The 4-Pillar System Behind a 93% Offer Acceptance Rate with Jordan Trott

Offer acceptance rate is the clearest signal of whether your recruiting engine is actually working.

Jordan Trott, Talent Lead at Taptap Send, joins Shannon to break down how his team maintains a 93% offer acceptance rate across global hiring. He explains why this metric reflects everything from role clarity to candidate experience, and where most teams lose candidates long before the offer stage.

Jordan shares the four practices that changed outcomes for his team, including tighter candidate profiles, culture-first interviewing, rigorous benchmarking, and a partner mindset with candidates. 

Key takeaways:

1. Clarify both sides of fit: Define not only who you want, but who will genuinely want your job.
2. Interview for values first: Design intentional questions that test cultural alignment.
3. Hunt for bad news early: Actively surface concerns and misalignment before the offer stage.
4. Own the talent bar: Build credibility by pushing back on unrealistic expectations and misaligned budgets.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(01:44) Meet Jordan Trott

(02:12) Why offer acceptance rate is a high-signal recruiting metric

(03:44) The four levers behind a 93% offer acceptance rate

(04:54) Building a candidate profile that answers “do they want this job”

(07:59) Interviewing for culture over content and why it changes the sell

(10:49) Benchmarking compensation at three moments in the hiring cycle

(12:31) The pre-close conversation that prevents late-stage surprises

(15:08) Treating candidate experience like a partnership, not a transaction

(20:03) Hunting for bad news early and using an “anti-sell” to build trust

(23:23) How this approach improves retention and reduces churn

(26:09) Where to connect with Jordan

Transcript

Jordan Trott (00:00):

If you need to go and ask your finance stakeholders for another X percent, another x, couple of thousand, whatever it may be, you are their advocate and you are the person that's going to make that happen, not them.

Shannon Ogborn (00:13):

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. 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 vicious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am stoked to have Jordan Trott here today who is actually also one of our ACE chapter leads. He started his career in agency recruiting in London, spending nearly seven years focused on tech hiring across Europe. He's really seen both ends of the agency spectrum from niche eat what you kill environments where performance is everything to really more structured corporate settings like Michael Page where the stakes are just as high, but the dynamics are quite different. In his best year at Michael Page, he ranked in the top 5% of recruiters across the UK. So needless to say, he kind of knows what he's doing in this space, but about five years ago he made the leap to where he is now at Taptap Send during a hypergrowth phase. They're backed by investors like Breyer Capital, spark Capital and Reed Hoffman and the company was scaling Fast. Jordan came in as a founding recruiter but has since built and now leads global talent acquisition. So really excited to hear from him today.

Jordan Trott (01:44):

Thanks for having me on. Excited to be part of it and honored to be added to the guest list of offer accepted.

Shannon Ogborn (01:50):

We are going to get into a bit of the how Taptap Send has achieved a 93% offer acceptance rate globally, which is super impressive, but just want to take a step back for a minute and talk a little bit about why offer acceptance is such a key metric to look at. I know it might seem obvious, but let's just set the stage there.

Jordan Trott (02:12):

Offer acceptance rate is the most reductive high signal indicator to recruiting health. It aggregates compensation, competitiveness, role clarity, process quality and candidate experience all into one single outcome. It measures whether your pipelines are producing candidates that will actually close, not just pass interviews. It's critical for forecasting accuracy, demand planning, and it's the final conversion in the funnel, which means it has a significant upstream impact due to compounding of your conversion rates. And as we know, slower time to fill has meaningful impact on your p and l. Higher opex costs is human capital and direct impact to the top line. Delayed revenue, product delivery, whatever you're hiring for. Reid does slow things down.

Shannon Ogborn (02:57):

I always relate this to a leaky pipeline with sales. If you have a large percentage of your sales pipeline not closing and you don't know why and you're not working to change it, that's a huge loss and waste of time. Talent is very similar I think in that way because you have these folks getting to the end of the process and if they're getting an offer that means you want them to join. And if you have that leaky funnel, I think it can cause quite a bit of issues. I know based on some of the things that we've talked about before and you also just mentioned there's a select couple of things that are really key to being at and maintaining that 93% offer acceptance. Can you walk quickly through what those four things are and then we will get into each?

