Differentiating Candidate Experience Through Unreasonable Hospitality with Greg Marsh, Sierra

Candidate experience is one of the few levers you can fully control in hiring.

Greg Marsh, Head of Recruiting at Sierra, joins Shannon to share how his team scaled from 25 to 600 employees while building a candidate experience that consistently stands out. He explains how Sierra approaches candidate obsession, why small moments like personalization matter more than big gestures, and how recruiting becomes a true partner to the business during rapid growth.

Greg walks through how his team operationalizes these ideas with simple systems, measures impact through candidate feedback, and builds a culture where every interviewer owns the experience. He also shares how AI fits into recruiting today and where human connection still makes the difference.

Key takeaways:

1. Candidate experience wins offers: A strong, consistent experience can outperform higher compensation offers.
2. Small details scale impact: Simple personalization creates meaningful candidate connections at scale.
3. Recruiting is a team sport: Interviewers and hiring managers shape the experience as much as recruiters.
4. Invest early in recruiting: Companies that prioritize recruiting early move faster and hire better.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Introduction

(00:15) Meet Greg Marsh

(02:18) Why candidate experience matters in a competitive market

(04:00) Applying hospitality principles to recruiting

(05:30) Personalization through small candidate moments

(08:00) Balancing intensity and family in company culture

(12:30) Scaling candidate experience with simple systems

(16:30) Measuring candidate experience and NPS

(18:30) Why great candidates become your best referral source

(20:45) Adapting candidate experience across global teams

(22:43) Where to connect with Greg

Transcript

Greg Marsh (00:00):

Don't let perfection get in the way of progress and keeping pushing forward. I think that's the mindset that we need to get into. My favorite new hires in recruiting are the ones that just hit the ground running and they just go. They don't wait to be told what to do.

Shannon Ogborn (00:15):

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 ambitious teams from Seed to IPO and beyond. I cannot be more excited to be here today with Greg Marsh while we were at Transform. He is a recruiting leader with 20 years of experience scaling some of the most iconic companies. Today, he is the head of recruiting at Sierra, where he's helped scale the company from 25 to over 600, so massive, massive growth in just two years.

(01:08):

It's kind of daunting. And just working on building teams globally across US, Europe, and Asia, before that, you spent six years at Google as a founding member of the university recruiting team and then led recruiting at Square through hypergrowth and IPO and later led business recruiting at Pinterest through its IPO as well. So you've went on to spend six years as interim head of talent for breakout startups like whatnot, Aura, Webflow, fair, Gusto and Grammarly before joining Sierra in 2024. So I think suffice to say you've seen some things and I'm excited to get more into that today, but thank you so much for joining us.

Greg Marsh (01:43):

Yeah. Well, thank you for hosting. Ashby has been an important part of our journey going from 25 to 600, so literally there from the beginning. So thank you for hosting.

Shannon Ogborn (01:51):

Amazing. Well, today what we're going to be talking about is candidate experience and specifically things that companies can do to really elevate candidate experience that maybe they haven't thought of before. But before we get into that and some of the very meaningful things that has done for the growth at Sierra, would love to take a step back and talk a little bit about why candidate experience matters so much as a differentiation lever, especially right now.

Greg Marsh (02:18):

At Sierra, we try to weave in our values into our culture whenever possible and really have it be part of our recruiting journey as well. At Sierra, one of our company values is customer obsession. So we kind of paraphrase that a bit when it comes to recruiting and we think about candidate obsession. So we really want to show up our best for our customers whenever possible. And for our candidates, we always want to provide that 10 out of 10 candidate experience. And in this market, it's so competitive, as you know. And we're competing against legacy startups, we're competing against AI labs, we're competing against other AI startups. It's super competitive. We want to create the best candidate experience. We want that to be the differentiator whenever possible. We may not always have the highest base salary, but if we can always create that 10 out of 10 candidate experience and know that we can control that, we can't control a lot of the other factors and someone leans into the offer because of that, then great.

(03:18):

We're going to really make that part of the process and lean into that candidate experience.

