something wrong with our hiring profile or process? How are we solving for it?

For the full leadership team, Quality of Hire helps both enable trust and identify areas for improvement.

“Our leaders want a talent dense organization. We aim for all of our teams at Flock to achieve a 4 as their Quality of Hire score. When scores for a department are coming in closer to 3, it does elicit a response from department leaders where they feel the need to insert themselves more into the process to get back on track. When they’re seeing a 4 or above, they feel strongly that their hiring managers are bringing in the right people and increasing the density of their organization. We’re having less conversations about what do we change, and more about how do continue to replicate this.”

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Impact: Strong Talent Density Supported by Quality of Hire Measurement

Through collaborating with People, keeping executive leadership and hiring managers informed, and using Ashby’s out-of-the-box surveys, Flock Safety has developed a Quality of Hire program that enables their team to continuously measure and improve their talent density. 

The team strives for a 4 or above, which while measured through Quality of Hire, is a reflection of the hiring process the team has built over the years. Some ingredients that Laura believes contributes to such strong scores include:

• Building out a 90-day onboarding plan before opening a role, enabling recruiters to know exactly what the hire will work on upon joining
• A team of recruiters who have been at the company for 4 or more years, which means everyone has extremely strong intuition for who would be a fit at the company
• Nailing the candidate profile, which comes from a combination of both the above

The Quality of Hire program has become so well adopted that it’s now starting conversations about what else the team can do with the data. Laura and Kevin shared some ideas on their roadmap for exploration, such as:

• Rating leaders based on the talent density of their org. Laura shares, “If you’re hiring a lot of C players, are you actually a great hiring manager or leader at Flock? Probably not.”
• Comparing Quality of Hire surveys to employee pulse surveys. Kevin believes the success of an individual and how they feel in that role should be aligned. Laura added that layering a hiring manager’s view with an employee’s view is important for employee engagement. “You might have a top performer, but if they’re likely to leave in a short-time frame, facing burnout, or disengagement, I wouldn’t say you had a strong hire.” 
• Create stronger feedback loops for onboarding and experience teams. Providing the teams who onboard employees with the right information on what makes a hire successful in their first 90 days is something the talent team hopes to be accountable to. 

The accountability that Quality of Hire data introduces has the team excited for what’s to come.

“Overall, my advice to any talent leader looking to start Quality of Hire is get Ashby. They have it completely ready to go for you with a sequence and questions. Be comfortable pushing your V1 and show what you can do with it. Your V1 will inspire what you want to do in the future and also help you understand what your business finds important. ” 

— Laura Barnes, Vice President of Recruiting at Flock Safety

Ready to turn on Quality of Hire Surveys at your organization? Request a demo today.