Jordan Trott (03:44):

Yeah, so it is not a restrictive list as we know, recruitment is incredibly dynamic. You can cut data in any which way you want to get a different result, but there were four main things that we really focused on and fixed and that I attribute to this super high offer acceptance rate, which is one, having a diamond clarity on your candidate profile. Two, interviewing mainly for culture, not content, and I'll go into that a little bit deeper shortly. Benchmarking religiously, making sure that you're competitive. It is incredibly important as we all know. And then four, really treating your candidate experience as a partnership. Your candidates should really feel like you are taking them along the journey versus this is just another representative at the business.

Shannon Ogborn (04:30):

I was going to make some joke about clarity in diamonds because there's levels but I don't know them, so just assume that we're talking about the highest level of clarity and color in a diamond. When you're talking about having these clear candidate profiles, what goes into that and what are the usual misses that other companies may have or that you've experienced over your career?

Jordan Trott (04:53):

Most companies will build a candidate profile around what they want, so what the skills, how much experience, what are their credentials, what companies they're coming from, where I think the biggest missed opportunity is when you're creating your ICPs is really answering the question, do the people that we're trying to approach that we want, do they actually want our job? And so you've got to bake selling the role and advertising the role into the fiber of the position itself. A lot of companies buy us too strongly to their own checklist. They never really interrogate whether the candidate on the other side is going to be genuinely excited about the job and that's where the mismatch or the offers that getting declined are born. The signal is usually there much earlier in the process. The strong candidate profile holds both questions at the same time. What do we need and is this person going to be energized by this role? And the result is a funnel that is harder to get but is much more likely to close.

Shannon Ogborn (06:00):

Getting really clear on who you want I think is something that is becoming more industry standard. But the flip side of that of who wants us is I think like you said, one of the biggest missed opportunities because I know we'll get to this a little bit later on the relationship between candidates and companies and recruiters, but it really is supposed to be a match. Jobs are intended to be a match, not a one-sided thing. If you have a one-sided situation, you're not going to hire the right people and they're not going to want to stay.

Jordan Trott (06:38):

Yeah, absolutely. I just had a small thing there that as recruiters, we all share the same pain. Hiring managers expectations are a lot of the time unrealistic. We used to call it a purple unicorn back in my agency days where the person just doesn't exist. And then when you find that person to leave, want the job and you're constantly fighting an uphill battle. And so when you are thinking and scoping out roles with your hiring managers, you should be asking the questions from both sides. Do we have a clear picture on what this person is going to be hired to do? And is the profile of the person we're attacking suitable and excited for that scope that we've just created?

Shannon Ogborn (07:21):

And are we paying them what their experience? Because I feel like when you're creating these ideal candidate profiles, they're ideal, but the ideal doesn't always match up with the budget. And if the budget doesn't match, you're not going to get your ideal person. But I am really curious to hear your thoughts on this interviewing for culture and not always leaning fully into content as you said, I wouldn't say this is controversial, but I do think that it is an interesting position that's obviously working for your company.

Jordan Trott (07:59):

So interviewing for culture, I really have to credit my CEO for this because it really was his brainchild. He's been incredibly prescriptive over what Taptap Send culture is. And so we've intentionally manufactured questions throughout our entire entry process to surface whether a candidate exhibits attributes those values that we look to hire for. Content is obviously important, especially in specialist roles. Experience does matter, but ultimately I think companies lean too far into the safety net of this person has done this exact job for the last five years, so we know that it's a safe bet, right? Going back to the prior conversation we were just having on candidate profile, if you constantly try and find someone that has done the job for the last five years, well your role's then not that exciting for them because you're asking 'em to do the same thing they've done.

(08:55):

Whereas if you say, okay, we want someone who is just super sharp, great communicator can solve problems, then the challenges you are giving them are a bit more ambiguous, a bit more nebulous, and it's like I want you to come and work out how to fix these problems that we haven't scoped yet, and we articulate that directly to candidates. Your value comes from who you are, not just what your resume says. And as I say that framing then changes to we are para using you into some big problems, come help us solve them. So immediately a more exciting sell, a better sell, and it attracts people who are motivated by the work, not just the offer. And I think we should probably talk about it a bit later, but retention is really important there as well. It's all well and good, overselling and overpaying, but people stay because of the challenge. I think that's an important point to make.