Shannon Ogborn (03:22):

It's very hard to compete on salaries right now, especially in the AI space. So there has to be ... Not everybody has that capacity or not everyone sees it as the long-term vision that's going to help their company be successful. So you have to start thinking about other things that are going to really shape how candidates feel walking in the door. And I always feel like candidate experience, it's not just about how they feel as a candidate, right? It's when they walk in the door, how excited are they to be an employee? If you're more excited to join because you had a great experience, then you walk in the door just motivated and excited to be there too.

Greg Marsh (03:58):

Exactly. So we think about that a lot and how candidates feel. So everyone at our company gets a book called Unreasonable Hospitality, and Will Guidara is one of the co-owners of 11 Madison Park, and he's also one of the advisors to Sierra. So this is something that we internalize and we think about where can we create that best possible experience. So the whole premise of the book, it should be must read for any recruiter that's out there, but the premise of the book is you go out to a really nice meal. You may not always remember what the actual food it was that you ate or how well the steak was cooked, but you're going to remember how that restaurant made you feel. And so we always try to think about how are candidates feeling throughout the interview process and that's where we look to elevate that experience.

Shannon Ogborn (04:50):

We also have Unreasonable Hospitality required read for Ashby's marketing team. Well,

Greg Marsh (04:55):

Perfect.

Shannon Ogborn (04:56):

Yeah. So it's actually- So you're

Greg Marsh (04:58):

Familiar.

Shannon Ogborn (04:58):

Yeah, I'm familiar. I think I will also plug it, and I was just talking with someone about this down at the Transform Expo. It's so cool because your wheels start turning when you're reading it thinking, these are all the things that I could actually take from this hospitality setting, more of the restaurant, business, industry, and apply it to my work because that is how you make people feel, like you said, that's what moves the needle.

Greg Marsh (05:27):

Absolutely. And so we try to think of ... So part of Sierra's culture, we talk a lot about junk foods. When everyone is introducing themselves, they have to say where they're coming from and then their favorite junk food, and it's just become a thing. And so we try to think about, okay, how can we weave that into the recruiting process? And so what are those threads that you can bring from the company through recruiting? So we'll try to find out what a candidate's favorite snack is, and then maybe we surprise them with that snack when they come in for their interview. And it's always just like this surprise and delight moment that people aren't expecting to hear about. But again, it goes back to, all right, listening, what's important? It's a very small thing, like what their favorite snack food is.

Shannon Ogborn (06:15):

But

Greg Marsh (06:15):

Again, I think it shows that we care. It's part of our culture. We bring it into recruiting and yeah, it's interesting to see the impact of that.

Shannon Ogborn (06:25):

I think the thing about that is that it doesn't have to be big. It has to be intentional because you could ... I mean, I guess no one would probably decline a yacht, but it's meaningful to somebody that you've heard them and that you've listened to them and that you understand them to be seen and heard is to feel valuable.

Greg Marsh (06:46):

That's right. So our recruiters are listening and we have a great head of rec ops. Her name's Stacey Kim. And so she's thinking about this experience. Michon Hardy leads our recruiting coordinating team and she's the face of the company. The coordinators are the face of the company in many ways. So they're the ones who are doing the work on the backend to find out what someone's favorite snack is. One of the interesting asks that we got or one of the interesting answers that we got, someone said their favorite snack was Cheetos and cream cheese, not a combination that I had ever heard of, but we did it. And we found that. And we hosted a party for our recruiting team and we ended up bringing Cheetos in and cream cheese. So it kind of became a thing for our

Shannon Ogborn (07:31):

Recruiting team. It's like Sierra Sierra recruiting team lore.

Greg Marsh (07:33):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (07:34):

Yeah,

Greg Marsh (07:34):

Exactly.

Shannon Ogborn (07:35):

You talked about earlier some of Sierra's values and there was a specific value that you felt tied this in really well of family. Can you tell me more about how that resonates with this in particular?

