Why Businesses Need Recruitment Operations Now More Than Ever

When the pandemic began, many businesses went into survival mode. Some are still trying to overcome economic and workplace obstacles. Others have successfully rebounded from initial setbacks and are ready to take advantage of a post-pandemic hiring boom. 

Wherever your organization falls on the spectrum, there’s one investment that helps address both immediate and long-term recruitment goals. Yet, it’s one that’s been largely overlooked until recently. 

That investment is recruitment operations.

As TRAP Recruiter Keirsten Greggs explains, “recruitment operations will continue to change and depend on the organization.” It’s this ability to change based on the needs of a given organization that makes it the perfect investment for businesses across the board. 

With recruitment operations’ emphasis on solidifying all recruitment processes specific to one’s organization, employers will be able to identify and address immediate concerns regarding employer competition, employee experience, and long-term business goals. 

➡️ Digitization of resources

➡️ Employer competition 

➡️ Tracking the right metrics

➡️ Workplace experience

Digitization of resources

Businesses today need their systems to function in a completely digitized environment. That can only be done best with seamless integrations and workflows across all tools in a recruitment tech stack. In fact, nearly 99% of talent acquisition professionals felt the need to digitize their resources in response to remote work and new softwares adopted during the pandemic. 

A recruitment operations role has ownership over all these tools and systems in place. Companies must hire an individual or a team that knows how to map every software system and team workflow to three main things: what’s best for the hiring team, what’s needed by the industry, and what can best get the team to reach organizational goals.

From there, recruitment operations will determine the right metrics to track, the right reports to build, the right tools to implement, and most importantly, the results that every member of the team must bring to the table.

By trusting operations to spearhead digitization, leaders will empower their teams to efficiently track short-term and long-term goals and leverage data to implement new strategies to achieve those goals. 

Employer competition

One million new jobs were added in the past two months, signaling a big comeback for recruiting activities this year. In a Randstad survey of C-suite executives and human capital leaders, 40% reported a talent scarcity in 2021. Even well-established brands, like Amazon and McDonald’s, are considering raising wages just to secure workers. With all of this in mind, beating competition for top talent is even more crucial for hiring success this year. 

With 63% of executives and leaders citing talent experience as a vital component of hiring post-pandemic, hiring teams will need to provide a talent experience that surpasses competitors. 

A recruitment operations team should be every company’s source of insight on how recruiters and hiring managers are working to build a stellar talent experience. This team or person has all the recorded documents, reports and data to show leaders and stakeholders what the company lacks in recruitment and why.

This can include data on how teams are adopting tools to automate administrative tasks, the ratio of visitors to applications submitted on your career site or even the retention of recruiters on your team. 

Leaders must work with operations to build a reporting system or data dashboard that highlights the most crucial metrics for talent experience. In turn, operations will work to keep teams accountable in reporting and meeting those target metrics. 

By ensuring that all tools, workflows, and data are moving in the right direction for a seamless recruitment experience, hiring teams will be better equipped to beat out competitors for talent. 

Tracking the right metrics

Workplace experience 

Beyond analyzing recruitment cycle metrics, there are other factors that weigh into the success of an organization. These factors include the experience of employees on your hiring team and how your organization is retaining these employees. 

When recruitment operations own the management of processes and systems in recruitment and hiring, they have the opportunity to help leaders identify areas for improving overall workplace experience. For example, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve employee productivity and retention by over 70%.

With a detailed understanding of how companies attract, hire and retain talent, recruitment operations can work with leaders and HR to ensure that new hires feel welcome, engaged and are set up for long-term success. 

When recruitment operations and leaders work together, it helps mitigate the negative impacts of sudden workplace changes, such as the effects of the pandemic. Employee burnout and stress during this period of time affected close to 70% of employees, resulting in less productivity and employee engagement during work.  

Recruitment operations teams can work with leaders to build or strengthen a feedback loop between HR, new hires and existing employees. This feedback-collecting process can take many forms, such as Slack or anonymous surveys to gauge employee satisfaction. Operations are in the best position to help HR select and implement the right channels to gather feedback, and work to create processes in the back-end that can drive better implementation and adoption of systems to address any concerns. 

Not Waiting To Start

When we look under the hood of some companies with the most successful hiring processes, most of them are forward-thinking. They have the insight to predict future needs in the market and address them before others do. While recruitment operations are not always recognized as the driver of this, we can see that those who prioritized operations were better equipped to implement innovative strategies and experiences in a seamless way. 

The best businesses know that the ultimate goal is never just hiring and keeping employees happy for what you need today. If your organization wants to overcome immediate challenges for the purpose of achieving long-term success, recruitment operations are a necessary investment to keep all aspects of your hiring process operating at maximum efficiency and effectiveness.