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Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters.
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Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, CEO at Pinpoint. And today I'm joined by Jeremy Lyons, co founder of RecOps Collective, which help companies improve their recruiting teams through tool selection, training, and serve as a community for RecOps professionals around the world.
A lot of experience working in RecOps and TM stuff. He also runs a great newsletter called the RecOps Roundup. No doubt we'll talk about that and we'll make a point of linking to it in the wrap up notes. Jeremy, thank you for joining us. You ready for some questions?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for having me, Tom.
Tom Hacquoil: No sweat. So cool. I mean, look, we've touched on RecOps Collective and yeah, I'm a big reader of the newsletter. We've talked about it for a long time. Can you give us a 60 second summary of what it is, what it's all about and why you started it in the first place?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah. So RecOps Collective, I started it at the end of 2022.
And the purpose of it was twofold. One, we wanted to make RecOps accessible to companies of all shapes and sizes. We had talked to a lot of people who felt that RecOps was specific to tech and specific to large tech. And we wanted to dispel that and help companies make their TA teams more efficient.
Better using of their tools, more data driven and take them from an older view to the newer, more modern way of doing talent acquisition. And the other side of it was we wanted to create resources for recruiting operations professionals and create a space for them like the player's tribune where people who are doing the work could share the work. Because a lot of the time when I went out and was reading, okay, what is this about RecOps?
What is this about a tool or how to do a process? A lot of what I was getting was, this is a TA leader who is sitting on the top and maybe it was their idea and now they're going to pass it off or it was coming from a tool and essentially it was like a recipe where, you read this long story about about what it is and you get down into the steps.
And it would be step one, step two, missing step three, step four. And then step five was essentially buy our product and we'll do this for you. And I felt that, especially within TA teams especially within RecOps teams, we're not known for having large budgets. So we have to build a lot of these things ourselves.
And I wanted to create a way for people to find unbiased resources. That would help them build that.
Tom Hacquoil: Sure. No, that makes perfect sense. I want to move to process and set up and things like that, right? So as you're working with all these organizations and delivering the value you've just referenced, what's the biggest mistake you're seeing orgs make at the moment when it comes to the way that they think about that stuff?
Jeremy Lyons: I think the biggest mistake that I see is that, at least for right now, people are thinking, tools are going to save them. So it's, we're just one tool away from being that great organization. And I think that when you get that mindset, you're ignoring that it's still bad data in bad data out. You need to think through why is that?
Why is this the right tool right now? Or why is this what we're going to be able to do, is it actually really a problem with the tools we have available? Or is it a people problem? And given the last five plus years, I've been in the tech space. I like to refer to it as, is it a hardware problem or is it a software problem?
It's a hardware problem. We can probably fix it. You just replace the bad hardware. If it's a software problem, you're probably going to have to really think through what changes are you making and how are you going to make those changes because you have to think through how do we make a cultural change versus just look, this bright new shiny thing is going to help us do this thing.
Tom Hacquoil: I think that makes total sense. And look, from my own perspective, obviously, I sell a tool, in theory, and so we have a view on that. But I think you're totally right. And I think that the best organizations that we see when they roll out Pinpoint or any tool like ours is they see it as a step change in the way that they think about execution, right?
What's the opportunity here to change process, to evaluate the way we do things. Equally, we also get a lot of organizations move to us and they absolutely slate their previous vendor or their previous tool and they say, we hate blah because it didn't do this. And we know that it did.
And actually, yeah, people are very quick to blame tools, but I think you're completely right. There's a bit of a missing link there. And I like the hardware software analogy.
Jeremy Lyons: And I think one of the things too, that's wonderful, especially about Pinpoint is. There's behavior that you can influence that isn't so obvious to people, but then once they get out of it, then they go, oh, wow, like that was actually a really nice guardrail that we had.
So sometimes it's about changing behavior without overtly telling somebody we're changing your behavior. It's those small incremental shifts that happen.
Tom Hacquoil: That makes total sense. I think If we step back, when teams are going through these changes, right?
And you talk about looking at tools and point solutions and so on, but really we're talking about stepping back, evaluating process, thinking about RecOps more broadly. How do people track the efficiency and the outcome of that? What are the metrics folks should be looking at to see the difference they're making as they go through this stuff?