Shannon Ogborn (09:49):

I feel like sometimes it's counterintuitive because people say they're bored at their job and they're not happy because they're not being challenged. Oh, I did this and now I'm copy paste doing it again. Do you think, well, you know how to do this so it's easy. We want work to be easy and actually a lot of people don't want work to be easy in that sense. They want to be challenged, they want to grow their career, and the only way you can grow your career is by consistently upleveling and upskilling and trying new things and taking on new challenges. So this idea of bringing people into new challenges, not just copying and pasting them into your company and culture, I think could end up being a very good selling point.

Jordan Trott (10:30):

A hundred percent.

Shannon Ogborn (10:30):

We talked about it earlier, compensation, you don't have to be the top paying company to win people over, but I do think you have to have some philosophy and thought around it. How does that resonate with you all?

Jordan Trott (10:48):

Completely agree. We have multiple times had candidates accept our offer that is below another offer that they've had because we've done such a good job on diamond clarity profile and then just being a good cupid, like finding the right person for the job and interviewing for culture. So obviously benchmarking is incredibly important. The conversation is incredibly important and we religiously benchmark to make sure that we are paying at the right levels, understand as accurately as we can what our competitors are paying because of course that changes the conversation internally and honestly, compensation is one of those super avoidable sources of offers being declined. If someone's great and you need to set better expectations with your finance team and your stakeholders that we're going to need to pay more here to get this person, it's better to front load that than have a surprise at the end and then ultimately lose the person because of it.

(11:50):

So we benchmark at three different stages. One, when we set the budgets for the year two, when we kick off the search and we start recruiting the role and then three at the time that we make the offer, we use highly curated platforms which directly integrate with the HRIS systems of pre IPO companies. It's updated and refreshed quarterly, so we know the cohort that we're operating in of similar companies. We have very high confidence in the accuracy of our data and then we can triangulate and make sure that we're offering good compensation. We also do a pre-close process before we make the offer where we'll jump on with a candidate and we'll spend 20 minutes really understanding exactly what we need to do to get that candidate to close. Compensation is obviously one of them. There's a few other staff trade secrets that we talk about that I can't share, and ultimately that's the goal is have enough confidence after speaking with a candidate, getting sign offs from all of your stakeholders that that offer is going to be accepted.

Shannon Ogborn (13:01):

When I was a recruiter, I felt like it was a little bit off the rails for recruiters, but I actually love the compensation piece because there's frankly nothing better than winning over a candidate for other reasons that aren't compensation. And it feels so good to have a candidate accept your offer when you're not the highest offer. But compensation is a tricky one because it involves so many other people, but it sounds like you all have quite a bit of support and alignment with your finance team and the folks who are doing the planning on that side.

Jordan Trott (13:38):

Yeah, we are very fortunate that we have an incredibly high talent bar and the understanding with all of our stakeholders is that we need to match our compensation to that talent bar. I think a lot of other companies don't quite have that synergy between the caliber, the candidate profile and what finance are willing to pay or your budgeting teams are willing to pay. So I think I'm lucky in that sense, but I also think there has been a lot of lobbying from me and from other hiring managers and other recruiters on the team to make sure that we are closing that gap as much as possible to the understanding of this is how much these people cost and this is what we need. So I think there's maybe an area for whoever listening to this assess, do your finance budget stakeholders have a true understanding of your talent bar

Shannon Ogborn (14:29):

That, and I think it's the also bridges the gap of the importance of business acumen and your recruiters really having that knowledge and be able to push back. Finance is the experts in finance, but recruiters are the experts in the market and so they're able to more accurately say, no, we really can't get who we're looking for for this budget and I can prove it through X, Y, Z. And that's I feel like the really big importance of part four of the things that you all do on candidate experience as partnership, you are the true experts. What else goes into that, do you feel like?

Jordan Trott (15:06):

Yeah, we don't reinvent the wheel candidate experience is incredibly important. Everybody knows that it's company A, company B, same role, same talent bar, same people, same size. Let's just theoretically say they're exactly the same companies. The only difference is going to be the candidate experience. The mindset and the framing that I get the team here to be in is to be the candidate's partner versus be a representative of the business. That distinction really matters because a recruiter for the company is optimizing the close of any of the candidates. A genuine partner is trying to get that specific candidate to get the role. Obviously not everyone's going to get the role, but that should always be how you are partnering with your candidates. I think this is rooted in my agency experience. You mentioned at the start of the call, eat what you kill. So in my niche agency recruiting days, if you didn't make money within three months you were out the door and I found that the easiest and best way to close candidates was to genuinely care about their next job and celebrate if they've got competing offers.

