How One TA Leader Transformed Hiring at an 11,000-Person Company
Reflections from Minoo Ayat, VP of Global Talent Strategy at ModelExpand, — and the lessons every Head of Talent can take from her approach.
When I joined Juniper Networks in 2023, I stepped into an 11,000 employees, global organization known for its technical excellence. But underneath that scale was a familiar challenge every large company eventually faces:
Everyone was hiring, but no one was hiring the same way. Some teams had calibrated interview loops. Others relied on intuition. A few used rubrics. And across the company, no one could articulate, with confidence, what “meeting the Juniper Networks’ bar” actually meant. As a TA leader, that’s both the problem and the opportunity. This is how we turned all these challenges into a consistent, aligned, globally scalable hiring engine.
The Moment I Realized the System Was Working Against Us
My first month was spent listening. I met with stakeholders including engineering VPs in Bangalore, HRBPs in EMEA, recruiters in the U.S., people managers in APAC. Across every conversations the same pattern emerged:
Great people. Great intentions. No shared process. No shared definitions. No shared data.
Without structure:
Each org defined its own hiring bar
Interview loops operated in silos
Feedback wasn’t evidence-based
Compliance standards varied
And our data could not be compared across teams or regions
No one was doing anything wrong. They were doing what had worked for them locally. But for a global company, that wasn’t enough. This was the inflection point: We couldn’t improve quality or speed until we created consistency.
Step 1: The Audit (The Uncomfortable Work That Changes Everything)
Before touching any process, we started with an audit not of documents, but of behavior. We asked:
How do hiring managers scope roles today?
What does a “good” candidate look like in this org versus that org?
How do interviewers make decisions?
How much of hiring is left to intuition?
Where is bias unintentionally slipping in?
For a company this size, the answer was: everywhere. Different regions were running their own approach with no way to calibrate. The audit wasn’t glamorous, but it gave us the facts. And the facts shaped the strategy.
Step 2: Designing the Playbook (Where Structure Meets Culture)
A structured hiring process only works when it reflects the business. It cannot be copied from another company. So we built the framework with Juniper, not for Juniper.
We defined:
Core role competencies
Technical skills needed for success
Behavioral markers tied to Juniper’s leadership values
Clear definitions of “what good looks like” across levels and functions
Then we built tools to support it:
A competency-aligned question bank
Interviewer guides for each stage
Clear roles and responsibilities across the loop
A shared language for evaluating talent
Interviewers no longer had to rely on instinct. They knew exactly what to assess and how.
Step 3: Operationalizing It (Where Most Execution Efforts Break Down)
A process only matters if teams can run it consistently.
So we built a repeatable operating rhythm that became the foundation for every search:
Structured kickoff for every requisition
Pre-brief with all interviewers
Each interviewer assigned a specific competency area
Questions pulled from the same, shared bank
Evidence-based feedback. Not “I liked/didn’t like/I felt like”
Structured debriefs
This alone was transformative.
Hiring managers told us:
“This is the most confident I’ve ever felt making a decision.”
Recruiters said:
“I finally have a real partnership with the interviewers.”
For the first time, the data became clean, comparable, and actionable.
Step 4: Reinforcing Structure with Technology
We needed systems that supported the process inside the workflow, not tools that sat on a shelf.
We chose Eightfold as our AI-driven platform and integrated it deeply:
Job descriptions tied to competencies
AI-assisted requisition calibration
Consistent interview workflows
Built-in question banks
Evidence-based feedback capture
Automated scheduling
Funnel analytics tied to core TA KPIs
The system forced consistency. And once hiring teams experienced the ease and clarity, they did not want to return to the old way of working.
Step 5: Change Management (The Real Work)
Rolling out structure to an 11,000-person company is not a “launch day” project. It’s a campaign.
We built:
A global, sixty-minute training
Walkthroughs of the philosophy behind structured hiring
Localized content for each region
A train-the-trainer model to scale globally
Champions across TA, HRBP, and business leader
Visible sponsorship from the CEO and CPO
Continuous feedback loops
This was not about training people to interview better. This was about shifting how the organization thought about hiring. We ultimately trained more than 3,000 interviewers in under eighteen months — one of the most successful programs the People team had ever run.
The Results (and Why This Matters for Heads of People and Heads of Talent)
Within one year, the impact was unmistakable:
Consistency improved across regions, Candidate experience became more predictable and equitable, Debriefs shifted from opinions to evidence, Hiring managers gained confidence in their decisions
Recruiters felt true partnership with interview teams
Structure replaced intuition, reducing the risk of bias
Quality of hire became measurable
Time to fill accelerated because teams were aligned upfront
Data visibility unlocked better capacity planning and TA strategy
But the biggest shift went beyond metrics. Hiring became a company-wide discipline, not an afterthought.
Leaders understood the bar. Interviewers were proud of their craft. Recruiters finally had real partnership. The system became sustainable because people believed in it.
We established a consistent hiring bar across the organization. Interviewers gained confidence in their hiring decisions, recruiters became true talent advisors, partnering closely with the business, and the system became more sustainable, providing a standardized workflow that interviewing teams could reliably adopt.
The Takeaway for Heads of People
You don’t need 11,000 employees to need structure. You only need misalignment, and every company has the potential to reach that point.
The playbook I built at Juniper works because it addresses five universal truths:
Teams want clarity
Structure accelerates quality (not the other way around)
Data only works with consistency
Technology sustains what process starts
Culture, not process, is what drives adoptions more
Get those right, and you can transform hiring at 100 people or 10,000. And once you do, hiring stops being a fire drill and becomes a strategic advantage.
About ModelExpand
ModelExpand is a talent advisory firm that helps companies build a high-performing internal recruiting engine. We partner with your team to design the people, processes, and systems that drive consistent, faster, higher-quality hiring at scale. Contact us to learn more.