Jeremy Lyons: That's a question that I often get is, all right, so how do you measure the success of your RecOps scene? When, if you look at traditional recruiting metrics, you're looking at, time to fill, time to hire, things that seem a lot more recruiter directed than the RecOps side. And I think what we're starting to see from a broader scale on how you measure your RecOps team is you're looking at efficiencies and you're looking at how many steps have we actually removed from a process.
To allow for people to be more successful. And usually that comes out in things like hiring velocity. It comes out in diversity, inclusion metrics. It comes out in little time increment things, so time to scorecard submissions times from when the candidate gets reached out to when they get scheduled.
So you have to look at every part and that's where I think going back and mapping your process is really important because when you start to look at the data, and then you want to go and tell a full data story. When you do that, if you know who's responsible for each element, you could start attributing certain elements to things.
And also that attribution switches you from a mindset of just being like, hey, we're recruiting and TA are transactional, to now being like actually this looks like it's a consistent problem across our hiring teams or above this certain level on this role? What can we be doing to make those things better?
And now you're strategically thinking about things.
Tom Hacquoil: Look, I love that. I think anything that moves TA from a sort of reactive function to a strategic one is like gold dust in my book, but I think I also love and it's like a subtle point, but I think it's really interesting. You said a minute or so ago, hey, let's see how many steps we're removing from the workflow and that's awesome.
It surprises me so often that people and organizations don't remove things ever. They just add things, right? Every change in process is an incremental. We're going to address this and we're going to do this. And now everything becomes this convoluted mess. It's rare to move things back.
Jeremy Lyons: The thing that I would say, and it may or may not be viewed as a hot take.
But when I look at recruiting operations teams, and I talk to people on the recruiting operations front, and we have these conversations, the elegance in what you do is not in the complexity that you introduce. The elegance in what you do is what do we remove to get it back to being a straight line?
Because I think a lot of people tend to think that the most complex solution is the best solution. When in fact it's not to make it so bloody simple that you're not doing anything, but it's going back to thinking about, all right, how do we Occam's razor this?
Like, how do we just get to the straightest line of this solution? And you don't have to necessarily introduce complexity to do that. Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: I love that, right? Yeah, celebrate simplicity, not complexity, I think is a super, super clear takeaway. So I love that. I think a couple of questions on you just to break it up before we get into the detail on some of these kind of bigger macro issues.
So if you weren't in talent, what would you be doing?
Jeremy Lyons: Oh, that's a fantastic question. If I wasn't in talent, what would I be doing? I've been having this conversation with myself a lot lately. I think probably I would be a chief of staff, a sales engineer, or go back to being a teacher.
Tom Hacquoil: Oh you're doing a lot of teaching in the role that you have now. I guess maybe less sales engineering, but I like that. Okay. That's cool. Chief of staff's an interesting choice, but love it. And I guess digging into some of that, cause I think obviously I know you and your experience, but as a bit a wild card, if you were gonna write a book, what do you think that book would be about?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, I already know what the title would be. Okay. The title of the book would be Lessons Written in Blood. And it would be my autobiography. And I think the reason for that would be, I've been through a lot of really crazy experiences, but
I've learned from all of them, and when I talk to people, I don't always want to give that sunshine and rainbows type answer. I want to give the hey, here's actually the full details.
Tom Hacquoil: I love that. So yeah, "In Blood" in bookstores near you soon, hopefully, but I think like really nice segue from my perspective into the next question about the space more generally. So you talked quite candidly there about having seen a lot over your period in this world, right? How do you think the industry has changed over the past few years? What are those kind of big trend lines you've noticed?
Jeremy Lyons: I think one of the things that's really happened over the last year is we've seen this explosion in people talking about AI and AI efficiency.
So that is certainly top of mind to recruiting operations people. One of the things and I don't think this is just recruiting operations people specifically is trying to figure out how do we keep the human elements still attached to a process that obviously is now going to have AI involved.
It's not a, if it will have AI involved. It's going to have it involved. So how do we continue to maintain great data? How do we continue to build processes where people don't feel like a number in a machine? And how do you start to build your team towards that? And I think what we're seeing is you're probably going to be doing it with less people.
So, because you'll have AI agents and AI tools that will be able to help you, you're probably going to see smaller recruiting operations teams, but you might see this proliferation of more recruiting operations teams, which is an exciting thing to think about. When I also, I look at the vertical, one of the other big talking points is going to be what's going to happen to the RC group.
