What did you want to be growing up?

I’ve always been passionate about music and guitar. My childhood ambition was to start a band, play music and tour the world. It’s a hobby that I still keep up today as a way to relax and unwind. Fast forward to today, I never thought I’d end up in Talent Acquisition and RecOps for tech companies, although I did study HR and Business at university. I see a connection between writing music and RecOps as both involve putting things together; writing music is a creative process where you create a harmonious and well-orchestrated sound with instruments. RecOps is similar in this sense as it looks at creating an inter-connected and seamless hiring experience both internally and externally.

Both music and RecOps are creative paths for me personally. The beauty of RecOps is the sheer scope of breadth, depth, and variety in the role. We’re needed in many different areas, given our varied skill sets. You also don’t have to be in a RecOps role officially. There’s always an operational component to any role. For Talent, we happen to now call it “RecOps”.

What was your first taste of RecOps?

My discovery of RecOps happened organically as I journeyed through Talent Acquisition. My first taste was in my early recruiting days, working for a high-growth fintech company in London. It was my first in-house TA role, and I was tasked with hiring for the entire business globally (EMEA, US, APAC) as the single recruiter. There were no consistent company hiring processes that were repeatable, an approach to candidate experience, a well-oiled ATS, a library of tools we could leverage, competency-based assessment frameworks, embedded value-focused questions, hiring manager training, a wider employer brand strategy for attraction, etc. The list went on. Then came the biggest surprise during my time there, scaling. With that as the challenge, I had no option but to think through the lens of recruiting operations. That was the realization that Talent is not just an act of having CVs fly from desk to desk or placing “bums on seats”. Talent is a strategic and operational function that is more than recruiting alone. Thankfully I took this approach and, in my time, I tripled the headcount to 300 people in under 2 years, which was both a challenge and a rewarding experience given the rapid growth and learning.

RecOps became even more prominent and key as I took on TA leadership roles, focusing on building TA functions from the ground up, taking companies through different funding rounds (Series A, Series B, Series C), and building global talent teams, having to think about strategy, infrastructure (people, process, technology), and the roadmap on a company, functional and team level to enable success.

How do you explain RecOps to friends and family?

When asked what I do by family, friends, and colleagues, my definition of “RecOps” to them is being the backbone of Talent. It’s the fundamental pillar required to be able to operate daily. Or, in other words, the engine that runs a car.

What was your first “Welcome to RecOps” moment?

I knew I was in RecOps when tasked with an ATS migration and the full responsibility and accountability for a successful launch.

ATS migrations for larger businesses aren’t simply swapping one tool for another. Each department has nuances to what they want and strong opinions about what they are looking for, which adds layers of complexity beyond just an A or B choice. I suddenly found myself having daily calls with Engineering, Procurement, Legal/Data and HR teams on a range of different topics, as well as daily calls with both ATS providers (old and new) to ensure there were two clear roadmaps aligned with each other to make the transition seamless. To make the whole experience even more fun, we had 3 months to focus on this as we were ramping up hiring the following quarter. So, it was vital that we had the tools to hire well without being overly compromised and deficient in our internal capabilities. Given all these factors, it was a rush to get everything done, but also felt like what a normal day in the RecOps life would be like looking back.

What led you to commit to RecOps fully?

I’ve always been passionate about building high-performance teams and best-in-class functions for a business that values the importance of Talent and is serious about wanting to build and sustain a great workplace. RecOps, regardless of whether as an individual contributor or leader, is a process of constant gap analysis, problem-solving, challenging the status quo, innovation, and making things better. In other words, the engine pushes the function forward, directly correlated to growth. I realised this is where most of my time was spent in TA leadership.

What also crossed my mind was what it would be like to take the direct “recruiting hat” off, which is often about achieving headcount plans, helping the team reach hiring goals, fixing fires and being in a constant state of reaction, vs. looking at the bigger picture and having the bandwidth to run strategy, systems, analytics/insights, processes, and talent programmes in a meaningful way rather than doing this sporadically.

Fortunately, the timing and stars aligned when I joined Automattic, a fully global and distributed (remote) company behind WordPress, WooCommerce, and Tumblr (amongst others), who saw the need to have a Talent Operations team, which is what I do today.

What’s been some of your highlights for 2023?

This year has been very interesting as I’ve seen many of my peers and friends in Talent being laid off. It’s been a challenging year for the Talent industry as a whole. My theme for the year has been “doing more with less” and finding ways to enable Talent Acquisition to be more nimble, productive and efficient. Fortunately, my team’s forte is exactly this, so our priorities revolve around this over-arching theme, with some things that stand out as we close out the year. 

Here are some of my highlights. 

• Improved Analytics & Insights: Improving hiring data adoption and building a data-driven approach and data-first mindset in Talent. The challenge was not having enough data but too much data that was hard to follow and understand. We partnered with our stakeholders (Recruiters, Interviewers, Hiring Managers, Executives, and Finance) to determine their needs and remodel Talent metrics in the form of Talent dashboards with all the key data points we look to monitor. Fast forward to today, our teams are active users of our reporting models with a self-serve approach to using Talent data, where we understand the effectiveness of our hiring in a way that is simple and clear. 

• Candidate Experience: This was an exciting programme. We introduced candidate portals where candidates would visually have an overview of the hiring process, information on who they would meet, and all of our email communications centralised into a single hub and platforms. We’ve been excited about this innovation for the transparency and engagement it creates. We have been passionate about putting the “candidate” as the customer in everything we do, so this move reinforced this mindset.

• Automation & Tooling: Our teams were spending too much time writing up candidate interview notes and scorecards. We introduced an additional capability to automate note-taking for our recruiters and hiring teams, saving many weekly hours in compiling notes. The highlight here was more about how well our teams engaged and received this, where our team solved a key process pain point.

• Referrals: Our referral strategy was ripe for improvement. We went from high volume/low-quality referrals to high volume/high-quality referrals by revamping our referral programme, referral submission process and experience as a whole, resulting in 40% of our hires coming from referrals in 2023. 

What advice do you have for future RecOps folks?

Change is not easy to drive, no matter the size of the company you’re in. RecOps involves driving change and constantly challenging the status quo, One of the challenges has been driving change without it being perceived as additional noise. My advice for folks driving positive change is to closely align changes with broader team initiatives so the change feels relevant, connected and close to the bigger picture. Communicate why it’s essential to change often, work with your team so they feel involved, and maintain those communication standards to be high at all times. It also takes time for any change to settle in the organization. So it’s a balancing act of collaboration, communication and time in order to succeed at change.

My other advice is to determine all competing priorities carefully, choose a few, and focus on completing those well rather than trying to do everything all at once. As noted, we can work on different areas and take on exciting projects. So, the challenge in RecOps is determining the highest priorities aligned with the team’s goals and then driving the action that leads to the impact. It’s an ongoing challenge and prioritization exercise, something that I continue to build upon even today.

What are you excited about going into 2024? 

I’m excited about the opportunity to adopt and welcome AI solutions that would take many of the repetitive and manual tasks away that we do regularly in Talent Acquisition, freeing up time and capacity to take on the bigger projects and spend time with our customers (candidates and stakeholders). Despite the tech downturn and general volatility, it’s also been refreshing to see technology in this space evolve rapidly and catch up to meet the current gaps we’re facing operationally. It’s an exciting time for tech tools that are innovating, unlocking new opportunities, and driving a new standard in the TA space. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my story, and hope you enjoyed it. 

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you made it up to this point!