How a Strategic Point Person in RecOps (Early) Elevates your Organization
About this Episode
Max gives tactical advice on how to discuss the value of RecOps to leaders internally, including those who don’t have as much knowledge of the recruiting function. He advises "don't wait till it's too late" and the critical nature of bringing someone in to evaluate recruiting operations before all the systems need fixing. Join us for a fruitful conversation on how to set your recruiting team up for success through putting an emphasis on recruiting operations.
Topics
This Episode's Guest
Max Butler
Head of Talent Operations @ CaptivateIQ
Max is an early adopter with a long tenure in Recruiting Operations. He’s scaled up several RecOps teams and practices at companies like Bain and Lime, but was a recruiter himself earlier in his career. Currently the Head of Talent Operations at CaptivateIQ, he prides himself on helping recruiting teams run more efficiently.
Key Learnings
“Don’t wait till it’s too late,” says Max Butler on creating a dedicated recruiting operations function.
It’s all too common in the recruiting space to bring in recruiting operations personnel to fix problems and put out fires rather than to build a process and recruiting function with RecOps in mind from the start. The former will lead to significant accrual of poor processes and technical debt, whereas the latter will help set an organization up for efficiency both today and in the future. The sooner you hire a RecOps person, the more proactively you can plan for future needs of the business.
Major takeaways:
What you’ve used before shouldn’t necessarily be plugged and played. Although tempting as a talent leader or RecOps specialist to plug and play tools and processes that worked for you in the past, resist the urge. Many companies make the mistake of bringing in tools solely based on personal familiarity, which may not align with the true needs of the organization. Further, if the one champion for a tool leaves, the rest of the team is left holding the bag for a tool they do not understand or utilize. Every organization is different and requires unique considerations such as the company culture, recruiting team size and structure, current and aspirational process, and much more. If you're new to an organization, make sure you are scoping things properly before jumping into a solution.
Create efficiencies for the present, but scalability for the future. It's easy to make the mistake of building processes for the now, but building true best practices will help you keep the future of the business front of mind. Although the future can be unpredictable, considering scalability for future growth is a key component to a successful RecOps strategy. TWhat's never scalable is thrusting the responsibility of RecOps to team members across the recruiting organization without having a centralized RecOps person. This takes away from the valuable daily work of recruiters, sourcers, and RCs and can degrade candidate experience. Appoint to fulfill the RecOps capacity to avoid slips in the core work of other functions on the recruiting team.
Use language that resonates with business leaders. It's essential for recruiting operations professionals to use language and metrics that resonate with business leaders, fostering transparency and sharing information about the recruiting function's impact and return on investment. Sharing data on cost per hire, spending, offer acceptance rate, and other key metrics should be a regular practice to align recruiting operations with other business functions and enable informed decision-making.
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