Production hiring runs on a spreadsheet until the spreadsheet is three versions old and two people are working from the wrong one, usually in the week that matters most.

Ryft, a media production company, hired production staff this way for years. The file worked, until the week it didn’t, and the weeks it didn’t were never the quiet ones.

The file that was the process

Ryft’s hiring lived in a shared file that had been growing columns for a year. It held the roles, the candidates, the notes and the decisions, and it was edited by whoever had it open at the time. Nobody had designed it that way. It had simply grown, role by role, until removing anything from it felt riskier than leaving it in.

When two people edited it in the same afternoon, one of them lost their changes, usually without noticing. Nobody found out until a candidate was contacted twice, or not contacted at all. The people closest to the file trusted it least. They were the ones who had watched it fail before.

Getting the pipeline out of the file

Ryft moved production hiring into Yardstick Sourcing, so every role, candidate and decision sits in one place that updates for everyone at once. Nobody edits a copy; everybody edits the same record. The move took a single production cycle to complete. The old file ran alongside it, not instead of it, until the team trusted the new one enough to close the last tab.

The columns that mattered survived the move: availability, role, rate band, the note about who spoke to whom last. The columns that had only accreted around the file’s limitations did not make the trip.

A coordinator adding a candidate at nine in the morning, and a producer checking the same role at noon, now see the identical state. Neither is stuck with whichever version happened to sync last.

Nobody automates the call

A coordinator, a producer and a line manager now see the same stage for the same candidate at the same moment. Most of what the spreadsheet was actually for was answering that one question by hand, over and over, for every role at once. Nothing in the new record advances or rules out a candidate automatically. A person still makes that call. The record shows who made it, and when.

What changed once the file was gone

Ryft has filled 60 production roles through the new pipeline since the move, without a parallel spreadsheet running alongside it as a backup habit. The old file is archived, not deleted, in case anyone ever needs to check it.

Hiring now runs from 1 shared record, down from the three or four spreadsheet copies that were usually open at once. Candidates contacted twice because of a conflicting edit have also dropped to 0 since the move.

The one thing that still happens by hand is the initial intake call for each new role. A coordinator writes down what a producer wants, in their own words, before it becomes a structured brief.

Folding in day-rate approvals

Ryft is now looking at whether the same record can absorb its freelance day-rate approvals. Those still live in a second, smaller spreadsheet.