Greg Marsh (07:47):

So family, I think for us, we think about we're working really hard. So one of our values is intensity, so I'll weave all our values in. One of our values is intensity, and that goes with this competitive space that we're in. And we're working hard to close deals. Our sales team is working hard to close every deal that we can. On the recruiting side, we often need to match the intensity. We think about needing to match the intensity of the business, doing everything that we can, but also family is one of our values too. And so that for us is how do you find that work life blend in your life? And for me, for example, I'm a father of four and I grind during the day, but it's really important to me that I'm home for 6:30, have dinner with the family, try to shut things down.

(08:41):

And we also, that's something that I often ask my team, "What's that one thing that you need to maintain work-life

Shannon Ogborn (08:47):

Blend?" I feel like it's said a lot, but I feel like it can never be said enough that we spend so much time with the people that we work with and it just feels good to be cared about in a way that supersedes professional things. We are all humans when we come into work. That part doesn't just shut off. And it's good that you show it during the interview process because a lot of companies tend to do tell and not show, and it doesn't really resonate with people because they can't see them in the culture and the process.

Greg Marsh (09:21):

Yeah, absolutely. We actually just had Sierra's third birthday party this past week on Friday, and it was amazing. But Brett and Clay, that the co-founders got up in front of the company, but they really took a moment to not only thank the employees, but to thank the plus ones and the partners because they realized when you're working at a startup, it's not just you, the whole family is working and on this journey. So I think they realize more than anyone that it's ... Yeah, this is family. We're all in this together. So it was cool to be able to celebrate that birthday with our plus ones and partners. One other thing at our birthday party that really stood out to me was that the co-founders were, in addition to thanking the families and the plus ones, they also called out the recruiting team and thanked the recruiting team for bringing all of these people together.

(10:13):

And to me, I've worked for a number of these companies. It's pretty rare that you see the co-founders truly recognizing recruiting, but that's when you know how important and how invested the co-founders are, how invested the companies are in recruiting, that we're not just order takers, we're the partners, and we've truly been their partners to help build this company. So that was really meaningful as well.

Shannon Ogborn (10:38):

It feels really good to have that top-down support because there are so many companies that operate as top-down recruiting is a service function. You're here to deliver it to us and they don't treat it as a team sport and they treat recruiting like not great. And I think just having founders acknowledge that is a huge deal to the recruit. It would be to me.

Greg Marsh (11:01):

Yeah. No, it has to be a partnership. We can't do this alone. It has to be all together.

Shannon Ogborn (11:06):

On the operational side, you kind of mentioned it, but I think contrary to what some people may think, you actually can scale experiences like this that are sort of like low cost, high impact, high potential. How have you all scaled this junk food, unreasonable hospitality?

Greg Marsh (11:24):

Well, this is a low cost solution, but again, it shows that we're listening. We don't need to get them a yacht, but yeah, we just find them their favorite snacks and we make this scalable. As I mentioned, Michon and our coordinators, she will figure out we use data and what are the most common things that people are asking for and we can have a supply of those that are ready that makes it more scalable. But yeah, this doesn't need to be this big, expensive thing. It can just be just showed that you're listening. And recently, just this past week, we had an offer that was accepted and I know for a fact that we were not the highest

Shannon Ogborn (12:03):

Offer

Greg Marsh (12:04):

That was given, but our recruiter, Ashton, found out through his network where the candidate was eating with his partner later that week, went out, got them a gift certificate and delivered that to the candidate and the candidate is accepting. But I think that is just an example of listening and, okay, we don't need to necessarily be the best offer, but we care about you and we want to show you that, but it's not just when you're a candidate, it permeates and we care about you personally when you're an employee as well.

Shannon Ogborn (12:37):

Yeah. That's the show not tell. That's really important because people just won't get that otherwise. It's like, "Oh no, don't worry. We care about you. " That doesn't do anything, that doesn't move the needle for anyone, but doing those small things has a big impact. I guess I'm curious, this is a lot of information to keep. Do people keep it in their head? Where do they keep this information?

Greg Marsh (12:57):

Where do they keep the information on the snacks?

