Two RecOps practitioners and a Talent Leader who “used to do it all herself” pull back the curtain on how to build a world-class hiring engine.
Has your organization already built a dedicated role to centralize the people, process, and data work that sits behind hiring? In a flash poll taken during our recent roundtable, 71% of attendees said theirs had. This is an impressive figure, but hard to square with how many leadership teams still talk about recruiting operations as something to build eventually, once there’s a budget for it. For most talent organizations, there’s still a long way to go between talking about the function and actually having one, and that gap was the focus of our conversation in our roundtable.
Our guests were three practitioners who built a RecOps function from the ground up: Ben Abear, who leads talent innovation and analytics at Adobe after a decade in recruiting operations at Google Fiber, and Susan Williams and Jaime Casassa, who lead talent acquisition and recruiting operations respectively at Lineage, a temperature-controlled storage company hiring frontline warehouse staff across the US and Canada.
They used the session to get specific about what RecOps actually does, when it’s time to create this function, and what it takes to staff it, run it, and defend it once it exists.
What is Recruiting Operations?
In the words of Ben Abear, “RecOps is the foundation of your house.” It comprises all the infrastructure sitting underneath hiring that makes the function scalable and legible to the rest of the business, and it tends to expand to fill whatever gap exists around it. In practice, that infrastructure spans:
- Process design and documentation
- Tech stack ownership and vendor management
- Reporting and compliance
- Enablement and training
- Contract negotiation
- Talent marketing and employer branding
- An informal IT or legal liaison role, depending on where the function sits in the org chart
Some of these responsibilities land in RecOps, also known as Hiring Ops, simply because nobody else wants it, and every organization will have its own mix of what falls under the title.
The common thread is visibility. RecOps gives the rest of the organization a clear line of sight into how recruiting contributes to business outcomes, something that’s nearly impossible to build when the work is spread across the side of multiple recruiters’ desks. Every other part of the business has already carved out its own version of this: sales has RevOps, engineering has DevOps. Recruiting has been doing the equivalent work all along, just without a name for it and without anyone owning it end to end.
“RecOps is the foundation of your house.” – Ben Abear, Adobe
How Do You Know You’re Ready for RecOps?
For Susan Williams, the catalyst was “being a single point of failure.” Only she understood how the entire talent tech stack connected, from the tech integrations to the systems behind them, and that knowledge sat with her alone. When Lineage prepared a major CRM implementation, the risk of carrying that knowledge solo was a risk the business could not afford.
Williams’ situation isn’t unusual. When we asked our roundtable attendees “Are you a single point of failure at your organization?” 29% said yes. Forty-three percent said no, and the remaining 29% said they didn’t know, arguably the most concerning answer, since not knowing usually means nobody has mapped the dependency at all. But generally, if one person leaving would take with them the institutional knowledge of how recruiting actually runs behind the scenes, the RecOps function needs building.
As for making the business case, Williams set the cost of creating a RecOps role against what the company already paid its HR systems administrators for the same level of capability on the Workday side, the argument being that if leadership already valued that skill set enough to fund it on the HR side, the same skill set was worth funding on the talent side. The funding came from repurposing a recruiting coordinator headcount that had just opened up, paid for through savings in advertising spend.
“I went to my VP and said, look at what we’re paying our HR operations systems admins. That’s the level of capability we’re talking about. We need that capability on our side.” – Susan Williams, Lineage
How Do You Hire For a Role That Looks Nothing Like Recruiting?
The skill set for a first RecOps hire looks nothing like the skill set for a recruiter, and that gap catches a lot of Talent Acquisition leaders out. They think they need a recruiting coordinator who’s comfortable with systems, when in fact most of the work is data analysis, system analysis, process efficiency, trend reporting, and the change management that comes with rolling out a major platform across a team where some people are eager to adopt new tools and others are actively resistant.
One cautionary example from Lineage involved a coordinator with a bachelor’s degree in information systems, which looked on paper like the analytical profile the role needed. It didn’t translate. “It really is a very elevated skill set, and there’s a way to interview for it, and there’s a way to assess for it that’s very different than someone who is system savvy,” Williams said. Being comfortable with systems and being able to pull raw data, interpret it, and turn it into a recommendation are not the same capability, and most standard interview processes aren’t built to tell the two apart.
