What is Recruitment Operations?

Recruitment operations is a trending topic in talent acquisition circles, and you’ll likely feel its effects sooner or later. So, what can you expect?

In this article…

• What is recruitment operations?
• The most common names for recruitment operations
• What is operations management?
• Why take an operations approach to recruiting?
• What recruitment operations teams do
• The role of data analytics in recruitment operations

Today’s employers are contending with a labor shortage and skills gaps, while racing to define what the future of work looks like. To efficiently and effectively identify, assess and hire talent now and in the future, companies are looking to streamline their recruiting strategy, improve hiring processes, and speed things up. The question is: How? Many organizations are turning to recruitment operations for the answer—and they’re taking a wide variety of approaches.

What is recruitment operations?

Recruiting operations is a function that defines work processes, helps talent acquisition teams run more efficiently, and oversees logistics like interview scheduling, offer processing, and onboarding. In other words, recruitment operations maximizes an organization’s ability to hire quickly, reduce costs, and ensure resources are used effectively. A strong recruitment operations plan also positively affects candidate experience by improving time-to-hire, communication with hiring teams, and more.

Some companies are incorporating recruitment operations strategies into their existing efforts, asking recruiters to continue identifying, engaging, interviewing and hiring employees while increasing focus on data-driven decisions and incremental process improvements.

At the other end, many companies have introduced entirely new recruitment operations staff, with the sole purpose of creating and executing a strategy to improve hiring processes, fill roles more quickly, decrease costs and generally find ways to improve the operational structure of the recruiting team.

In truth, recruitment operations is an evolving function, and there isn’t one universal definition of what it is, what it involves or how to do it. Ten years from now, there will likely be case studies on best-in-class recruitment operations organizational structure, strategies and tactics. For now, it’s history in the making. So, let’s start with some basics.

According to Mercer’s Global Talent Trends Report, 99% of companies are taking action to prepare for the future of work:

A chart showing how companies are taking action to prepare for the future of work

That’s where recruitment operations comes in. By applying operations methodologies to each step in the hiring process, human resources teams can identify opportunities for improvement, use company resources more efficiently, better prove their value to leadership and build stronger business cases for new recruiting solutions. Recruitment operations professionals can also help their companies prepare for the future of work by anticipating industry trends, combating global talent shortages and identifying how other external forces may affect the company.

Leaders who participated in Mercer’s 2019 Global Talent Trends indicate:

Figure showing the top human capital risks from excessive time to fill open positions (highest risk) to slow decision making

What Does a Recruitment Operations Team Do?

As noted earlier, the way companies define recruiting operations falls along a large spectrum. To give you some insights about what to expect, here’s a sampling of job responsibilities from Recruitment Operations Leads, Managers and Analyst job postings:

Business operations

Support the head of recruiting by managing all operational aspects of recruiting and identify opportunities to drive the efficiency and effectiveness
Manage budget, spend and ROI
Train and hold accountable the recruiting organization, hiring managers and interviewers on operational changes to promote excellence
Build relationships and collaborate across HR, Finance, IT, Procurement, Legal, Operations, Engineering and mo

Strategy development

Understand market conditions, trends, and business growth targets to develop a recruitment strategy
Lead, develop, grow, and manage a recruitment operations strategy to deliver an exceptional candidate experience
Manage change and related communications
Drive global recruitment strategies to scale the organization
Obtain business and candidate feedback on recruitment quality and identify improvement opportunities

Systems management

Oversee recruitment systems and tools, reporting and analytics, onboarding, employer branding, immigration, contingent workforce, employee referral, diversity recruiting, global expansion, contingent workforce and employer branding initiatives
Identify, build, maintain and manage relationships with recruiting vendors, agencies and third-party suppliers

Reporting and analytics

Identify, monitor and regularly report key metrics (including KPIs and ROI) for sourcing platforms, staffing partners and productivity tools
Use data to analyze and optimize recruitment processes
Identify new tools and technology to improve operations

Getting recruitment right isn’t optional. According to the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services Survey:

A figure showing the keys to competitiveness in hiring over the next two years

How Much Does a Recruitment Operations Manager Make? The national average salary for a Recruitment Operations Manager is $76,971 in United States. — Glassdoor

What Role Does Data Analytics Play in Recruitment Operations?

No matter how a company defines its recruitment operations structure, you can be sure of one thing: data analytics is a huge part of it.

Data is key to evaluating whether your organization is finding the best talent for open positions and measuring operational excellence in recruiting. It can also help you gain leadership support of new technologies and investments.

Applicant tracking systems, social media tools, and virtually all recruiting technologies typically provide some form of analytics reporting to help you make data-driven decisions, show return on investment, measure progress, identify improvement opportunities, and more. Determining what to measure may be based on recruiting goals, operational efficiencies or a combination of the two.

“While it’s common for recruiters to focus on cost per hire, this isn’t the be all end all metric. The end all goal of hiring campaigns shouldn’t be to hire more cheaply – rather to hire better.” – TMP Worldwide

How Yello Can Help

With automated tools built to reduce time-consuming manual work, Yello has everything you need to advance quality candidates and extend and offer before the competition.