Shannon Ogborn (12:59):

Yeah.

Greg Marsh (13:00):

So one of the ways that we make this scalable is we have custom field in Ashby, and it prompts the recruiter to ask what the candidate's favorite junk food is. So that is another way to make this scalable. And we make sure that it's part of our checklist. We ask about work authorization, we ask about their in-office expectations, but we also ask about junk food, and that makes it scalable if we get some really rich data through that field.

Shannon Ogborn (13:26):

It's great though, because I feel like otherwise you'd have to dig through notes and then it's just right there, like bing, bang, boom, put it in a report and off the rec ops and coordination team goes. I think it's like the small things that make it scalable. Again, it's not a high cost thing.

Greg Marsh (13:47):

No, no. No, it doesn't have to do with cost. And it's just that you're listening and again, just trying to find ways to weave the culture into the experience.

Shannon Ogborn (13:57):

Yeah. Culture definitely seems like a big part of it. So I love that. And I love all of the culture weave elements here because when people are joining a company, they're also joining a culture. They're joining a place, not just because the work they do, because the people around it in the ways of working. And so it's kind of a nice balance between the intensity you're talking about and the family piece, but-

Greg Marsh (14:20):

And often a natural contradiction to each other, but I think it is possible to have both. I will tell you at Sierra, I have never worked this hard in my entire life, hard stop, and I've never had this much fun. And I think that's what makes the intensity doable for me and that I know that my family's cared about. I know that, okay, this is a place where I can close my laptop when I need to, but you need to have that blend, but that's where the family and the intensity kind of come together. So you can work hard and you can have fun and that makes it sustainable. If you're not having fun, this would probably not be sustainable.

Shannon Ogborn (14:58):

100% agree on that. And what is it if we're not having fun? No,

Greg Marsh (15:03):

That's

Shannon Ogborn (15:03):

Right. We need to have fun, grow, learn, have experiences. And that matters a lot. In terms of results, I'm curious, have you seen anything tangible come from this? And we can't experience in general, but specifically called out from this project.

Greg Marsh (15:20):

Absolutely. So we measure everything as much as possible, and we're always trying to lead with data. So Rachel Morris on our rec ops team is constantly looking at the candidate feedback, making sure to shout out. We have a channel that we shout out any positive candidate experience. We shout out the recruiters for who is listening. Another recruiter, Alishan found out it was a candidate's birthday, sent them a cake to their house. And great, that was another experience, but that came through. We saw that in the candidate feedback, but we're measuring candidate NPS score and we're consistently above nine, nine out of 10, we're trending up

Shannon Ogborn (16:00):

And- Which is really good for NPS.

Greg Marsh (16:01):

Yeah. Absolutely. But we lean into it and we see that, we've seen that trend up and hopefully a little bit is because of how we're making them feel during this. But it's interesting, candidates won't often specifically call out, "Oh, they came with my favorite snack." They will call out that they felt heard and that the candidate experience felt personalized and that we were listening. That's what's cool is that we are measuring it, but it's not really about the snacks.

Shannon Ogborn (16:29):

It's

Greg Marsh (16:29):

About, again, how you make them feel, and we see that in the candidate feedback.

Shannon Ogborn (16:34):

Yeah. And it's definitely a situation where you might walk away and be like, "Oh, what was that thing that they did? They did something." People remember those feelings of warmth, of belonging, belonging is such a big reason why people join companies. There were some really great quotes that you had said. I wanted to read one of them. "I was blown away by the speed at which the team moved, which is another great thing. I also loved the craftsmanship exhibited by the team after the offers made, text from the people I met and then every process, email followup from the founders expressing excitement. It's like all of these ... The snack thing, it's not about the snack, right? It's a touch point in the process. And every touchpoint you can get to build rapport is going to get you closer to having your top choice candidate join.

