WHAT IS RECOPS?
The following is the introductory chapter from the book “RecOps - Recruiting is (still) broken. Here’s How to Fix It”
Approximately 5 minute read. Full book available on Amazon
I once took my recruiting team on a journey through a dangerous obstacle course…blindfolded.
To ensure that we stayed connected, I lined everyone up single-file and joined them together
at the waist with a rope. When all the knots were secured, I walked to the front of the line, tied the
rope around my waist, and started walking forward. But I didn’t tell them where we were going or
what we were doing.
The location of the obstacle course was a local park. We were gathered in a flat, open field,
standing in knee-high grass on the edge of a thick forest. Without warning, I started jogging
at a slow pace across the field, heading toward the tree line. One by one, everyone stumbled
forward as their section of the rope snapped tight and jerked them into motion. At first, it
was fun. There was excitement, intrigue, and lots of laughter. As we got closer to the trees,
however, I picked up the pace, and the excitement turned to anxiety because, remember,
they were blindfolded, but I wasn’t.
As we entered the forest, the team went silent. All I could hear was the sound of crunching
leaves and twigs snapping beneath their feet as they tried to navigate the terrain in total
darkness. Some of them tripped over logs. Some slammed into trees. I could tell by the
amount of tension in the rope that they were struggling to keep up, but I continued to
power through the course, dragging them with me at all costs.
As the journey intensified, team members started to show their true colors. Some of them
emerged as leaders, shouting out instructions as they encountered obstacles. Others simply
complained and wanted to stop. As I continued to sprint forward, weaving in and out of
trees, I noticed that the tension in the rope gradually went slack, and their voices went
silent once again. I thought to myself, Yes! We’re finally in sync! But the opposite was true.
When I stopped and turned around, I saw my team leaning against trees and sitting on logs,
trying to catch their breath. They had removed the rope, taken their blindfolds off, and
called it quits.
Before you report me to the local authorities for abusing my employees, I have to tell you
that this story is not entirely real. But there is some metaphorical truth to it. This story is
about me. Early in my career, an executive coach told me this story when I was making a
transition from an individual contributor to a people manager. It was also at a time when
the war for talent was in full swing, and an explosion of technology and innovation was
disrupting the talent acquisition landscape.
The actual time frame was March 2013, and my coach from the Center for Creative
Leadership in San Diego had just finished reviewing my 360-degree feedback. What he saw
was encouraging but at the same time concerning. The encouraging part was that my
colleagues felt like I was innovative and forward-thinking. They said I was always pushing
the envelope and looking for new ways to transform our talent acquisition function. But the
concerning part was that I moved too fast and enacted change without communicating the
purpose or destination to my team very well. I wanted to fix everything. And I wanted to fix
it now! As a result, they felt blindfolded, unable to keep up and unwilling to follow me
down a difficult, unknown path in the dark.
I was stunned. But with one vivid metaphor and some additional guidance, my coach made
two points very clear to me that day. He said, “Don’t ever lose your forward-leaning
approach to talent acquisition, but…
1. Set the stage for transformation by creating a
clear vision for your team.
2. Create a system that drives ongoing
transformation at a pace that your team and the
organization can handle.
From that moment forward, this feedback set me on a journey to create clarity and find a
continuous improvement practice for talent acquisition that would help me fix many of the
biggest recruiting challenges I was facing. That search would lead me straight into the arms
of a practice called RecOps.
A Forward-Leaning Approach
If you’re like most recruiting professionals, you probably want to make your talent
acquisition function better. The problem is, recruiting is hard. It’s complex. It’s full of
stakeholders who have needs, biases, and opinions. Over the years, managing a recruiting
function has been getting progressively harder to do. With the onslaught of software
solutions flooding the market and the emergence of verticals for compliance, sourcing,
branding, candidate experience, diversity, and more—recruiting leaders are simply
overwhelmed. If you’re one of them, on most days, you’re just trying to keep your head
above water. You live meeting to meeting, project to project, request to request, just trying
to stay afloat. Every once in a while, you pull off a random process-improvement project.
But then it’s back to more urgent matters like opening new jobs, sourcing more candidates,
and conducting more interviews. It just…never…stops.
As the days and weeks fly by, you eventually lift your head and realize you’re falling behind.
Your employment brand needs a refresh. Your career site isn’t mobile optimized. Your
applicant tracking system (ATS) is out of date. Your boss wants a campus recruiting
program. Your stakeholders want better reports. And then—BOOM!—you’re so far behind
that your chief executive officer (CEO) calls for a company-wide “reinvent recruiting”
initiative. If you’re lucky, you get to keep your job and spearhead the project.
This cycle of random, isolated improvements and big one-time optimizations is very much
like dieting. It doesn’t work over the long term. Like dieting, if you don’t put systems in
place to support a healthier lifestyle, you’ll gain all the weight back (and then some).Talent
acquisition is no different. It works better when you have a continuous approach to
optimization. Ideally, your approach is forward-leaning. A forward-leaning recruiting
function is one that doesn’t accept the status quo. It doesn’t wait to adopt new technologies.
