Many teams want a better candidate experience, yet few build one that reflects the real work and the real product behind it.

Tianna Johnson, founder of People Culture Talent and former talent leader at Notion, Lyft, and GitHub, joins Shannon to share how product-infused hiring creates clarity, excitement, and trust for every candidate. She explains how she introduced product touchpoints at each company, from Notion-built takeaways to real-world Lyft problem-solving to GitHub challenges that sparked early community buzz.

She walks through the results she has seen across teams, including more substantial alignment, deeper conversations in the final stages, higher acceptance rates, and long-term retention for new hires who know the work they are joining.

Key takeaways:

• Define your north star: Clear guidance on what you want to be known for shapes every hiring decision and keeps teams aligned.
• Solving real work problems in interviews: Problem-based prompts drawn from actual product challenges reveal creativity, judgment, and long-term fit.
• Create advocates through experience: Even rejected candidates can become supporters when the process feels human, transparent, and connected to the product.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:43) Meet Tianna Johnson

(02:38) Why product touch points matter in hiring

(03:57) Defining your north star for talent decisions

(05:00) Mapping the candidate journey for product moments

(06:14) How Notion used product-led takeaways

(06:26) How GitHub created a challenge to spark interest

(10:40) How Lyft built interviews around real product problems

(13:52) Turning unsolved challenges into strong conversations

(16:04) How product-infused hiring shaped brand advocacy

(18:11) How deeper final-stage dialogue improved acceptance

(20:34) Why interviewer energy influences candidate trust

(21:15) The candidate questions that reveal authentic culture

(22:06) Where to connect with Tianna

2025 was a year of real change, not just in tools or trends, but in how recruiting teams showed up.

In this special recap episode, host Shannon Ogborn looks back on the conversations that defined Offer Accepted this year. The common thread among the highest-impact teams across all episodes was not the pursuit of the next big thing, but a clarity on fundamental priorities. They achieved success by embracing structure, maintaining transparency with candidates, collaborating closely with the business, and always prioritizing the human element in the hiring process.

This is a thank you to every guest who shared their time, a reflection on what this community has made possible, and a reminder that, even with all the change, the heart of recruiting hasn’t changed.

Learn more about Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform powering Offer Accepted.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(01:06) Trend 1: AI Won’t Replace Recruiters, But Recruiters Who Can’t Use AI Will Fall Behind

(03:18) Trend 2: The Power of Structured Hiring

(04:49) Trend 3: Candidate Experience as a Trust-Building Engine

(05:51) Trend 4: Authenticity, Transparency, and Brand Storytelling That’s Real

(07:44) Trend 5: Talent’s Strategic Seat at the Table Through Influence

(09:50) Trend 6: Data Fluency as a Skillset

(12:01) Trend 7: Humanity In Talent

(13:38) Closing Reflections for 2025

How do you keep hiring quality high while the company scales globally at speed?

In this episode, Shannon sits down with Maggie Landers, VP Talent at Harvey, to walk through the values interview program that keeps a fast-growing AI company aligned. Maggie shares how Harvey turned three simple values, simplicity, decisiveness, and “Job’s Not Finished”, into a global, standardized interview that any people manager can run without adding friction to the process.

Discover how her team leveraged tools like ChatGPT and Ashby to accelerate the design of interview questions, scoring rubrics, and enablement from months to mere weeks. Crucially, this efficiency was achieved while prioritizing human judgment, active listening, and an excellent candidate experience.

Whether your team is hiring dozens or hundreds of roles, this conversation will help you simplify your values work, prove its impact, and scale it across regions and functions.

Key takeaways:

• Simple values guide hiring: Focusing interviews on a few clear values improves cultural alignment without adding complexity.
• Train managers as interviewers: Empowering all people managers to conduct values interviews ensures culture ownership and scalable hiring across all teams and regions.
• Iterative Improvement: Ship, Learn, Refine. Treat values interviews as an evolving product. Quickly update interview questions and rubrics using AI, informed by focused group feedback.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:24) Meet Maggie Landers

(02:08) Why Harvey scaled values interviews for quality

(04:39) Turning three simple values into a global hiring lens

(07:47) Building scoring rubrics that interviewers actually use

(10:29) Designing a low-risk pilot for values interviews

(13:33) Getting exec and board support for experimentation

(17:35) Standardization, simplicity, and training people leaders at scale

(22:59) Using AI to maintain values programs without burning out

(27:10) Why great interviewers are listeners, not checkbox operators

(30:00) Where to connect with Maggie