“I look for people with systems thinking skills that have the ability to see how all of the parts connect. I would argue that it’s not only in recruiting, it’s how we connect our function to the overall business success, and see where there are opportunities for symmetry.” – Ben Abear
Two more qualities worth hiring for are skepticism and systems thinking, the ability to see how the moving parts of a process connect, and to notice when something in the data doesn’t add up. That combination is getting harder to find at the exact moment it matters most, since every recruiter now leaning on AI tools also needs someone on the team willing to say a tool’s output looks wrong, rather than assuming it must be right because a machine produced it. That instinct can’t be taught in a week of onboarding, which is exactly why it has to be screened for at the hiring stage.
How Do You Earn Trust From the Team You’ve Just Changed?
For incoming RecOps practitioners, the brutal truth is that it’s rare to get a warm welcome from the recruiters whose work is about to change underneath them. To handle that resistance, our experts recommend starting with the people closest to the work, not the leadership team, and actually listening to what’s happening on the ground. That includes listening for what people aren’t saying as much as what they are, and giving the process real time, since synthesizing themes in week one rarely captures the full picture.
There’s often a real sense of loss built into the handoff. A RecOps hire is often taking over the recruiter’s baby, something they’ve built and cared for over years. Going in with a “this-is-broken” framing will put recruiters on the defensive; recruiters who’ve been doing the job for twenty years are understandably skeptical of someone who’s been in the building for twenty minutes telling them to do it differently. That skepticism only dissolves once the RecOps person has demonstrated they are listening and understand the work well enough to improve it.
“I showed up to those recruiting team meetings and said, I’m your advocate. Yes, I’m on HR technically, but recruiting is in my heart. I’m not another person going to tell you that you’re ten priorities down the list. You’re number one.” – Jaime Casassa, Lineage
Where Does AI Fit in This Picture?
AI tools sit inside the tech stack RecOps owns, so RecOps is the function responsible for how they get used and for proving that use holds up to scrutiny. Litigation tied to AI-driven hiring decisions and regulatory scrutiny from bodies like the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office are starting to push back on the assumption that a human reviewed a decision just because a human technically had the chance to. If AI ranks 1,000 applications and a recruiter only opens 10 of them, calling that a human-reviewed decision is closer to rubber-stamping the machine’s output than genuine oversight, and RecOps is the function that would have to defend that if it were ever challenged.
“We need to make sure that the human component stays in recruiting, that it’s not just all automated. The recruiter-candidate relationship is still so important to keep intact.” – Jaime Casassa, Lineage.
Lineage has tackled this challenge head on by keeping a recruiter in the loop after the sorting happens. A fit-score model inside the CRM sorts through the hundreds of applications a single warehouse posting can generate, helping recruiters filter and prioritize. Recruiters are still doing human-to-human outreach once that list is built, just to candidates who are more likely to actually be a fit.
What Does RecOps Actually Return?
Reporting is where leadership teams expect the case for RecOps to be made in numbers, and the practitioners on this panel had real ones to share. At Lineage, internal customer satisfaction has improved simply because business unit leaders can go directly to RecOps for data instead of routing every request through talent acquisition. The same visibility has tightened budget management, since the team can now see which parts of the TA tech stack are actually being used and cut what isn’t earning its cost.
“Our leaders have access to RecOps directly. That just wasn’t scalable before. Our internal customers are really appreciative of that level of service, which is new for them.” – Susan Williams, Lineage
Abear put it plainly: “I look at it as a risk mitigation strategy. It helps build the credibility, and it’s something that’s often overlooked, because everybody wants to build shiny, pretty dashboards for the business side, and not so much the far less sexy conversation about a process that’s broken, or someone who didn’t get moved from here to there, at the right time, in the right way. But it all contributes to that foundation that helps make everybody successful.”
For more insights from Ben, Susan and Jaime, watch the full roundtable here.
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