It brings solutions to the business before the business asks for them. It makes ongoing
improvements based on a multiyear plan, not on a spur-of-the-moment pain point. And
most of all, it’s deliberate and centered on a clear vision.
In the absence of a forward-leaning mindset and practice, a recruiting leader will fall
behind, lose control of their function, and live in a constant state of treading water. This
book will help you prevent that from happening or dig you out of that mess if you’re
already in it.
The Impact of a Suboptimal Function
When a recruiting function is not optimized, an entire ecosystem of people suffers.
Your recruiting team suffers when inefficient processes and technologies require them to
work longer hours and trudge through administrative tasks. Your hiring managers suffer
because they go weeks, or sometimes months, without the talent they need to achieve their
business objectives. Candidates suffer through overly complex online applications, a
disjointed interview experience, and a general lack of transparency throughout the hiring
process. Sometimes their families suffer, too, when a breadwinner gets screened out of
your process for all the wrong reasons. It doesn’t just hurt their career. It’s hurting their
ability to provide for their family.
And let’s not forget about you. You suffer too. Because, at the end of the day, you’re the one
who shoulders the stress and overwhelm that comes from trying to make a talent
acquisition function work. It’s your career and your reputation on the line every time you
get up in the morning to face another day.
The thing that frustrates me the most is that as recruiting professionals, we all know which
aspects of our function need to be transformed. It’s not a mystery. No matter what the size
of your company is or where you’re located in the world, we all want the same outcomes.
We want better candidates, acquired faster, at a reasonable cost. And we want to deliver a
good candidate and hiring manager experience in the process. But doing so has gotten
increasingly more complex over the years. To achieve this universal promised land, it’s
critical that we have a system to fix what is broken and drive transformation in a more
deliberate way.
The Search for a Practice
Since the executive coaching session I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I’ve been on a
mission to find a practice that would help me set a clear vision for my recruiting team and
help us achieve our most ambitious goals. On this path, I’ve talked to many talent
acquisition leaders, practitioners, consultants, and vendors. The best ones are always on
this mission too. What I’ve learned over the years, however, is everyone has a different
approach. We, as recruiting professionals, have a variety of tactics, tools, processes, and
programs that we use. Many of them are very useful. But as an industry, we lack a unified
practice that rolls up all of these proven techniques into an operational model. If we had a
practice that had some definition to it, maybe—just maybe—we could all solve some of
recruiting’s biggest challenges through a common language and a common set of tools.
To understand the value of having a standard way of transforming a business function (or
fixing part of a function), you need look no further than how your peers do it in other
departments. If you’re in a manufacturing setting, your production leaders have a lean
manufacturing practice like Six Sigma that helps to reduce defects and lower costs. Your
software developers use DevOps to more efficiently build software. Your marketing leaders
use growth hacking and brand-building frameworks to unlock growth. Entrepreneurs and
product managers use the lean startup method to build products that customers want.
Even your sales leaders, who typically don’t like to be bound by any sort of process,
leverage the emerging practice of sales enablement to increase deal sizes and speed up
sales cycles.
These standardized practices have fixed some of the biggest challenges faced by these
functions. Entire industries of consultants and conferences have sprouted up as a result.
But while other departments have developed these capabilities, what do recruiting
departments have? What standard practice do we use for improving our processes,
programs, and technologies? How do we consistently lower costs, increase speed, improve
quality, or deliver a better hiring experience?
The truth is, we don’t have a standard practice. The recruiting industry doesn’t have a
common way of making continuous improvements that lead to transformation. The most
hopeful candidate for serving this purpose is just now beginning to take shape. And it goes
by the name of RecOps.
What Is RecOps?
RecOps is a continuous improvement practice for the recruiting industry. Its primary
purpose is to drive transformation through a deliberate focus on improving the recruiting
process and key recruiting metrics. The target areas would include metrics related to
experience, speed, cost, quality, and satisfaction. To do this, RecOps practitioners use
proven techniques to mine data, build and manage recruiting programs, streamline
processes, implement technologies, and enhance service delivery to both candidates and
hiring managers.
Depending on who you talk to, RecOps is just a shorter way of saying recruiting operations.
But I’d like to make the distinction that recruiting operations is typically a function that is
most closely associated with scheduling interviews, running background checks, and other
administrative duties. To be clear, this book is not about administrative duties. This book
represents the evolution of the administrative side of recruiting operations into a more
modern practice focused on recruiting optimization and recruiting transformation. This
emerging field is called RecOps.
