Making Interviews an Accurate Job Preview with Tianna Johnson, People Culture Talent

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

Transcript

Tianna Johnson (00:00):

One of the things that I started thinking about is how do we actually design questions for not the talent that we have now, but the talent that we want to be able to get? And it became this really beautiful dialogue that opened up between interviewees and the interviewers where they just had more meaningful conversation. And I feel like it ended up leading to us making more meaningful hires because there was this core connection to some of the stuff that we were trying to solve. So I think that all good hires and all good talent, they are joining a company because they want to solve hard problems. They want to know that they're going to make an impact. And so when you think about making the right match for a role, you want people to know what they're getting into.

Shannon Ogborn (00:43):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

Shannon Ogborn (01:09):

Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform empowering ambitious teams from Seed to IPO and beyond. I am so excited to be here today with Tianna Johnson. She is the founder of People, Culture, Talent, and Ashby's first Ashby expert partner. With over 15 years of experience in human capital management and talent acquisition, she's worked with high growth startups and tech giants alike. She specializes in guiding early and mid-stage companies through pivotal growth phases, driven by her passion for building inclusive, high performing teams. She has shaped people and talent strategies at very amazing companies, and we'll get to some of this today like Notion, Lyft, and GitHub. And as a founding member of Notion's recruiting team, she scaled the organization from 30 to over 600 employees while building its talents, infrastructure and global teams.

(02:00):

Tianna, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. And for those who might recognize we are twinning, that was actually an accident. And we were really excited when we walked in to see we were wearing the same color, so we're super, super in tune. We are going to get to some examples today of how this has resonated, especially in your work at Lyft, GitHub and Notion. But what we're really going to get into is how people can infuse their product into hiring, especially folks who are in this B2B SaaS type company. I would love to hear before we get into those examples and the how-to, why companies should consider infusing their product into hiring.

Tianna Johnson (02:43):

Yeah. I mean, I think I feel really passionate about this because I think infusing your product into your hiring process, it actually reflects a lot about your culture. It gets to show people before day one what your product is about. It also shows a little bit of a glimpse into how those people might be able to use the product in their everyday work if that's even possible or the problems that they're going to be thinking about. So I think it's just a way to give them a little bit of the secret sauce upfront.

Shannon Ogborn (03:13):

Yeah. And to that note, it seems like something that kind of lives at the intersection of employer brand and candidate experience. This could be something that could significantly increase your employer brand.

Tianna Johnson (03:27):

Absolutely. So I think it increases not only your employer brand, but also your talent brand. So your employer brand is basically what employees say about working at the company. It gets them excited about the questions that they ask and being able to showcase the product in certain parts of the interview process. And then for your talent brand, it really helps to attract the right talent to you.

Shannon Ogborn (03:45):

Yes, I love that. And you've done some pretty impressive work with this, not only at some of the companies that you work with now through your consulting, but also at former companies, but there is this sort of stage one before you can even get to the point where you can do that infusion, which is identifying your north star as you put it. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how that impacts what comes after?

Tianna Johnson (04:13):

Absolutely. So one of, I think, the critical questions that I ask every single founder, every single hiring manager, anyone who joins my team, it's what do you want to be known for? So I think that this is a really ... It sounds like a simple question, but when you really dig down into what that means, it really is the driving force behind any single decision that you make. So are you actually making decisions that are going to be driving towards that thing that you're trying to actually build? So for example, if you are a company that really wants to be known for being able to have people grow there and be able to grow with you as they grow, you need to have quality benefits,

Shannon Ogborn (04:51):

You

Tianna Johnson (04:51):

Need to have inclusive benefits, you need to be thinking about things and crafting your hiring process and your people practices that are all going to align with the thing that you say you want to be known for.

Shannon Ogborn (05:01):

And it's kind of a no-brainer that any company would want to be known for the product that they're selling. And that's sort of where this identifying the natural product touchpoints are so you can really design the product infused candidate experience. What does that look like? What do you need to map to get there?

Tianna Johnson (05:25):

So I call it the candidate journey. So you really need to look at what is the candidate journey. And then within that candidate journey, what are potential places that you can infuse your product? So for example, when we were building this out at Notion in the early days, when I joined, we were 20-ish people, we had zero brand awareness. I needed to help take us from about 20 to 100 and there was nothing online and nobody had used this. I hadn't used Notion before I joined. And so one of the things that I did was I tried to figure out how can we actually infuse the product into our hiring practices. So I built interview guides to guide candidates through the hiring process. We would have them respond back to take homes by building a Notion doc and show them how they could insert videos or put pictures or different things to make it their own.

