Diary of a High Volume Recruiter Series: Stacey Slater of Oyster

This series is dedicated to sharing the knowledge and expertise of high-volume recruiters. These are the hardest-working people in the industry. So we’re asking how they’re getting hiring right at scale. Featuring guidance for the future generation of aspiring talent acquisition and recruiting professionals, here is the next instalment of our high-volume recruiter series. 

Meet Stacey Slater, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Oyster, a trusted Professional Employer Organization. With over a decade in fast-growth talent acquisition, Stacey has been leading Oyster’s lean recruitment function as the business has evolved. During their peak growth phase, Oyster was hiring as many as 400 people per year. Scaling the company meant Stacey was hyper-focused on prioritisation, stakeholder alignment, and operating discipline. Read the full interview below.

1. How has the practice of recruitment changed since you began your career? Any memorable moments? 

The biggest change has been the move from reactive hiring to more intentional, system-led talent acquisition. Early in my career, recruitment was much more transactional; it focused on filling roles and CV matching. Now, especially in global organisations, it’s about designing hiring systems that can flex with business needs while maintaining consistency and quality.

One of the most meaningful shifts I’ve seen is how distributed hiring has matured. At Oyster, hiring across multiple countries and time zones made it clear very quickly that you can’t rely on informal processes. You need structure, clarity, and strong decision frameworks.

A consistent learning has been that speed doesn’t come from cutting corners, but rather from removing friction in the system.

2. What does a good day look like? 

A good day is one where the hiring system feels predictable rather than reactive. Where roles are moving forward without constant firefighting, and where decisions are being made with clarity and pace.

3. What systems and processes make it work?

The things that make the biggest difference are:

• Strong workforce planning alignment with leadership teams
• A clean and reliable ATS structure (we love Ashby!) that gives visibility on pipeline health
• Clear role scorecards and interview frameworks to support consistency
• Tight feedback loops and SLAs across hiring teams
• Regular prioritisation conversations to ensure focus stays on the right roles

At the lean-team level, the biggest unlock is always clarity: what we are hiring, why it matters, and what “good” looks like.

4. How are the challenges of high-volume recruitment different?

In my case, I wouldn’t frame Oyster as a classic high-volume recruitment environment, but we have operated in periods of intense hiring demand with a very lean team. The challenge in that context is volume and elasticity. The pressure points tend to be:

• Prioritisation: ensuring the right roles get attention at the right time
• Stakeholder alignment: preventing decision delays in distributed teams
• Consistency at scale: keeping interview quality and standards high across many roles
• Avoiding process fragmentation as teams move quickly

One of the clearest lessons from that period was that small inefficiencies compound very quickly. Even modest delays in feedback or unclear ownership can create bottlenecks that ripple across the entire hiring system.

What changes everything is treating recruitment less like a service function and more like an operating system that needs continuous tuning.

5. What advice would you give someone considering this career?

I’d focus less on “becoming a recruiter” and more on becoming someone who understands how hiring systems work in practice.

Learn to design for scale early, even if you’re not operating at it yet. Stay close to data, but don’t lose sight of human judgment.

Invest heavily in stakeholder management; it’s often the real lever of speed. Build comfort with ambiguity... high-growth environments rarely offer perfect inputs. Also, protect candidate experience deliberately because it doesn’t happen by default at volume

And finally, the most effective talent leaders stay curious about how hiring connects to broader business outcomes, operating as true partners in growth while balancing empathy for people with discipline around process and decision-making.

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HiringBranch would like to extend a sincere thank you to Stacey Slater of Oyster for participating in this important series. For the previous interview in this series, click here, and stay tuned for the next installment coming next month.

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Image Credits

Feature Image: Property of HiringBranch. Not to be reproduced or distributed without permission.

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