Discovering RecOps: From Skeptic to Full-Believer by Mark Jenkins
The first time I heard of the term “RecOps” was in early 2021 and this was only because the Director of TA at the time (Jill Leonard) at Ocado was bringing this position into the TA structure.
At first, I admit I was a bit of a skeptic, which is ironic as I’m now a RecOps Manager. I thought “Why was this role needed?” or “What would the person actually do day-to-day?” Another reason why I may not have been a fan of this position at that particular time was mainly that I had a narrow-minded view and saw this person taking away some of the things I loved most about TA such as:
Finding solutions to enable the TA team to unblock bottlenecks and identifying opportunities for continuous improvement.
Telling the story through data.
Looking at new technologies that enhance candidate, recruiter and hiring manager experience through automation or using the data to make strategic and informed decisions on where would be best to hire that particular skill-set.
However, having a dedicated person who solely focuses on enabling the team by improving processes and collating data to help tell a story on my and the other TA Managers' behalf is genius. It frees the Heads of or TA Manager’s time in three major ways:
They can become more strategic and have a helicopter view of what’s happening in their department.
It allows them to plan ahead and offer more value to the business rather than getting bogged down in the tactical/delivery of recruitment.
They can now spend time coaching and leading your team and so much more.
After a couple of months, I started to see results from utilising this particular resource, embracing the role even more as I could see the value a RecOps person offers (thanks Fiona Ireton, you did an ace job). So, after partnering with a RecOps Manager for a year and given the interests and passion I previously mentioned earlier, the allure to become the RecOps person at an organisation was just too strong.
How did I get my role?
So how did I discover my current RecOps Manager role? Networking, I’ve always said your network is your net worth and it will always come in handy one day. My current manager and I had met through attending previous events, it’s a great way to build rapport with fellow like-minded individuals and, like me, who knows you may have already met your future manager.
The Gadgets and Data
Let’s face it as well. If you know me, you know I’m a tool and data geek.
I love recruitment technologies that take away the mundane tasks of recruitment admin via automation but also those that assist with creativity. I also love that as a RecOps Manager I get to explore these tools inside and out. A couple of new favorites of mine are:
Real Links helps with referral/employee advocacy in an easily scalable way and tackles the engagement issue with traditional referral schemes.
myInterview is a one-way video interviewing platform that assists with processing our pre-qualified candidates. We invited candidates to record themselves and answer questions that they would have had during a F2F interview but the beauty of this was that the candidate could complete the interview at a time and location that suited them. The issue it helped us solve was due to the volume of hires needed in a short timeframe and a lack of hiring manager time as a resource we were able to assess and review 4X more interviews than we would have via traditional methods.
Metaview.ai automatically writes your interview notes for you so you can save time and focus on high-quality interactions with more meaningful conversations with candidates.
Evaluating the Wins
One piece of advice I would offer to RecOps professionals is to accept your wins. You will have many, but you will often overlook them because of moving too fast or focusing on what went wrong. Here are a few that I remind myself of during busy days:
I’ve now been at the company for a year and even in the first few weeks making an impact on how the TA team report and moving away from manually reporting to now 95% fully automated reporting, where the TA team just need to comment and provide further insight on what action they are going to take to resolve any challenges they may have.
Mapping out the current recruitment processes and identifying timelines and non-value-added tasks then removing them from the workflow and making sure the task still flowed correctly through the relevant systems. As you can imagine an ROI on many of these processes was time and money we no longer had to spend doing the long-winded processes. This wasn’t something I did alone; I had support from the people who were involved in each of the touchpoints and gathered the amount of time spent on each task. From that, it was identifying those non-value-added tasks and removing them from the workflow and making sure the task still flowed correctly through the relevant systems.
Using data and analytics to inform strategic decisions. For example, we analysed the hiring trends across different regions and skill sets to identify where we had gaps or surpluses in our talent pipeline. This helped us prioritise our sourcing efforts and allocate our resources more efficiently.
There are far too many wins to talk about in this article but just a couple above show the impact RecOps can have.
In Closing
investing in recruitment operations and efficiencies can lead to a range of benefits that go beyond simply filling open positions. By streamlining the process, improving candidate satisfaction, and using data and analytics to inform your decisions, you can build a stronger, more diverse, and more productive team.