(06:12):

So it was one of the ways that we built brand believers and early adopters from people who definitely weren't technical to kind of build something that was their own. And I think it was also a great way to see the diversity of how the product could be used in those early days because everyone got to bring their own Legos and figure out how to build their own Notion page is like how we would describe it. And you got to see what people would build. And it was really a cool experience to see as our user group grew.

Shannon Ogborn (06:40):

And I know that you not only did this at Notion, but you also did it at GitHub in kind of a fun way that was multimedia.

Tianna Johnson (06:52):

Yeah. So when I was at GitHub, it was the early days back kind of before open source was just taking off. There was a lot kind of happening in the world. And one way that we were trying to really kind of go from basically about a 200 person team to close to an 800 or a thousand person team was we needed to create some buzz and get engineers really excited about us and also be able to attract go- to-market people because that's what we were building and nobody who wasn't a developer knew anything about GitHub. So we designed a challenge that basically we put billboards up around the city and we had some different outside marketing that we did. And we created a Sink My Battleship exercise where we had people go to an open source repo, tried to solve a technical challenge. There was kind of a non-technical part to it too.

(07:41):

And if they could solve that challenge, they automatically got an interview kind of fast tracked on site. And it was a really fun way to create some buzz around a creative way that we were able to do some interviewing and get people interested to open people up to the idea of seeing what open source could do and how people were building on top of it and things that people were doing and just to also showcase our product.

Shannon Ogborn (08:03):

Did you get any pushback from the exec team or from hiring teams like, "No way, this is not going to work."

Tianna Johnson (08:12):

I think that there was a component of ... There was a little bit of pushback in terms of like, is this actually how we want to go spend money on outdoor marketing, which is very expensive. Is this how we want to create a buzz? And I think that we had to, there were a few components where we thought about like, how do we make this fun? How do we still have structure and have it be challenging, but have it be creative? And I think the more concern was around how can we really tell that this person actually completed this exercise and that it wasn't someone else that completed it. And I think part of it was we had a really good hiring process where we doubled down when we met with them and said, "Talk us through how you figured this out. Let's talk through how you were able to figure out where our battleship was and where we were moving." And we were kind of playing a game together and we were able to really hear about how they were problem solving in the moment trying to solve this problem and then what their motivations were on why they wanted to interview with us.

(09:12):

And so I think it ended up being a really cool experience for us to go through and a lot of learnings on what people really thought about the product. And we got a lot of feedback on where things were broken, what felt clunky, all of that. And that was where we were then able to sell them on being like, "Well, you know what? If you were to join, if you were to be a part of our Eng team, we have an open source edge team. You can actually come and help us fix this and build this.

Shannon Ogborn (09:35):

" I love that. And yes, out of home is super expensive, but I don't think companies are spending enough on their talent and employer brand. It's such an important thing. And I think candidates now are getting more and more skeptical of what companies are really like, what employees really think, and this type of work is just getting increasingly more important. And the other thing too that we see a lot is people worried about cheating and AI interviews and things like that. And I know one of the things that you did at Lyft was putting product challenges into interview questions and just a quick call back to a different interview that we did with a lean from interviewing IO, they did this whole entire experiment with their company interviewing. They caught no people cheating, which is kind of scary, but the thing that really came out of it was that companies or interviews that were using these sort of real world questions had a lower pass rate because people could cheat it less.

(10:53):

Now, that wasn't necessarily the issue that you were experiencing when you were at Lyft, but would love to hear a little bit more about sort of designing candidate interactions that mirror the work. Absolutely. So

Tianna Johnson (11:07):

One of the tasks that I was kind of a project lead for was redesigning our interviews at Lyft. And we were starting to think about a lot of our interviews questions were leaked. We were asking a lot of questions that just weren't relevant to our business. And one of the things that I started thinking about is how do we actually design questions for not the talent that we have now, but the talent that we want to be able to get and the place that we want to drive the company towards and all of these big dreams that we had on how we were going to be redefining transportation. And I started asking people in every single department like, "Tell me what are some of the problems that you're facing? What are things that y'all are talking about on the product side? What's feedback that we're getting from customer support?" And a lot of what we did is we came up with this cool kind of list of, I think it was like 25 questions of how would you define the future of transportation and what does this mean?

