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We stopped squeezing every last patient slot out of our clinicians. Here’s what happened… About ten years ago, a cherished nurse practitioner came to me in tears. She told me: “I am working ALL the time. I run from patient to patient, barely get to eat or pee, then still take home a ton of work. It isn’t worth it.” That conversation changed everything. I introduced protected admin time. For every 8 hours of clinical work, my clinicians now get 2 hours of dedicated time for documentation, patient calls, portal messages, and care coordination. Yes. That means a salaried 40-hour clinician sees patients for 30 hours. The results have been powerful: Morale is higher. Clinicians feel trusted and supported instead of squeezed. Revenue hasn’t dropped; in fact, it’s improved. With space to think, they code correctly, capture care gaps, and are willing to add patients when needed. Patients are happier. They hear directly from their clinician, and messages get answered promptly. And Melissa Bradley, who was ready to walk away? She’s now one of the most important leaders on our team: our clinical liaison; a position we created as a result of that conversation. She has her finger on everyone’s pulse, knows who’s drowning, and when we need to shift. She knows this because she lived it. Too often, practices try to maximize “revenue-generating” time at the expense of everything else. My experience? Giving your team the breathing room to do their jobs well pays off for everyone—patients, payers, and providers.

Layoffs cost 10X to 100X more than they save, but HR’s data only covers compensation, so business leaders only see savings. I use data to talk at least one CEO out of layoffs every month. Here’s how to protect your team from the chopping block. Quantify the Loss: The most common mistake is making the case with the value the team has created and the projects it has delivered. CEOs think about future value, not past gains, when making layoff decisions. What projects won’t deliver and how much revenue will be lost? CEOs need growth now more than ever. Build the case with data that quantifies the forward-looking value on the team’s product roadmap. Emphasize This Year’s Losses: Your CEO is being told that after an initial cost in the next 1-2 quarters, the business will see higher margins. Quantify this year’s lost revenue in big, bold terms. Showcase how internal efficiency initiatives will save the company more than the team costs. What external teams will miss their goals? Everyone advocates for themselves, so you’ll stand out by getting other leaders to add their voices. Use external teams’ KPIs and connect them to top-level strategic goals. Reduce Costs Without Reducing Headcount: Take high-cost, low or uncertain returning projects off the roadmap. Optimize hardware and cloud utilization. Push out tool and infrastructure purchases. Consolidate and put pressure on vendors to offer discounts. I frame this as, “I can’t reduce the staffing budget, but here are other areas where I can provide similar savings this year.” Instead of saying “No,” give your CEO alternatives and new options. Focus on informing vs. convincing. Every company’s CEO and CFO are taking a hard look at the technology budget, and layoffs are being discussed quarterly. Be proactive. Assume it’s coming and prepare the case now. Your team and career will be better off if you do.

Using Gem's dataset (140M+ applicants, 14.4M candidates, 1.3M hires), we looked at what actually moves candidates through the funnel. The single biggest finding: sourced applicants are 5x more likely to be hired than inbound (2.0% vs 0.4%). BACKGROUND: For years, recruiting advice has been pure superstition. Most teams guess at what works. We analyzed Gem's full dataset to see what actually moves candidates. Here's what we found: A 3-stage sequence should aim for 82%+ opens, 26%+ replies, and 14%+ interested. Sourced candidates are 5x more likely to be hired than inbound. THE 4-TOUCH SEQUENCE: Touch 1: Reason-first personalization Subject examples: - "Reaching out because of your Kubernetes migration post" - "Your talk on scaling Postgres caught my attention" - "Saw you just shipped v2 of the mobile app" Body: One line on why them, two sentences on value, soft ask. Why this works: Highly personalized messages see 73% engagement. Generic outreach gets ignored. Specific reasons signal you did the work. Touch 2: Concrete outcome Subject examples: - "Cut deployment time 40% - Staff SRE" - "Own data platform serving 50M users" - "Lead mobile eng for Series B fintech" Body: One outcome they'd own plus a 1-click scheduling link. Touch 3: Value with no ask Share a relevant resource like an open-source PR, launch note, or talk. Stay top of mind without pitching. Touch 4: Breakup email Subject examples: - "Should I close your file?" - "Last note - timing off?" - "Wrong time?" Body: Acknowledge silence, offer to close their file or reconnect later. Give them an easy out or a path back in. WHAT REASON-FIRST ACTUALLY MEANS: Bad: "We're hiring for a great role" Good: "Saw you scaled [system] to [metric] at [company] - that's exactly the challenge on our [project]" That's what Gem's #{{reason}} token operationalizes at scale. THE DIAGNOSTIC: If your opens are too low, your subject lines are generic. If your replies are too low, your value prop isn't clear or your ask is too big. If your interested rate is too low, you're targeting the wrong audience or timing. TAKEAWAY: Run this 4-touch sequence Monday. Measure your first 3 touches against 82/26/14. Want the full 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks report? Link in the comments. 👇

