Discovering RecOps: Making the Jump from Recruiter to RecOps by Tessa Denney
Few Recruiting professionals know upon graduating that they will pursue this career. For me, it was a certainty. After a year-long data-entry and analysis internship in the Insurance Industry, I realized that I wanted to have an impact on people and business processes - and Recruiting offered that opportunity!
UNDERGRAD
In my first Recruiting Internship, I was responsible for speaking to warm leads and sending qualified candidates to Recruiters at a healthcare staffing agency. I also spearheaded a summer-long project that tracked the final result of candidates my team qualified. This included seeing who was hired or rejected, when, by whom, and why. Talking to candidates and seeing the impact Recruiting has on people’s lives made me fall in love with the career path. At the same time, the positive impact of my project on my team’s pre-screening effectiveness sparked my passion for RecOps. I also learned a few important things that have helped me in my career ever since:
The importance of asking good questions and learning from others
You need to be comfortable being bad at things in order to become great at them
Learning happens outside your comfort zone - and if you’re willing to push past the discomfort, you’re already ahead of most others who will never dare to
RECRUITER
Upon graduation, I moved to an in-house recruiting role in the Construction industry for a heavy equipment sales and repair company. While I was learning and growing in Recruiting, I gained more exposure to Internship and Referral programs and process improvement initiatives. I also formed the foundation of my consultative approach with internal partnerships by learning from both my successful and unsuccessful partnerships with different leaders and their approaches to hiring. In this role, I learned the following that have helped me in RecOps:
How to ask the right, and sometimes hard, questions
How to put together a business case based on data and research to back your ideas or hunches
How to work with executives and be comfortable pushing back based on best practices, data and candidate feedback
How to network and build relationships within the Recruiting industry
While I worked in Recruiter roles, I continued building interviewing and persuasion skills. Yet I also found myself pushing to spend more and more time on process improvement, tool enhancements, improvements to the candidate experience, and performance metrics. At the end of 2021, I landed a great role doing both Recruiting and RecOps for a small early-stage company. However, at the beginning of 2022, a layoff stopped me in my tracks.
LAYOFF
During this time between jobs, I made a big mistake: taking a job for job security and compensation, and not for passion. I had convinced myself it was the right job, but quickly realized it wasn’t right for me when RecOps was not an area of importance for the company. I quit after just 5 weeks on the job. After this happened, I took the time to really think about what I loved doing most and what I wanted to spend my 40 hours a week doing. I realized that I didn’t really love interviewing anymore; what I loved was Recruiter enablement, creating resources, scaling processes and making them more efficient, and vendor management. Cue my search exclusively for “Talent Operations”, “Recruiting Operations” or any role that just focused on the continuous assessment and improvement of the Recruiting function. If you’ve been impacted by a layoff, I hope you learn from my mistake!
RECOPS
Thankfully, I pursued a role with SoFi as a Talent Operations Specialist. My role now covers vendor relationship management (particularly with Greenhouse as our Applicant Tracking System); process reviews to assess how scalable and efficient our operations are; data analysis to uncover messy data and areas of opportunity; and resource creation to help our team continue to improve. I love this role and have seen success largely because of my passion for it.
Some of the main skills I’ve had to grow or develop in this transition from Recruiter to RecOps Practitioner have been:
Project and program management skills
Giving partners what they NEED, not just what they ask for
Proactive communication on timelines, expectations, and issues
Time management
How to have difficult conversations
The more I learn about RecOps, the more dedicated I become to growing my knowledge and experience. My goal is to become a RecOps Leader both within SoFi and the RecOps community, and I look forward to all the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead!