(16:27):

And also if their other offer is better, tell them to take it. They might not be a candidate for now. They might be a candidate for two years time and that's the same here. You might not be able to hire someone today, but when they're looking for another job, if you care about the longevity of your career and you care about the longevity of your business and your role, they will be a candidate again. And if you have left them with a high credibility, high trust relationship the first time you deal with them, it's only going to help you further down the road. And I think that's really comes from my agency experience and I've brought that into my team here and the team here have done a really good job of that. So in practice, get personal with candidates, write your personal notes, find out their dog's name when their next holiday is, whatever it may be.

(17:13):

I know it sounds really obvious, but that stuff really does matter. People care about that. Pay attention to what matters to them in the role in what they're looking for, the kind of culture of the business they're looking for, and ask the right kind of questions that help candidates think clearly about whether this actually is the right move for them. Smart candidates will understand why you're asking the question. They will know and feel your presence of like, I'm trying to help you get this job because if this is the right job for you, I'm going to be your internal voice, your internal advocate, especially we were just talking about compensation. If you need to go and ask your finance stakeholders for another x percent, another x couple of thousand, whatever it may be, you are their advocate and you are the person that's going to make that happen, not them. So yeah, the posture is I want to get you hired because it's the right match, not because it feels a requirement, builds credibility, creates a very different kind of conversation by the time the offer arrives and if you've done a good enough job of truly understanding that this is the right job for them, the offer genuinely becomes easy because they're already convinced. They've already convinced themselves because you've asked them the right questions.

Shannon Ogborn (18:27):

For sure. Candidate experience is one of those simple but not easy, and I think there's a lot of people in recruiting who think, I've got to be a shark. I've got to close this person. When really you're like you said, your best chance of closing the person is knowing what matters to them. If you don't know what matters to someone, you cannot sell to them properly because you're going to be selling them the compensation when what they actually care about is whatever benefit you have to know the candidate and know everything that you can offer to pick which part is the most compelling for them and a hundred percent on telling people, you know what? I think the other job actually is the job for you based on everything that you've told me. You build a rapport. I had not to brag, only two offer declines while I was at Google.

(19:17):

One of them had just an astronomical offer and I was like, listen, I think it would be silly to not accept that even for just a year we will be here. You can come back if you want. I will be here for you. And just recently she reached out to me because she was interested in Ashby because I worked here. It doesn't really matter if that person gets hired or not, right? It's because you spent the time to create the relationship with that person that they trust you. It's not just about right here right now. Everyone shifts companies at some point, the candidates, recruiters, employees, and you never know when you're going to run into these folks again. And if they had a good experience with you, that is true sign that you've nailed the candidate experience.

Jordan Trott (20:03):

There's one big tip that we'll share that I think we do exceptionally well is always hunt for the bad news on every interaction that you have. Don't be scared to find the bad news and then taking that a step further, don't be scared to reject people because of it and tell them you didn't like this piece of the culture at your last business. Well, unfortunately that is how we do things here. I don't think this is the right position for you. Versus having them find that out either when they're joined or at the final stages and then bang, you get the offer rejected. Ask specific questions designed to uncover those concerns early. Most recruiters are optimized to sell because we all get pressure. We're expected to push candidates through the funnel. And so I think to our detriment at times, we will push candidates forward, square peg, round hole type situation where actually it is genuinely better for you to own pulling someone out of process because there is too much bad news or it's not the right role for them or they're just simply not going to accept the job. We use an anti cell quite heavily, especially in the final stages and the pre-close run proper feedback sessions with the candidate, actually listen to what comes back and don't try and sell them through a concern. If the concern is real, surface it. If it's un mitigatable, tell them you further earn trust and empower.

