In 11 months at Indeed, I was moved across 7 teams. When I finally got the chance to stick on the Valvoline account, my team helped cut their time-to-hire from 20+ days to 3.
My time at Indeed was chaotic from the start. The business unit I joined was disorganized, and over 11 months I was moved across 7 different teams spanning training, small and medium business account management, recruiting, and enterprise company COVID recovery. For the first 6 months, I moved so frequently that it was hard to make a lasting impact. Most of my time was spent training, retraining, and adapting to new teams and new expectations.
That changed when I was placed on the Valvoline enterprise account as part of a COVID recovery hiring initiative.
Valvoline needed to ramp hiring quickly as the economy reopened, but their process was working against them. Time-to-hire was sitting at over 20 days. The relationship with Indeed's team was strained. Valvoline's internal team didn't fully trust the third-party hiring specialists, which led to micromanagement at every step. That micromanagement created bottlenecks that slowed candidates from getting to the finish line.
The fix wasn't a single process change. It was a trust-building exercise wrapped in incremental operational improvement. Our team focused on client management and expectation management, earning Valvoline's confidence through small, consistent wins. As trust grew, we were given more and more decision-making authority, which allowed us to remove the barriers that were slowing down hiring velocity.
Each step was deliberate. We didn't ask for full autonomy upfront. We proved competence on smaller decisions, delivered results, and used those results to earn the next level of independence. Over three months, the bottlenecks disappeared because the client no longer felt the need to manage every touchpoint.
The Valvoline project taught me that the fastest way to fix a broken process is often to fix the relationship first. The bottleneck wasn't the hiring workflow. It was trust. Once we earned it, the process improvements followed naturally.
More broadly, 11 months of being moved across 7 teams taught me how to adapt quickly, deliver in ambiguity, and find ways to contribute even when the environment around me was unstable. Not every role gives you the perfect conditions to succeed. Sometimes the skill is making an impact anyway.