(11:59):

One of the things that we decided to do was to tap into our ERGs and we tapped into our parents' group. And one of the things that we realized is that when parents travel, they don't want to travel with a ton of car seats and a ton of stuff for their kids. They're heavy. They are heavy. And it's hard when you just want to go to New York and be able to bop around and everything isn't super convenient. And so that's where we came up with a question like, how would you design Lyft for parents? How would we put it in Kid Mode where you could request a car that had a car seat?

Shannon Ogborn (12:30):

Yep.

Tianna Johnson (12:30):

We had some really cool ideas come out about, say that it's snow season or ski season. I'm from Hawaii, so I don't know what it's called, but- What season? When the snow was out and when you do snow things, but how do you order a car when you have a pair of skis or you have snowboards? And so we started thinking about these fun questions and then we infused it into our hiring process and candidates got really, really excited about being able to think about these things and being able to be like, "Oh wow, you guys are thinking about this. I hadn't thought about this. " Interviewers were getting really excited because they could actually talk in real time about some of the things that they're trying to think through and almost have a think tank about it with people. And it became this really beautiful dialogue that opened up between interviewees and the interviewers where they just had more meaningful conversation.

(13:18):

And I feel like it ended up leading to us making more meaningful hires because there was this core connection to some of the stuff that we were trying to solve.

Shannon Ogborn (13:26):

It also showcases someone's just first principle thinking of, how would you solve this problem? There's definitely value in behavioral, like what have you done, but there's also value in what would you do? And I think the transparency of, "Hey, this is something we haven't solved that we are trying to solve for. Let's get excited about that. Let's hear what you think about that. " One thing that I love about what you all were doing is that you were making the quote mess work for you. You were repositioning it as an opportunity versus look at all of our problems. It's like, look at the opportunity that you have to solve the problems. Can you tell me a little bit about how that resonated?

Tianna Johnson (14:18):

Absolutely. So I think that all good hires and all good talent, they are joining a company because they want to solve hard problems. They want to know that they're going to make an impact. And so when you think about making the right match for a role, you want people to know what they're getting into. And there are different types of messes. And if that is not a mess that that person wants to clean up when they come into it, you don't want to get 11 interviews deep with them and then figure out, I'm granted you shouldn't have 11 stages, but when you invest that much time, that's an expensive mistake to be able to make to them find out actually they don't want to solve these problems. They want to solve different problems. And so I think that it's really good around finding that alignment and then also being able to do a little bit of that back and forth rapport on the situational questions, which I love because it's something where you can't load something into AI and then be like, tell me what I did.

(15:14):

It's like actually asking them, in this environment, if you were to join, what would you do? How would you fix this problem? Tell us all your ideas. You have no budget, you have no constraints, tell us all the ways that you would do this. And I think you get some really creative ideas from people who aren't in

Shannon Ogborn (15:29):

It,

Tianna Johnson (15:30):

Deeply in it where they can kind of have a different perspective to be able to add some fresh thought and creativity into how you could solve that.

Shannon Ogborn (15:38):

A hundred percent fresh thought and creativity. And I would have to imagine in a lot of ways it is a benefit to the longevity and tenure of someone at the company because they know what they're getting into and they're excited about that. Not everything is going to showcase an interview. And I think some people probably would say, not everything should, but the fact that people have a good idea and vision of what's happening and what they're contributing to is absolutely huge. And I know that there's probably other sort of results and impact that you all saw from this. Whether that be Lyft Notion or GitHub, what results did you see and what impact did you see when you were able to infuse your product into the hiring process?

Tianna Johnson (16:30):

I think it was tenfold. So a lot of what we saw, particularly at Lyft and at Notion, because it wasn't just for developers, was we saw so much brand advocacy. So there became more brand awareness that we were able to multiply by means that we didn't even know because even when we weren't making people offers the experience that they had going through it with us and the things that we talked about and them getting to test out the product and them getting to know how we're thinking about it, they ended up being really excited about what we were building. And they're like, even though you're not making me an offer, I'm super excited to continue being a customer.

Shannon Ogborn (17:03):

Which is so important, especially on the customer side, but also because a no today is not a no forever. The number of people that I have hired that were rejected before and then they improved their skills or the role changed slightly and they were a better match, those hires are a huge unlock to companies who are growing.