We all want to hire the best people - but a mistake so many founders make is ignoring step 1: Build a talent magnet 🧲 Psychometric testing, blind referencing, task-based assignments and culture-fit interviews - all great tools for selecting talent... But if your top of funnel is only 50 candidates per role - you're better off investing time in building the top of funnel rather than selection. At my first company we built a talent magnet that attracted 2,000 candidates per role (pre AI applications). Here are the core steps to building top of funnel in hiring: 1. Define your culture - ensure it is authentic and 'controversial' 2. Craft your employer brand - the reasons people enjoy working at your company (beyond your culture) - eg at sequel those might be working with the world's best athletes on a daily basis, funding pioneering founders, a 'dope' office with a roof terrace & plenty of socialising space, an experienced team with multiple exits 3. Pick your benefits carefully - you are what you attract - at sequel we offer a learning budget, free gym membership, private healthcare, a generous parental policy and proactive wellness screenings - therefore we have healthy team members with a hunger to learn and who want to have families one day 4. Talk about the above publicly - post on LinkedIn, attend events, talk to the press, apply for awards 5. Craft job descriptions optimising for top-of-funnel - remove barriers like requirements for certain levels of education, include wide salary ranges (and pick the range carefully), offer equity if you can, link to other resources to help people learn about your brand (eg we have a team video on our website) 6. Use an ATS & post widely to job boards - we use Workable and post to 20+ job boards for every role 7. Host events - hackathons are a great way to build relationships with engineering and product talent and spend extended period of time seeing how they work 8. Outbound - do not just rely on inbound - create an ideal candidate profile with a detailed dream job history - and start pro-actively reaching out to people who fit the profile Focus on attraction before you invest time in selection. It's a bit like dating... Any other tips for building a magnet for talent?

🚷Laying Off Employees is not the only way to reduce cost ➡Optimize your Supply Chain Instead Seems like August is the month for layoffs, as for another consecutive year press releases and news all have similar headlines on this topic 💡Is laying off people the right strategy to reduce operational costs? At first it might be the "fastest" and even "easiest" way to achieve this But, what is the true cost of layoffs? The aftermath of layoffs shows in 3 ways: 📉 Productivity goes down ➡ At least -1 hour/day per worker during 6-8 months 📈 Voluntary attrition increases ➡ Going as high as 50%, your most valuable employees start quitting 📈 Recruitment costs increase ➡ In the attempt of replacing key talent faster than the rate at which you are losing it comes at sometimes 3x higher costs The attempt of saving in salaries, bonuses, compensation packages... ⚠ The true cost of layoffs in the long run exceeds the short term savings Instead of laying people off, you should optimize your supply chain: ✨ Improve your demand and supply planning ➡Avoid stockouts or surplus and rushed decisiones such as expedite shipments ✨ Improve your capacity utilization ➡Pack and ship less air; always look for ways to achieve FTL ✨ Simplify your invoicing processes ➡Aim for frictionless transactions to enhance relationships with your stakeholders and avoir penalties ✨Simplify your portfolio and BOM ➡Reducing complexity in part numbers and variety helps you focus on true value Which other low hanging fruits can you think of instead of laying people off?

