What Is Recruitment Operations?

The recruitment operation is a function that sits in the human resources department and is responsible for streamlining the hiring process to give talent teams a competitive edge. Recruitment operations isn’t just about recruiting; it’s about ensuring you have access to all of the data necessary to make informed decisions about your hiring efforts.

What is Recruitment/Talent Operations?

Talent Operations is responsible for designing and implementing the processes that recruiters use to find and hire candidates, including:

Sourcing methods
Campaign effectiveness
Implementing and maintaining applicant tracking systems (ATS) or other tools
Designing the process for structured interviews
Standardizing all the steps in the hiring process

Like any other operations-focused team, talent operations (ops) employees are highly analytical, collecting and interpreting data to improve talent teams’ efficiency and effectiveness.

What Do Recruitment Operations Teams Do?

Talent operations teams measure a variety of KPIs to pinpoint parts of the hiring process that are lagging behind or need improvement.

These KPIs could be:

Outbound sourcing metrics
Number of applicants who apply for an open position within a specific time period
Candidate NPS scores
Time to hire
Retention rate
Employee satisfaction
New hire engagement

This type of data could inform future improvements in posting content or optimizing recruitment marketing campaigns based on what resonates most with potential candidates at different stages in their careers versus others’ stages.

Outstanding talent operations team members proactively propose solutions to gaps in the hiring process by gathering requirements from interviewers and hiring managers and interviewing candidates and employees about their experiences.

They also stay up to date on new ways other companies optimize their hiring process, identify trends that could be useful to the organization, analyze the level of effort, and make recommendations regarding implementation and measurement.

Talent operations is a relatively new function, but as companies collect and track more and more hiring data, the talent ops team will only become a more essential component of your hiring strategy. Recruitment operations professionals are typically found at large companies or organizations with many employees and a robust hiring strategy.** **Talent Operations is an important part of recruiting that can help you find and hire qualified candidates quickly and efficiently.

Recruitment Operations Teams Increase Synchrony

There’s a key element to winning the war on talent that’s often overlooked: synchrony. In other words, ensuring everything you prepared for comes together at the right time.

While this may seem simple, operationalizing it is tougher than you think. It becomes abundantly clear when you start to add in variables like external sourcing or recruiting firms, employees who’ve never used structured interviews before, and fantastic candidates who don’t apply until the final day of the application deadline.

You can’t control all these variables, but the fact is that you need to be able to act quickly while still providing a quality candidate experience. And it’s very difficult to do that if you’re not running a tight ship. Recruitment operations keeps the interview process on course by analyzing KPIs, and focusing on training, timing, delegation, and feedback.