As a further point of clarification, RecOps is a term that is often used interchangeably with
the terms Talent Ops or HR Ops. This is the result of the ongoing specialization that is taking
place inside of HR departments across the world. For what it’s worth, I believe these
disciplines are close relatives of each other. They both focus on optimizing a specific
vertical of human resources. I focus on the topic of recruiting, so I will use the term RecOps
as a means to isolate it as a recruiting practice.
Throughout the remainder of this book, I’ll expand upon the definition of RecOps and
provide you with the information you need to start building your own practice in-house.
Part 1 will cover an “Introduction to RecOps.” I’ll introduce a simple model to explain the
important relationship between strategy, operations, and recruiting. In Part 2, I’ll discuss
“The Foundations of RecOps.” These are three capabilities that serve as the foundation of a
modern RecOps practice. Part 3 discusses the type of person who is best positioned to
embrace and execute the transformation of your recruiting function. I call this “The RecOps
Practitioner.” Following these three heavy sections pertaining to the practice of RecOps, in
Part 4, I’ll pull back for some perspective on strategy and share one of the most important
things you need to do before you embark on your RecOps journey. This part is called
“Setting the Stage for Transformation.” And finally, Part 5 will introduce “Putting RecOps
into Practice.” This section will provide a five-step tactical recommendation for how you
can begin to improve any part of your recruiting function immediately through the practice
of RecOps. A conclusion will serve to draw all we learned together.
I’ve Had Enough. I Hope You Have Too
In the pages that follow, I’ll define RecOps and share some practices and tools that I have
personally used or observed that have helped me (and others like me) to establish clarity
and optimize functions in a continuous manner. I don’t claim to be the “Father of RecOps”
or the person who invented it, but I am putting a stake in the ground by attempting to give
it shape and improving upon the existing concept through writing this book.
But why me? And why now?
The truth is, I didn’t write this book to elevate my personal brand in the recruiting industry.
And I certainly didn’t write it to make money. Niche books like this almost never make
money! As of the writing of this book, I’m right where I want to be as the practicing head of
talent acquisition for Sheetz Inc., one of the largest and fastest-growing family-owned
convenience store chains in America, with over 600 locations and 20,000 employees. Prior
to this role, I managed a Fortune 500 global RecOps function at The Hershey Company, I
served as the founder and CEO of a recruiting technology startup, and I led the technology enablement
function for Cielo, a world-class recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) company.
Over the course of this diverse twenty-year journey in recruiting, together with over two
years of focused research on the topic of RecOps, I’ve solidified my belief that the key to
running a world-class recruiting function lies in a leader’s ability to build a mechanism for
transformation. In this book, I’ll refer to this mechanism as the practice of RecOps.
My experience and research have given me so much conviction in RecOps as a practice that
I believe this book will help any HR or recruiting leader make improvements to their
function, no matter their size, industry, or geographic location. I believe it will especially
help those who are new to recruiting leadership or anyone who is experiencing some of the
challenges and overwhelm that I listed earlier in this introduction. If we’re being honest
with ourselves, I think that covers just about everyone, myself included.
While my hope is that this book will help leaders optimize their individual functions, I
secretly hope it will spark a conversation and mobilize our industry around a practice that
has the power to make the recruiting industry better as a whole. Since there are already a
number of very capable people and organizations focused on improving different parts of
the recruiting process, I’ve established a free website where you can learn more about
RecOps and engage with established communities who can help you transform any part of
your recruiting function. The website will serve as an extension of this book to pull all of
the disciplines together and unite them through the lens of RecOps. You can access the
website here: https://recops.org.
But back to the original questions: why me…why now?
Well, I’ve been in the recruiting space for my entire career. I’ve struggled with many of the
same problems that you’re probably facing right now. I’ve solved many of them, but every
single day new ones emerge—labor market shortages, major economic shifts,
advancements in technology, and even global pandemics! To stay nimble and competitive,
these dramatic swings have created a need to have a forward-leaning, always-on approach
to transforming a recruiting function, no matter what’s happening in the world. It’s never
been more important than right now, in the face of a massive digital and mobile
transformation. That’s the business reason why I wrote this book. But there is a personal
reason too. I genuinely want to help other talent acquisition professionals improve how
their recruiting function operates. If just one struggling leader benefits from this book and
it makes life easier for their recruiters, their hiring managers, their candidates, or
themselves, then in my mind, all of the effort that went into writing this book will have
been worthwhile.
Finally, if I’m being totally honest, there’s one more reason. And it’s a big one. I’m sick and
tired of hearing business leaders, recruiting technology vendors, and candidates say that
“recruiting is broken.” It bothers me. But they’re right! Despite all the advancements in
recruiting technology, all the amazing recruiting conferences, all the best practices
published online, and several decades’ worth of improvements to our craft—recruiting, at
far too many companies, is still broken. So, instead of denying that it’s broken or doing
nothing to fix it, I decided to write this book. If you’re tired of hearing the negativity too, I
hope you’ll join me in learning more about RecOps and the potential that it has to fix your
recruiting function and our industry once and for all.