Most hospitals think length of stay is a bed problem. It isn't. It's a decision problem. Hospitals lose an estimated 0.5–1.5 bed-days per patient to preventable decision delays. Not lack of capacity. Yet most interventions add beds, push discharge, or deploy AI. The bottleneck is upstream. The system is slow to decide. Over time, working across clinical care, population health, and health economics, I have found a simple framework: See. Align. Proceed. 1. See: Diagnose the system, not the symptom LOS is rarely driven by a single delay. It is a system-level outcome: diagnostics not prioritised for discharge, decisions made late in the day, fragmented ownership, planning that starts too late. From a public health perspective, this is a coordination failure, not an isolated inefficiency. Patients are often medically ready before the system is operationally ready. 2. Align: Fix incentives before scaling solutions This is where most initiatives fail. Clinicians optimise for safety. Operations optimise for throughput. Finance tracks cost, but does not control flow. No one owns end-to-end LOS. Until alignment is addressed: discharge will be delayed, variation will persist, and AI will underperform. Technology cannot compensate for misaligned incentives. 3. Proceed: Act where impact is highest and risk is controlled Only after alignment should we intervene. Start with high-leverage changes: discharge planning at admission, morning discharge rounds, prioritising diagnostics for discharge-ready patients. Then scale structurally: standardised pathways, real-time patient flow visibility, AI to predict discharge readiness and delays. The question is not "what works." It is what scales without introducing new risk. Do not reduce LOS by pushing patients out. Reduce LOS by improving how the system makes decisions. In healthcare, we do not lack solutions. We lack clarity on systems, discipline in alignment, and rigour in execution. That is where sustainable impact lies. This is part of a series on decision problems in healthcare. Most healthcare challenges are not constrained by resources. They are constrained by how decisions are structured and executed. I will be sharing practical frameworks across healthcare systems, AI, and capital. Connect if you are working on similar problems. #HealthSystems #AIinHealthcare #PatientFlow #ClinicalLeadership #HealthEconomics

Stop blaming "the talent market" for your hiring struggles. The same candidates you can't attract are saying yes to your competitors every day. The difference isn't luck - it's these 4 strategic components most companies ignore: 1) Foundation Most companies jump straight to posting jobs and hoping. Big mistake. World-class hiring starts with building your talent ecosystem: • Define the specific skills that predict success in each role • Build talent pools before you need them, not after • Create assessment standards that work across sourcing channels • Design one system that handles source, screen, and shortlist This feels like "overhead" but it's the difference between scrambling to fill roles and selecting from pre-qualified pools. Build the infrastructure once, use it forever. 2) Design Your hiring process IS your product. Design it like one. Strategic companies architect an integrated system: • Sourcing strategy that builds assessed talent pools • Screening that happens automatically, not manually • Shortlisting based on validated skills, not resumes • One platform experience from discovery to decision If sourcing, screening, and shortlisting feel like separate systems, you're working three times harder than necessary. 3) Execution This is where everyone focuses, but it's mostly operational: • Running assessments and validating skills • Conducting structured interviews • Managing pipeline and offers Important? Absolutely. Differentiating? Rarely. When you have the right foundation and design, execution becomes selection, not elimination. 4) Optimization What gets measured gets improved. Track metrics across your entire funnel: • Source quality (% of sourced candidates who pass assessments) • Screen efficiency (hours saved through automated testing) • Shortlist accuracy (% of shortlisted candidates who get offers) • End-to-end velocity (source to hire in days, not weeks) The magic happens when sourcing data feeds screening decisions, and screening results improve sourcing strategy. TAKEAWAY: 80% of companies treat sourcing, screening, and shortlisting as three separate problems. 20% of companies build one integrated system that handles all three. Guess which 20% consistently hire better talent, faster, at lower cost? Stop juggling multiple tools and disconnected processes. Start building an integrated talent acquisition system where sourcing feeds screening, screening builds pools, and shortlisting becomes simple selection. The companies mastering this don't scramble to fill roles. They select from pre-qualified talent pools they've been building all along. P.S. Count how many different tools you use to source, screen, and shortlist. What would change if it was just one? ;)

Telecommunications hiring has an efficiency problem. Not a people problem. Not a talent shortage. An operational one. In high-volume telecoms hiring, the biggest cost drain isn’t salary. It’s time, and what happens while roles stay empty. Here’s what the data shows from a typical telecoms TA setup: ● 5-person TA team ● 5,000 applications per month ● 40 hours/week spent screening ● 49 days average time-to-fill ● £125 per day cost per vacant role That combination creates a silent cost spiral! What actually happens: ●Recruiters spend the majority of their time filtering, not hiring. ●Qualified applicants are delayed, missed, or dropped. ●Vacant roles remain open longer than the business can afford. ●Speed compromises quality, or quality compromises speed. The measurable impact when this is fixed: ●87% reduction in manual screening time. ●£30,368 saved annually in direct TA capacity. ●£330,750 recovered through faster time-to-fill. ●£40,264 gained through better matching and retention outcomes. ●£401,382 total annual efficiency gain. ●2,378% ROI when operational and strategic gains are combined. This isn’t about “doing more with less.” It’s about stopping highly paid teams doing work machines should already be doing. Telecommunications is one of the most volume-heavy, time-sensitive hiring environments there is, yet much of the process still relies on: ●Manual CV reviews ●Keyword filtering ●Human bottlenecks at the very start of the funnel The result? Slow hiring, inflated costs, and lost talent, all before interviews even begin. Efficiency in hiring isn’t a future advantage. It’s now a baseline requirement for telecoms organisations that want to scale, compete, and retain talent without burning cash or people. Sometimes the biggest gains don’t come from hiring better recruiters, they come from removing the work that never needed a human in the first place.