(21:44):

And a lot of times, majority of the time, and probably a hundred percent of the time, no job is perfect for someone. There is always going to be something that frustrates them or isn't quite what they were hoping for. And so you lend more credibility and higher trust when you surface that stuff and say, look, this is going to exist, versus a competitor who's going this best job ever and it's a hundred percent perfect for you. I'm pretty confident saying that they're going to trust me higher because I've said this thing exists and it's not going to be mitigatable. So finding that bad news before it finds you is a big enabler of getting a super high close rate.

Shannon Ogborn (22:26):

And I think it's you finding the bad news before the hiring manager finds the bad news, I think is always a good look for recruiters.

Jordan Trott (22:34):

Hundred percent.

Shannon Ogborn (22:34):

Because even if it exists and you're choosing to move someone forward because you want the hiring manager to suss it out a little bit more, you're still creating the credibility with the candidate and you're also creating it with the hiring manager to say, Hey, we actually do really operate this way, but I think you should talk to the hiring manager about it because they're going to have more intel on how this actually plays out because that's their team. So there's a lot to be said there. Bad news isn't always bad news. It's a means for you to filter people out. Well, and that sort of brings to the results. Obviously 93% offer acceptance rate is the headline number for all of these things compounded. It's not ever just one thing, but I think back to what we were just talking about, retention is one of the other big outcomes of this.

Jordan Trott (23:22):

Absolutely. It's almost in a way more important retention because if you're constantly backfilling, so when a good getting off is accepted, but if you're constantly churning through roles that you've previously filled, you're not building the business. So our retention is super strong. Our churn is at about 8%, and of that 8%, about half of them are people that were hired before 12 months. The others were just people that perhaps we didn't get right. But I can confidently say that the topics that we've discussed in the last 20 minutes, half an hour, are the reason for it. We're not overselling, we're not overpaying all four parts, as I said that we've discussed. We do completely authentically. It's about being the good matchmaker and the good cupid and spending more time upfront to get it right. It's almost paradoxical asking harder questions, finding reasons to take people out of your process and having a higher drop off earlier in your funnel does create a more efficient process over time, less wasted time on candidates who are never going to accept and fewer offers extended that shouldn't have been is what you should be targeting. Rejected offers are incredibly demotivating for you and your stakeholders. You've mentioned it a few times. It's incredibly rewarding when you've gone through a process, you've rejected a lot of people and then finally get that signature. When you build momentum of a high offer acceptance rate, it's an awesome situation to be in. Your stakeholders are happy, your board's happy, your executives are happy, your team are motivated, is definitely the way you should optimize your model, in my opinion.

Shannon Ogborn (25:05):

I also think that it can be very demotivating if you have bad retention because you've sold a bag of goods. That's not true, and your team is only working on backfills. That's actually very demotivating as well because you're one back to the challenges. Your recruiting team's not being challenged. They're just turning in a hamster wheel, trying to get people back in the door. All of these things, like you said, fold into each other. One is not necessarily more important than the other, but they all work together to create this really robust system because offer acceptance rate, like we said earlier, if you have a low offer acceptance rate, that means you wasted a lot of time. And at the end of the day, time is money. But we are about to get into our fun questions here at the end. If you haven't watched before, these are in the extended version on YouTube. Well, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Jordan Trott (26:09):

Good question. I'm not super public with my opinions. I'm not like a LinkedIn blogger or a poster, but my inboxes are always open. I don't think, and this is where we need to credit you, Shannon, like giving more a louder voice to the recruiting community. I think there is a very false, and I'm ongoing attending here, but a false competitiveness between recruiting leaders. Yeah, we compete for candidates at times, but on mass there's really not much crossover. And so my inbox is always open on LinkedIn. I would love to network with people. I would love to talk about problems. I would love to understand what you are doing. Awesome. That I can learn from. I'm happy to share how we do things here. So LinkedIn inbox number one, and I'm based in New York. I know the accent's deceiving, but if you're an Ashby customer, then come to our customer experts events. We do one every quarter. If you're not an Ashby customer, you should be, but always happy to meet. Always happy to network. I'll be in and around New York.

Shannon Ogborn (27:16):

Amazing. 93% offer acceptance rate is for non fang companies. Just way higher I think, than benchmark. And I think people will get a lot out of understanding how you all think about this. So thank you so much.

Jordan Trott (27:32):

Thanks, Shannon. It's been a pleasure.

Shannon Ogborn (27:34):

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 at s 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.