Greg Marsh (17:26):

Yeah, absolutely. And we've talked a lot about recruiting. We're at a recruiting conference, but this is everyone. And I often say to people that we're working with and the teams on agent development and go to market, they're all recruiters. And this is something that it's not just the recruiting team, it's the interviewers, it's the hiring managers, it's the founders. We're all recruiters. They hear me say this all the time too. We will not hit our hiring goals without our team. And so they need to be providing, the interviewers need to provide that 10 out of 10 candidate experience. It can't just all fall on recruiting. It's got to fall on the hiring managers and the hiring managers that are leaning in that really care about recruiting, but that shines through in that experience.

Shannon Ogborn (18:11):

Yeah. Hiring is absolutely a team sport. And I think the other thing too that we had talked about is it's not just about people who get an offer and join. It's also about people who just have a great experience and then want to refer people.

Greg Marsh (18:28):

My favorite, I'm glad you mentioned that. My favorite referrals are often from candidates. And in fact, we're giving an offer today to a candidate who was referred by another candidate. And the candidate was one who was opportunistic and decided not to move forward, but they said," Hey, you know what? Had a great experience. You should talk to Sierra. "Those are the best or the candidates that maybe they decline our offer, but they still had a good experience or we declined them and they said," Hey, we had a really good experience. You should talk to them. "Those are my favorite referrals.

Shannon Ogborn (19:03):

That's the ultimate testament. Someone referring someone to your company when they were declined.

Greg Marsh (19:09):

That's right.That's right. And that gets back to the NPS score of, would you refer this? Would you recommend Sierra to a friend? But yeah, those I think are the most meaningful and most rewarding referrals for me.

Shannon Ogborn (19:22):

Looking ahead, how do you all continue to evolve candidate experience and add things on or think about things in different ways, especially that we have access to so much information now. It's almost like overwhelming on how you would carry that forward.

Greg Marsh (19:40):

Yeah. And I think for us, particularly as we're a global company now, and this has been something that's really evolved over the past few months and we're opening in London or we have an office in London, we have an office in Singapore, we're opening an office in Japan. We announced recently we're opening office in Australia. So it'll be interesting to see how that candidate experience translates and because it may show up differently in the different offices. And I think whenever you open up a new office, perhaps 80% is core

Shannon Ogborn (20:11):

To

Greg Marsh (20:11):

Sierra, but maybe 20% is localized to what's important. We do this Sierra birthday party and that is something that we do instead of a holiday party and great, everyone can come in and March and that works. But for example, in London, they do have a holiday party because it's London and you can't not have a holiday party in London. So that's something that they do that becomes a tradition, a ritual for London. So I think you could see that the same for candidate experience and what they do in the London office may be different than what we do in San Francisco, maybe different than Singapore, Tokyo, Australia.

Shannon Ogborn (20:47):

Yeah. I think leaving the flexibility for localization is one of the most important parts related to culture and candidate experience because you want to keep the core, like you said, but you also have to allow people to have their own local geo experience. Otherwise, they're not going to feel seen and heard because they're going to feel like you're just squishing us into this culture that is not native to our culture and you don't see us. And I think having that flexibility, that 20% flexibility is actually a big part of that.

Greg Marsh (21:20):

Yeah, absolutely. I agree.

Shannon Ogborn (21:22):

For those who have been longtime listeners, this is on the YouTube extended version for those who might be joining us for the first time, if you want to hear one thing Greg would tell us earlier career self, his recruiting hot take and what hiring excellence means to him, feel free to head to our YouTube. Well, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Greg Marsh (21:43):

They're certainly welcome to check out Sierra. We have a great blog, a lot of great resources on there. Certainly our careers page. They could see all of the roles that are posted. Follow us on LinkedIn. You could follow me on LinkedIn for sure, but yeah, they're welcome to check it out.

Shannon Ogborn (21:57):

Awesome. Well, like we've both plugged, our reasonable hospitality is a must read, I think in any industry, but specifically recruiting. And I think folks will get a lot of good, fresh ideas and perspective on how to accelerate their care and experience. So thank you so much for joining.

Greg Marsh (22:13):

Yeah, thank you.

Shannon Ogborn (22:15):

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.ashybhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.