You're not telling candidates about the real company culture...

Hello! After a break we’re back with the Recruiting Wisdom Newsletter. Each week I’m interviewing a Talent Leader to ask them for some practical recruiting advice.

This week I spoke with Adam Horne, Co-Founder of Open Org and expert on all things culture and transparency. Today we’re diving into practical ways to better communicate company culture & improve the candidate experience.

If you’d like to see the full conversation the links are below. Feel free to subscribe on these channels too as we’ve got new episodes coming out weekly.

👉 YouTube
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1. Rethinking How We Talk About Culture

The way we discuss company culture often focuses on feelings like "collaborative" , "supportive" and "nice" rather than tangible elements.

Adam suggests we can make this more concrete by focusing on what culture actually means, such as:

• How we work, not how we feel about work

• The specific ways we get our best work done together

• The tools and processes we use

• The operational aspects of daily work

2. Making Transparency Work in Practice

TA professionals reading this may be itching to provide more transparency in the recruitment process but need to fit within wider company processes and can’t go build an entirely new careers page tomorrow.

Adam still has some practical tips everyone can take action on:

Improve Hiring Manager Kickoffs

Going deeper in your intake meetings generates more information you can share with candidates on what it’s actually like to work in the team, actions such as:

• Getting detailed information about the role beyond the basics

• Asking about management style and team dynamics

• Understanding who thrives (and who doesn't) under this manager

• Pushing back if you don't get the information you need

Set Clear Communication Standards

As well as the culture, provide transparency on the recruitment process through:

• Establishing clear SLAs for candidate feedback

• Communicating these timelines to candidates upfront

• Being explicit about what feedback will (and won't) be provided at each stage

• Creating team commitments around response times

Understand Your Hiring Managers

And lastly getting to really know the person who will be managing the candidate you’re looking for creates areas for transparency, things like:

• Their management style

• How they handle pressure

• The types of people who succeed on their team

• Their communication preferences

• Their definition of success for this role

3. Real-World Example: What Great Looks Like

Adam highlighted PostHog's approach to transparency. Some things they do:

• Share their monthly management report publicly

• Be honest about lack of career frameworks

• Provide clear statements about who shouldn't apply

• Mix personality with serious information

• Provide clarity about work style and expectations

Check out their careers site here.

4. Best Practices for Implementation

Some final tips on implementing more transparency in your recruitment process:

Focus on How Work Gets Done: Document specific processes and tools, explain actual day-to-day workflows and share concrete examples of how teams operate.

Be Upfront About Trade-offs: If there's no career framework, say so. If the role requires long hours, be clear. If certain perks aren't available, acknowledge it.

Set Realistic Expectations: Share actual KPIs when possible, provide examples of what success looks like and be clear about limitations and challenges.

As Adam says, "people can handle not getting feedback if they know upfront that they're not going to get a certain amount of feedback at a certain stage of the process." It's all about setting and managing expectations effectively.

Interested in learning more?

✅ That's it for this week! We hope these practical tips help you improve transparency in your recruitment process. Please reply to this email with any feedback - we'd love to hear it.

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