Tianna Johnson (17:26):

And I mean, you also think about just those people, even though they're not going to be joining Notion or joining Lyft, they're going to go join another company. They're on the job hunt, they're going to join another company, and who knows if they'll be able to then go and say, "Hey, we're rolling out a transportation budget. I had this amazing experience with Lyft. I would love for us to be able to do Lyft credits for employees."

(17:46):

I would love for us to be able to use Notion for whatever it is. And so you can create basically brand advocates for yourself just by ... I truly believe that the way people feel leaving an experience with you, even if it's not the outcome that everyone wanted, that matters more than anything. And especially when you infuse your product or your problems or you do it in a really authentic way, I think that's some of the results that we found is because we weren't trying to force it. We were just kind of saying like, "This is what it's like to work here. Come join us. And if it doesn't work out, you at least know what it would be like. " I think the other thing that we saw just from a results perspective was we saw just more meaningful conversations happening in the last mile.

(18:30):

So the last mile is like, when you know you want to hire someone, you know that you're trying to close them, they have competing offers. Instead of us doing the typical let's kind of go through and do a sell call and do whatever, we were actually able to strategically put in place specific calls where people could have deeper dialogue and they could start talking about like, "Shannon, this is where I really would love to partner with you if you decide to join. These are the things that we could be building together based on your experience and what we talked about. This is what I could really see being the next six months if you decide to join." And that led to higher acceptance rates, that led to better onboarding experiences. People were just drinking the Kool-Aid a lot early and then they were able to really just feel that magic a lot longer and it led to hire employee retention because people were excited about the work that they were doing and then they could envision after I solve this problem, these are the next problems that I can see myself solving.

(19:27):

And so it almost got them roadmapping what their role could look like and what their growth could look like.

Shannon Ogborn (19:32):

We definitely don't talk about the employee retention piece enough when we're talking about hiring.

(19:38):

It's such a critical piece. If you are hiring the right person for the right role at the right time, you're going to have better retention and the best way to hire the right person in the right role at the right time is to have a process that accurately depicts this. And part of that, I think something you may have mentioned before was this interviewer excitement. You cannot underestimate the impact of interviewers being excited to interview. Talent people can only do so much. We're only so ... I still say we. I still consider myself part of the we. We only can do so much. We only have so much influence and you're relying on a lot of other stakeholders to bring that together. And when they're excited, the candidates are excited. At Ashbury, we have people all the time saying, "Everyone who works here was so excited about what you all are doing.

(20:29):

It made me that much more excited." We have all interviewed places and talked to an interview that's just kind of loafing around, definitely unhappy to be there, and that totally sucks. No one's getting energy from that. And not only can it impact interview performance because you're anxious, you're like, "Is there a problem with what I'm saying?" It's like, no, the person just doesn't want to be there and that is not only bad for talent brand, but it's also just, it doesn't create those advocates like you're saying.

Tianna Johnson (20:59):

And I think the other thing that that makes me think of is for me as a candidate when I was interviewing, one of the questions or the two questions that I would ask everyone that would interview me when they would say, "Do you have any questions?" And I would say, "Tell me why you joined." And then they give their answer and it's like, "Well, tell me what keeps you here. Why are you staying? You have an amazing background. You could go anywhere. Why are you staying here? What makes this place special?" And that's really where you can't fake that and you can see through that. And candidates, when they see that there's excitement around the problems that you're solving or the mission or the connection or the values, that's the thread that I think helps to build longer lasting teams.

Shannon Ogborn (21:40):

100%. Well, we are about to get into our questions that we like to ask all of our guests. If you don't know this already, we have moved these to our YouTube extended version. So if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, head to YouTube to hear what Tianna's definition of higher excellence is, what her recruiting hot take is, which I'm super excited about and what her advice would be to her early career self. I think we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Tianna Johnson (22:11):

You can go to www.peopleculturetalent.com and drop us a note.

Shannon Ogborn (22:17):

Amazing. Well, Tianna, I cannot thank you enough for being here today in our twinning matching matching shirts, but I think this is going to be super valuable for teams that are really trying to stand out. There's a lot of companies hiring today. There's a lot of companies that can improve the ability to get their company out there and known. And so I really appreciate you spending the time with us. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Shannon Ogborn (22:48):

This episode was brought to you by Ashby. What an ATS should be: A scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.