The Modern Recruiter #50: Introduction to Recruiting Operations, Luke Eaton.

Hi everyone, and welcome to this podcast episode! I'm Robin Choy, CEO of HireSweet. Each week, I humbly tackle recruiting issues about recruiting outreach, interviewing, employer branding, career management, and anything else that could be helpful to you as an aspirational recruiter (whether you are an in-house recruiter, an agency recruiter, a freelancer, or the founder of an early stage startup).

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Introduction to Recruiting Ops

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The manufacturing sector has an inherent obsession: to deliver more products, of better quality, in less time. This obsession led to the Kaizen method, a Japanese method of continuous improvement of industrial processes. The idea is simple: identify the problems in the production line, find a simple solution to solve the problem, implement it quickly, and look at the results.

This method, made popular by Taichi Ohno in the 1950s, has made the success of many companies, including Toyota.

In the early 2000s, the era of the internet and tech startups happened. Very quickly the same obsession as in the Toyota era appeared: how to build better software, faster. In 2001, 17 software developers met in a room to write together the Agile manifesto for software development, a method inspired by the Kaizen method, which will become a reference in the new way of producing software.

But what's my point?At a certain stage of maturity, most industry professionals start asking themselves the same question: how to do the same thing as we do, but better, and faster? This is exactly what is happening in the recruitment industry.

Here’s come the RecOps.

You've probably noticed the rise of this new discipline: recruiting operations, or RecOps. Recruitment Operations is a function of a Talent Acquisition team that focuses on improving the efficiency of recruitment, by designing better processes. Here’s how RecOps design better processes:

* Collect data related to the recruitment process of a company

* Identify bottlenecks in the processes

* Find a solution to remove these bottlenecks and make processes more fluid and efficient.

* Check the results

(The similarity with the Kaizen method and the Agile method is striking!)Let’s focus on the first two steps.

Step 1 : Measuring the data.

The data generated by the TA function of a business is enormous. It is often many multiples larger than the data generated by your sales team. Let’s look at 3 classic operational metrics: Volume - The total number of candidates at each stage in a given time frame.

Conversion - the percentage passthrough of candidates from one stage to another

Capacity - the number of candidates that can be accommodated in each stage for a given time frame.What is the point of measuring all this? To identify bottlenecks.

Step 2 : Identify bottlenecks

A bottleneck is a stage of a process where the capacity is smaller than the volume in a stage in a given time period.

Here’s what bottlenecks matter. Here’s the example given by Luke in the episode, that explains why bottlenecks matter:

Imagine that a fast-growing company, Shoes.com, has multiple, ongoing software developer roles open. Your team is producing on average 6 candidates at the technical interview stage per week. Your stakeholders only have 2 engineers capable of conducting 2 interviews each per week, so 4 interviews.

In the above scenario, we start to see a bottleneck that will impact the throughput of this pipeline.

Each week, 4 slots are filled, and 2 candidates are scheduled for the following week. This means the following week your recruiters are presenting 6 candidates and only have 2 effective slots, the other two being scheduled from the week before.

After several weeks of this bottleneck, the time between stages for the candidate increases significantly.

Some of the impacts a process bottleneck such as this one has on a pipeline :

* Time to offer increases over time.

* Candidates have more time to accept other offers and withdraw, reducing conversion at each stage, which further reduces throughput.

* Cost per hire increases

* Candidate experience decreases as they wait for weeks in between stages.

* Any effort your recruiters expend creating volume that exceeds the bottleneck is wasted effort, costing your team efficiency.

* Recruiter experience decreases as frustration sets in, increasing attrition rates.

It’s easy to see the significant impact a bottleneck has over time. Bottlenecks are cumulative. They are vicious cycles that compound over time.

Here’s how I would summarize it :

The effectiveness of your Talent Acquisition team doesn't rise to the level of your best processes, but falls to the level of your worst bottlenecks.

So, how could you solve this problem? Listen to the episode to find out more.

Listen to the episode to find out more.

For this first episode on RecOps, I invited a subject matter expert: Luke Eaton. Luke has helped dozens of high-growth companies structure and improve their Talent Acquisition team processes, including several startups now valued at over $1 billion.

Luke also wrote a great article on the subject, from which I drew a lot of inspiration to write this newsletter:

He also mentions these two books during the episode :

* The Goal: a process of ongoing improvement

* The Phoenix project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and helping your business win

Hope you like the episode!

Have a nice week and see you soon,

Robin

CEO of HireSweet

Did you enjoy the episode? Feel free to check out the 3 most downloaded episodes:

* 37. Build a thriving & strategic sourcing team, with Garrett Lewis, tech sourcing lead at Grammarly.

* 36. DE&I strategies for companies below 200 people, with Claudia Colvin, People & Talent @ HappyScribe.

* 41. Personalization at scale in recruiting. Jonas Waloschek, Senior Technical Recruiter @MANTA, ex @McKinsey.

If you find this podcast useful, you'll be interested in what we do at HireSweet.

👉 HireSweet CRM helps Talent Acquisition teams get more candidates. Increase your reply rates by 70%, and handle twice as many candidates at the same time.Request a demo here!