u/InsuranceNeither903

A big part of my week is pulling content back out of slides. A reviewer marks up a deck verbally, I update, then I need the final copy as plain text to paste into a summary document for sign-off.

Every time I select text across a few text boxes and copy, the paste comes out wrecked. Random line breaks mid-sentence, double spaces, the reading order scrambled because the boxes were not created top to bottom. A bulleted list arrives as one run-on paragraph. I spend longer cleaning the paste than I did editing the slides.

What I do now is sad. I click into each text box one at a time, copy that box alone, paste, repeat. On a thirty-slide deck that is a lot of clicking. Outline View helps for title and body placeholders but ignores anything in a free-floating box, which is most of my content.

Is there a real method here? Some export or order-fix that respects the visual layout, or a way to force PowerPoint to read boxes in the order they sit on the slide rather than the order they were drawn? I would settle for a reliable manual sequence if there is one.

19 employees. ~$1.2M LTM.

every trades ig looks the same: truck shots, before/afters, "call us today" stickers. its all generic.

what we do:

• 1 reel per week of an employee explaining what they like about their job (30 sec, vertical, raw)
• 1 carousel per week of "this week at [our company]" (5-7 images, a mix of work + team moments)
• 0 promotional content

results in 8 months:

• 14 hires came through ig
• ~6 client leads / month attributed to ig
• the recruiting use case is where the real money is, hiring through ig saved us ~$22k in recruiter fees this year

Sales leader at a series B SaaS, 14 AEs reporting up. 5 years at the company.

Our sales deck template is 32 slides. AEs report customizing 4-5 slides per prospect. Conversation in pipeline meetings consistently surfaces that prospects "tune out" by slide 14.

Considering a full rebuild this quarter with an ai presentation tool to make per-prospect customization fast.

The idea:

• Core deck drops to 9 slides
• Each AE has an ai presentation tool workflow to produce 3-4 prospect-custom slides per opp
• Custom slides answer THIS prospect's questions, not "what we do generally"
• Total deck per opp: 12-14 slides, half customized

Feedback wanted from other B2B sales leaders or AEs:

1. Did anyone do the "core deck shorter + per-prospect customization" move and what was the win rate impact?
2. Is per-prospect customization actually meaningful or does it just feel meaningful to the AE?
3. Where's the wall, at what deal size does customization stop being worth the time?

The honest concern: I might be over-engineering. The current 32 slide deck wins ~22% of pipeline. The cost of the change is real (training, deck infrastructure, AE habit change). The benefit might be marginal.

What's your decision logic on deck infrastructure changes?

dublin. engineering manager at a fintech. 12 direct reports. responsible for hiring 4 senior engineers in 2025. all 4 hires made through claude-assisted workflow. wanted to share what worked + what didn't because hiring is the use case nobody writes about well on this sub.

what i used claude for during hiring.

1. role design. i sat with claude for ~3 hours to write each role. claude asked me clarifying questions i wouldn't have asked myself. one question that changed how i wrote the senior engineer role: "what's the difference between this role and a staff engineer role, and would you hire someone overqualified into this role?" forced me to be honest about ceiling.
2. JD writing. drafted 4 job descriptions. claude reviewed each. caught 2-3 things in each JD that would have skewed our candidate pool. (e.g., "fast-paced environment" actually excludes parents of young children based on a/b testing. claude flagged it. removed it. application rate from women aged 30-40 went up.)
3. resume review. screening ~80 resumes per role. claude reviewed each against the role criteria i'd defined. surfaced patterns i would have missed. one example: 4 of our top 20 candidates had unconventional backgrounds (career changers, bootcamp grads with strong portfolios). i would have screened them out on autopilot. claude's structured review surfaced them. 2 of our 4 hires came from that group.
4. interview prep. for each candidate at the technical stage, claude reviewed their work history and helped me prep 4 questions specific to their experience. zero generic interviews. candidates kept saying "you actually read my background."
5. reference check synthesis. claude helped me write structured reference check questions and summarize 14 reference calls into themes per candidate. found patterns i'd have missed.

what i did NOT use claude for.

the actual interview. i don't have AI in the room when i'm interviewing a human. that's a values thing for me. claude prepped me for the interview. the interview was between me and the candidate.

what surprised me.

claude made me a more THOROUGH hiring manager. not faster (the hiring still took 6 weeks per role). more careful. the surface area for getting hiring wrong shrank because claude was reviewing my judgment at each step.

my 4 hires are all 6-9 months in now. none have left. one was promoted to senior staff already. these are my best 4 hires in 11 years of engineering management. some of that is luck. some of it is that the process was more rigorous than my prior hiring processes.

for other engineering managers. claude in hiring is not about speed. it's about thoroughness. the workflow doubles the rigor of your hiring without doubling the time investment.