In the hospitality industry, staffing is one of the biggest cost drivers. Labor expenses often account for up to 50% of total hotel operation costs Here’s the step-by-step approach that worked for me - 1. Defining Your Desired Service Standard -What kind of guest experience do you aim for? Ask yourself—what’s truly essential? What could be streamlined? This stage helps you identify areas where you can maintain or even improve service quality without overextending your resources. 2. Create a Zero-Based Manning Budget Once your service standard is clear, it’s time to take a hard look at staffing from a fresh perspective. I did this by developing a zero-based manning budget. Here’s how you can do it: Understand Productivity Levels: Know how much each employee contributes and where efficiencies can be improved. Encourage Multi-Tasking: Look for opportunities to combine job roles. For example, can your front desk staff handle concierge duties as well? Plan for Variable Labor Needs: Even with “fixed” labor costs, you can adapt staffing levels based on occupancy. During busy seasons, you’ll need more staff; in quieter times, fewer. 3. Tackling Resistance and Gaps Change is rarely easy. As soon as I started talking about streamlining processes, the fear and resistance became clear among employees and managers alike. There were gaps in training, outdated equipment, and barriers to achieving new standards. Here’s what helped me: Identify Resistance: Acknowledge that this fear is real, and figure out what’s fueling it. Communicate Clearly: Explain the “why” behind the decision and show your team how it benefits them. Provide Training: Multi-tasking requires preparation. Invest in training to help employees succeed in their expanded roles. Equip Your Team: Ensure your staff has the tools they need to work efficiently—manual processes create duplication and burnout. Update SOPs: Revise and communicate your new standard operating procedures (SOPs) so everyone is aligned with the new expectations, including customers and stakeholders. 4. Calculate the Cost and Adjust At this stage, you’ll want to calculate the cost of these changes. Are the benefits worth the investment in training, equipment, and restructured staffing? If not, go back to the drawing board and make the necessary adjustments. 5. Monitor and Refine I learned the importance of constant monitoring—assessing challenges, checking for staff burnout, and making adjustments as needed. Success in staffing optimization doesn’t happen overnight. Yes, it takes time and sometimes tough conversations. But, I’ve seen firsthand how it can help hotels not only survive but thrive, delivering the high-quality experience guests expect while maximizing profitability. P.S. What’s your experience with managing labor costs in the hospitality industry? P.P.S. Want to know how you can too manage staffing more clearly and accurately? DM me “STAFFING” and I’ll share the further details.

The Talent Acquisition Experience: From Funnel to Flywheel In one of my previous organisations we were able to 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗿𝗼𝗽 𝗥𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 𝗯𝘆 𝟲𝟱.𝟵𝟳% 𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿. Not by paying more. Not by changing the roles. By fixing what happens between during the process of acquisition, offer letter and Day 1. When I joined, offer drops were a significant problem — candidates were accepting offers and then disappearing before joining. The instinct was to blame the generation type, the market or compensation. The real issue? The candidate experience between offer and onboarding was almost non-existent (experience and engagement matters). No communication cadence. No culture signal. No sense of belonging before they even arrived. We redesigned the entire post-offer journey: → Personalised joining kits → Manager/HR touchpoints before Day 1 → Flipbook with critical insights about the organisation → Clear 30-60-90 day anchors communicated upfront → Culture signals woven into every touchpoint 𝗧𝗔𝗧 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝟱𝟭.𝟰% 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗱 — through workflow redesign, not more recruiters. Most hiring problems are not sourcing problems. They're experience problems. Where in your hiring funnel are you losing people? #TalentAcquisition #HiringStrategy #OfferDrop #HRLeadership #PeopleOps