Discovering RecOps: How a Variety of Experiences Could Lead You Here by Jennifer Kurtz
The 1999 cult classic comedy Office Space resonated with me in my early career. I learned that I was unhappy with my first few endeavors, and I became hellbent on devoting a lot of time to being more intentional about discovering what I’d like to do professionally. I didn’t want to spend the next 40 years having a “case of the Mondays” every day!
I read everything I could get my hands on - including numerous books like “What Color is Your Parachute?”, likely the entire O*Net website, and took all the free personality tests I could find!
I got so into this research and the excitement of possibilities, that I started to do this for others as well. During my time as a property manager, my residents would come to me for advice related to personal finance and their jobs. I probably spent more time giving career guidance, as opposed to marketing and showing apartments!
Recruiting Agency Life
It was around this time that I realized, “Hey, I should probably look to move into a human resources function, and I think I’d enjoy recruiting!” I had my first opportunity to cut my teeth in Recruiting as a side gig - recruiting physicians and surgeons for healthcare systems in very rural areas in the US.
You may wonder, how did I get myself into something like this? Well, I had met a local business person on a networking group on Facebook. He had just established his own medical recruiting agency and had formerly recruited for the well-known Cleveland Clinic. As an independent contractor, I only got paid for my efforts if I actually brought an interested applicant into the interview process and they were hired. It ended up manifesting into a lucrative side gig, as I managed to have a couple of doctors hired into their new roles in the following 12 months. That was my first taste of the kinds of accomplishment and gratification that come with the profession of Recruiting!
From there, I leaned on that side gig experience to secure a full-time agency recruiting position, and eventually into internal recruiting. It is interesting because looking back now, I recall how interested I was in exploring every nook and cranny of Bullhorn for agency recruiting. Unfortunately, that curiosity didn’t necessarily translate to the results that agencies need to have in order to thrive. Those familiar with the agency recruiting space know that it’s more about speed and placements, less about being an ATS pro! When you’re in the agency space, the problem you’re solving for is a vacancy for your clients. They need you to solve this problem quickly, and sometimes lack the bandwidth across their internal teams that they need to address all of their openings. So, in order to compete among the other agencies vying for your clients’ business, speed and results are priority over maximizing the utility of tools. There is nothing wrong with this, and many people love the thrill and sometimes near-unlimited income that comes with agency work. For me, I had a longing to put a stake in the ground and serve my internal team by building a foundation for excellence!
Buying the In-House
My first internal talent acquisition role was for a very early-stage start-up. I was on a team of two, recruiting mostly for business development and inside sales roles. We even reported to the Director of Sales….. (I know, right?!) We were very scrappy! Little to no process existed, but we felt like this was a wonderful opportunity to create some foundation. We were even tracking candidates and interview stages in a spreadsheet. Along came the day when we felt we could start vetting an ATS, and make a business case for its purchase. I really enjoyed diving into the tech, understanding the functionality, and how we could adopt the tools into our workflows that we were also defining at the same time! As it goes in a start-up, leaders have to be very prudent with spending. Very understandable. However, when our greenlight to move forward with our first ATS was put on hold; naturally, it was a bit discouraging.
A Detour into a Similar Skillset
Later that year, I saw that a local tech company, JazzHR, had an opportunity for a Customer Success Manager at their office here in Pittsburgh. I had not heard of this title at the time, but it sounded so interesting to imagine working with customers (who were recruiting teams), and helping them to fully utilize JazzHR. I decided to go for it. I was able to leverage my experience, sitting in the same shoes as customers, to learn and understand their goals and help clients worldwide to succeed in their hiring goals via the use of JazzHR! I loved it! I was able to be seen as a subject matter expert, while continuously learning from hiring teams in all kinds of industries, all over the world! Many of my main points of contact were Recruiting Ops leaders, although they weren’t commonly called that yet either.
A few years later and one year into the COVID pandemic, I had an opportunity to move to Calendly as a CSM and continue to work with a portfolio mainly focused on recruiting use case customers. Eventually, I felt a compulsion to take all that I learned from my wonderful client relationships and bring that back to an internal team putting those strategies I’ve learned into motion.
In 2022, I was able to pivot back into Recruiting. I couldn’t have imagined a better situation. I was actually recruiting for the very team I was once a part of. I had fantastic relationships and partnerships with the hiring managers, and I can confidently say that this was the highest level of consultative recruiting I had done in my career at this point. What a year! I was able to help my former team grow by more than 3x!
