When I took over product and design hiring, we didn’t have a clear picture of what made a great PM or designer at our company. We’d been hiring engineers for years — that felt more defined. But product recruiting was years behind, and the data made it impossible to ignore: only 15% of candidates were making it through our final rounds. That number told us something was broken well before the interview stage — we weren’t finding the right people, and when we did find them, we weren’t showing up for them the way we needed to.

We decided to rebuild from the ground up. What follows is the full framework — four changes across the entire funnel that took us from 15% to over 40% onsite-to-offer and 72 hires in one year.

Align on the profile

Everything starts with a proper intake meeting with your hiring manager. It sounds basic, but most teams get it wrong. The goal isn’t just to collect requirements — it’s to build a shared understanding of what this role actually needs, where you can make trade-offs, and what kind of person genuinely thrives at your company.

A perfect candidate doesn’t exist. So get realistic. We mapped the backgrounds of every high performer in the function and looked for patterns. What emerged: a combination of big tech and startup experience, ex-founders with entrepreneurial instincts, people who came out of consulting. From that, we landed on two non-negotiables: they must have seen great, and they cannot be a job hopper.

“Seen great” means more than surviving a high-performing team. It means knowing what winning looks like, understanding what it takes to get there, and being able to attract other A players around them. And we need people with real longevity — who will see things through when it gets hard, not leave when it does.

From there we built a target company list: organizations with similar culture, comparable business models, and strong product fundamentals — places our hiring managers genuinely respected. That list became the foundation of our sourcing strategy.

Build a sourcing machine

Recruiting is math. Start with your data: response rates, interest rates, pass-through rates at each stage. Build a reverse funnel from there — how many people do you need to reach to produce one hire? Work backwards from your headcount target and your timeline.

But here’s the real question for 2026: how do you actually build the machine? The answer is AI, and I don’t think any company can afford not to use it today. We deployed AI tools with bots trained for specific roles and specific profiles. It takes time upfront — you need to give the bots feedback, review what they surface, iterate — but the quality of profiles they produce becomes genuinely competitive with manual sourcing. And with how fast the technology is moving, it’s only going to improve.

This doesn’t eliminate the need for sourcers or recruiters. What it does is free them to do the work that actually requires a human — talking to candidates, building relationships, closing. We used to run a 1:1 sourcing model and have since pivoted: dedicated sourcing partners only on strategic, hard-to-fill roles, and mid-level searches running full-cycle with AI support.

One more thing worth noting for product and design specifically: volume isn’t the answer. Engineering sourcing can be a numbers game. Product and design requires a different approach — specific search, quality first. We filter on background, craft, trajectory, and whenever possible we review portfolio work before reaching out. We’ve even fed AI tools with stakeholder feedback from previous portfolio reviews and used them as a first filter. The accuracy surprised us. It reduces the time your stakeholders spend reviewing profiles and gets you calibrated faster without waiting on their feedback.

The pre-work most teams skip

Getting the pipeline flowing isn’t enough. The competition for top talent is fierce, and the best candidates have options. You need to be the reason they choose you.

Start by knowing your limitations. Is work-life balance your sticking point? Hard RTO requirements? Risky industry? Whatever the friction points are, your hiring team needs to be equipped to address them directly — and early. Not when the offer goes out. Pre-closing starts from the first conversation.

The second piece is often overlooked: a recruiter can only do so much. Candidates don’t accept offers to work with us — they do it to work for their future manager. In a world where most companies treat recruiting as a transaction, the teams that win are the ones that build an actual human connection. We coach our managers to get into candidates’ DMs early: text them, meet them for coffee, give them tips for their next interview. The manager’s job is to build a relationship with the candidate outside the formal process. Ours is to advise and enable them.

The calibration problem

This is where most companies lose candidates they should have hired — and pass candidates they shouldn’t.

If only 15% of your finalists are getting offers, that’s not a sourcing problem. That’s a calibration problem. We saw it clearly in our own debrief notes: “their work was meh,” “I wasn’t blown away.” When feedback sounds like that, your team doesn’t actually know what they’re looking for.

We went back through our strongest interviews and built structured rubrics for every stage — HM screens, case studies, and cross-functional partner interviews. For each competency (Communication, Product Thinking, Craft, Execution, Complexity, and others), we defined what a strong signal looked like and what a weak one looked like, with concrete examples from real interviews.

Rolling this out takes time. You need to train your interviewers, run calibration sessions, and actively monitor debriefs to catch problems early. A Bar Raiser program could be valuable here — a small group of trained, independent interviewers who run your debriefs and serve as an objective voice in the room, separate from the hiring team’s enthusiasm or bias.

Once the rubrics were in place, we built structured scorecards tied directly to those rubrics — not to gut feel.

And the recordings. I don’t know how we functioned without them. If your company isn’t recording interviews today, change that now. Recordings are how you calibrate interviewers at scale: watch sessions, give specific feedback, use strong examples to train others. It has been one of the highest-leverage changes we made.

The results

Twelve months after rebuilding the funnel, our onsite-to-offer rate went from 15% to over 40%. We closed 72 hires in a single year — double our previous annual output.

None of it happened because of one change. Profile alignment without a sourcing machine means you know who you want but can’t find them. A sourcing machine without interview structure means you’re moving the wrong people through. Interview structure without interviewer calibration means your rubrics sit in a doc nobody reads. Each piece depends on the others.

If you’re rebuilding from scratch, start with the profile. Everything downstream — who you source, how you pitch, what you assess, how you debrief — flows from having a clear answer to the question: what does great actually look like here?

One honest caveat: the framework works, but it doesn’t run itself. The single biggest enabler of everything above was having unwavering support from the business — executives who looked at the data, acknowledged the truth, and committed to being real partners in the process. Before you start rebuilding, secure that first and make sure you have the right advocate for all the changes you’re looking to implement. After all, operational changes are the easy part — organizational alignment is what makes them happen.

‍

Author Bio

Julia Aybin is a Senior Manager at Rippling, a $16.8B HR and workforce management platform, where she leads the Product & Design recruiting function for North America. Her career in talent acquisition spans 10+ years across both sides of the Atlantic — she joined Rippling as its first recruiting hire in Europe, building out offices in London, Dublin, and Warsaw before relocating to the US. Prior to that, she was a Senior Recruiter at Uber Amsterdam, working across seven European markets and leading its product hiring there.