Recruitment Operations and the Future of HR: What You Need to Know Now

Recruiting the best people for your organization is a challenging task — candidates have higher expectations for employers than ever, while the available talent pool is small and top talent is hard to source. Fortunately, there’s also a new field emerging that can help streamline recruiting and make it more efficient for employers while improving the candidate experience: recruiting operations. 

Since the field is so new, however, there’s still a lot to learn about what recruiting operations is, how it’s best used, and what it means for the future of HR. This guide will cover everything you need to know about the basics of recruiting operations so your company can reap the benefits of this exciting new function. 

What is Recruiting Operations?

Recruiting operations oversees all the aspects of recruiting except for actually finding the candidates themselves. They facilitate everything in the recruiting process, from creating job descriptions to coordinating interviews to extending offers and even onboarding new hires.

Recruiting is an incredibly complex function, after all. Streamlining it by placing the responsibility for all operations in the hands of a data-focused, strategic team with the entire candidate experience top of mind can offer significant efficiencies. 

With an expected talent shortage of more than 85 million by 2030, companies can’t afford to leave their ineffective recruiting processes and policies in place if they want to compete for top talent. Recruiting operations helps them make the leap into the future of recruiting. 

Recruiting Operations Responsibilities 

What exactly does a recruiting operations team do? It can vary by company, depending on the size and complexity of the organization, but here’s a detailed look at a typical recruiting operations team workflow. 

Recruiting Strategy

Recruiting operations begins with creating an overarching strategy for recruiting in both the short-term and the long-term, which closely aligns with the overall business goals. They proactively anticipate the future recruiting needs of the company, looking at expected retirements, normal attrition, and skills gaps to determine what the company will need and how to get ahead of those needs. 

Measurement

They also look closely at the data around the current recruitment and hiring process to find roadblocks and friction points where the candidate experience is failing, the process gets unnecessarily held up, or where poor hiring decisions creep in. Using this data, they suggest effective improvements to the recruitment process and implement them. 

Standardization and Accountability

Recruiting operations doesn’t own the entire recruiting process, but they do designate clear lines of accountability and ownership so everyone involved knows what their responsibilities are. They also ensure the recruitment and hiring process is consistent throughout the company by using tools like standardized interview questions and job descriptions. 

Optimization

As improvements are made to the recruiting process, the recruiting operations team tracks progress to measure the effectiveness of the changes and suggests further tweaks. They often track key metrics like Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS), new hire turnover, and other hiring success measures to be sure the organization is on track with improvements. 

Employee Experience

Recruiting operations also influence the employee experience, helping to improve elements like new hire onboarding processes to ensure success and gathering information from exit interviews to refine the candidate experience and hiring process. 

Data is at the Heart of Recruiting Operations 

As you can see from the list of responsibilities and goals of the recruiting operations team, data is core to their mission. Most organizations today have access to an overwhelming amount of data on candidates and employees and their recruitment processes — so much that it’s difficult for HR teams to know what’s important, what’s irrelevant, and how to effectively use this data. 

That’s where the real mission of recruitment operations teams comes in. They help companies use this data effectively, to make better hiring decisions as well as create a better candidate experience. 

The Benefits of Recruiting Operations 

Recruiting operations helps your company optimize for the best possible candidate experience, which is more critical now than ever. Candidates expect regular communication throughout the hiring process, more transparency and equity in hiring, and faster speed to hire, and recruiting operations can help companies deliver all of this and more. 

With a better candidate experience, your company will lose fewer top quality candidates thanks to removing flaws in the hiring process and be able to get the best people in your industry onboard. 

Recruiting operations also helps HR departments take a step back from just running the regular process of sourcing and hiring candidates the same way they’ve always done, which is likely not working well anymore. With a more strategic, high-level view, recruiting operations can help their organizations recruit and hire based on the latest best practices instead of the familiar way of doing things. 

At its core, recruiting operations takes on tasks that lift the load on the rest of the HR team so they can focus on people-focused work — like interviewing, performance management, the employee experience, and career development — lifting a load that’s become increasingly heavy for many HR teams in recent years. 

Recruiting Operations Technology 

All of this data collection, synthesis, and analysis is fortunately made much easier with the wide variety of recruiting operations technology that has come on the market in the last few years. These platforms make it easier for companies to look at data from all of their HR systems, understand what it means, and use it to make better recruiting and hiring decisions — while also improving the candidate experience. 

Recruiting operations technologies include: 

• Platforms that help you source top-quality candidates 
• Sophisticated applicant tracking systems that offer data analytics 
• Talent screening and evaluation platforms that can identify the top talent in your hiring process

Plus, these platforms mean that even smaller companies can build a recruiting operations team, because the technology makes even just one or two recruiting operations team members a valuable part of the HR team. 

Recruiting operations software can help your company standardize and remove the bias from job descriptions and interview questions, create and analyze responses to skills assessment tests, schedule and evaluate video interview responses to speed up hiring, and even suggest other open roles where a candidate might thrive. 

When you’re shopping for a recruiting operations platform, be sure to look for one that also integrates easily with your existing HR tech stack to eliminate friction points and make all your data easy to use. 

Cangrade offers all of these features and much more — and it’s certified bias-free as well. Get your free demo today and see for yourself how it can power your recruiting operations and help you create an exceptional candidate experience.