Present Day, New World of Recruiting Operations:
Like many organizations in recent years, my company wanted to scale hiring and solidify structured processes to do so. In order to accomplish this, it takes a bird’s eye view of the ways that processes and tech systems work together. It also necessitates a curiosity for what is working for all stakeholders, and what could be counterproductive to all of our efforts. Recruiting Operations was born from this type of need.
I had opportunities to start getting involved with projects that our Manager of Recruiting Operations was leading. This included the creation of recruiting dashboards, examining career page analytics, revamping our internal interview training program, and exploring ways to fully utilize our applicant tracking system. All of these things fall very neatly into my personality and collective interests across my professional experiences!
This led me to my next position title, Recruiting Operations Specialist.
What I love about my day-to-day:
My days are now filled with projects, meetings, testing in technology sandboxes, and sometimes a bit of research. I get to interact more frequently with our other HR teams such as HRIS, PeopleOps, and Learning & Development, for example. No two days are really the same!
There are times when I get to be the key support for our Recruiting team if we are experiencing a challenge with our tech or a question about a process. I also enjoy enabling our team and answering questions on recruiting metrics and insights. This helps them (Recruiters or Recruiting Managers) to be better prepared for impactful conversations with hiring managers about their pipelines and conversion rates across interview stages. This data also enables them to advise based on trends that may indicate a need to pivot in hiring strategy.
When I am not in responsive mode, I am forward-thinking on future projects. An example here might include researching the product roadmaps of our tech tools, to learn how we could capitalize on future releases and discuss these with our Customer Success Managers. Other helpful future-oriented activities could include a start/stop/continue exercise, which is useful to surface pain points that could be known among our recruiting team. Placing ideas on an Impact/Effort matrix is helpful in deciding what projects should be prioritized and where we can also grab some quick wins! All of our chosen endeavors fundamentally solve for an identified need, or present an opportunity to improve the experiences of both hiring teams and/or candidates.
A Strong Case for the Future of RecOps:
I believe Recruiting Operations will not only stay in demand, but grow fast! More organizations across all industries will recognize that hiring does not have to be broken. We do not have to accept the “status quo.” Inefficiencies and pain points can be surfaced and markedly improved or even eliminated! There is always room for continuous improvement.
Just as Sales Ops, Revenue Ops, DevOps, and Customer Experience Ops exist to achieve very specific goals - Recruiting Operations is crucial to running a world-class recruiting function. It is the distinction between recruiting in “the Wild West” versus fostering a winning strategy. It means deploying streamlined processes, structured interviewing, and having clean data for actionable insights. The results bring a winning candidate experience that translates directly to offer acceptance rates, making the right hires, lowering vacancy costs, and achieving business goals through our people!
Organizations that do not embrace this, are more likely to struggle against their competition for top talent and forego the innovation or revenue that comes with it!
Is Recruiting Operations for you?
Do you feel strongly about recruiting and hiring experiences?
Do you like to seek out and solve pain points?
Do you like to explore the nooks and crannies of software and tools?
Do you like to ask “why?”
Are you motivated by accomplishments that are less personal but impact your team or organization?
Do you enjoy continuous learning?
Would you like to work in a way that your focus can shift from one project to another?
Last but certainly not least - Are you team-oriented and love to support others by enabling them to do their best work?
If you were shouting to yourself “yes!”, with each question - then I absolutely recommend considering getting into Recruiting Operations!
If this is something you’d like to do, jump into side projects that involve the aforementioned types of activities that improve recruiting experiences. If there aren’t already needs on the table, start thinking about where your current processes seem to “break down” or where candidates or hiring managers express frustrations in their journeys. Take these ideas to those you may need approval from and seek to get buy-in on the project you’d like to undertake!
What else can you do?
If you’re like me, and your excitement causes you to fall deeply into rabbit holes of information, I’d recommend a few starting points! You can also get ideas and inspiration from those already doing this work!
The Recruiting Operations community is growing every day on LinkedIn, and other areas online. Get connected, ask questions, share experiences, join webinars and virtual meetups!
A great community to do this is to join and follow is OneReq!
A great newsletter to follow is RecOps Collective’s RecOps RoundUp!
Check out James Colino’s book called RecOps, published in 2022. As the Director of Talent Acquisition for Sheetz, he captivated my attention right away in learning how he brought TA Ops to scale for a chain of almost 700 locations in the eastern US! Living in PA, I am a Sheetz fan!
Connect with me on Linkedin! I’ve shared my journey with you. I’d love to hear about yours!
Disclaimer: The views expressed and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and they do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author. Since we are critically-thinking human beings, these views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time. Please do not hold them in perpetuity.