Because a lot of people are thinking, okay if we have AI agents and we have scheduling tools and we have all these abilities, what do we need an RC for? And I think that the problem with that mindset is that one, people aren't looking at RCs for their candidate experience qualities, for the project management qualities, but they're also not looking at how this group feeds and seeds a lot of different groups, not only within TA, but in other elements of a company. Because unlike other departments, recruiting get introduced to every delta and every valley in the recruiting space and all these different roles and you find something that you love and you go down that path. And so it's going to be really interesting to see how this group evolves.
But if this group ultimately ends up not evolving and getting eliminated, how is that going to impact other departments as well?
Tom Hacquoil: No, I hear that. I guess taking a few of those highlighted themes, how do you keep it human? How do you deal with smaller team sizes?
How do you deal with missing links disappearing in the process on the recruitment coordination side. You're doing some of this stuff yourself, right? As I understand it, you've got the RecOps GPT and you're thinking about AI a lot and you're spending time right in the weeds, like how are you taking all of these things into consideration as you tackle some of these challenges yourself?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, I came up as a recruiting coordinator, so I still have a great affinity for that group and for everything that I learned on that. And it's I'm not going to lie. It's hard. It's hard having conversations with businesses that basically say, we're thinking about eliminating our recruiting coordination function and replacing it with these sorts of elements.
On one hand where you're looking at where there are efficiency gains, on the other you have to think about the very human element of you're talking about people possibly losing their jobs. And I think one of the things that keeps me very grounded in the, don't run to tools immediately sort of function because people can solve some of the, these human driven problems is the fact that every week I do a post around all the layoffs that have happened over the past week.
And I spent the majority of last year looking for a full time job as much as I love RecOps Collective piece, I still keep my eye out for a full time role because. As much as you can love doing the work, the thing that nobody tells you about starting your own business is now you gotta do all the business development work.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons: You like doing the thing that you're doing, but you're doing business development work now. You have so many more things, so many more obligations that you oftentimes don't get a lot of time to do the work that you actually love to do and why you started the business in the first place.
But one of the things that I keep doing is I keep an eye out for all the recruiting folks who are getting let go in these movements. And I think to myself okay how can these people what is the evolution for these folks? Because, you're talking about huge knowledge drains as well.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, no I hear you. And there's just, there's so many things going on there. It's a difficult balance. And I think it's interesting to me because, to your point on starting your own organization and things like that. Arguably the more successful that organization gets, the further away you get from doing the piece of the puzzle that you love doing and that you're extremely talented at, right?
And so there's that like interesting dichotomy that actually gets net worse rather than net better over time. And I think most people don't realize that until you've gone on that journey.
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: Cool. So we've talked about GPT, we've talked about AI more broadly, we've talked about these big thematic trends.
As you look forward to 2025 and beyond, how do you think RecOps professionals are best equipped to deal with this stuff and in your own community, what are you hearing on the grapevine about challenges or things folks are contending with?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah I think one of the kind of major challenges or continuing challenges is going to be what does good AI look like? What does AI in our process look like? And what are we going to need to maintain for that? I think the other challenges that people are going to be looking at is how do we switch and move to more modern recruiting metrics.
I think that's going to be really important. And then I think. This is not necessarily like a hot take, but I think it's probably going to see more of a conversation at the end of 2025 is does recruiting split off from your traditional people team HR team to now have a Chief Talent Officer? Because especially for companies that are switching to more of a skill based hiring model and talking about going skill based hiring, which is, obviously going to be a huge trend in 2025, does this thing need to be split out into an entirely different group.
And then that will obviously impact recruiting operations professionals. Because now is that going to create more growth path for us? Is it going to create more opportunities in different places? I think one of the biggest questions amongst recruiting operations professionals is once you've hit the recruiting ops manager, it becomes,
what is the next skill? Where is my next move? How do I get off this ride if I want to be leading a department? And we're going to start seeing more recruiting operations people probably becoming more Heads of TA types. And then the other thing too, is standardization in recruiting operations.
I gave a speech about that a couple of weeks ago at the RecOps Conference. There is a desire for people to understand, if I have these skills, this is what these skills will translate to in my RecOps career. And if I don't want to, and I want to stay at the same level, or I want to get out, how do these skills translate into other places?
Tom Hacquoil: That's super, super useful advice and a great perspective. Thank you for that. I think last question as we moved to wrap and it's a bit of a wildcard one again, but always interested in understanding like if you were to attempt to break a world record, what would it be for?
Jeremy Lyons: I don't think that there are any recruiting operations world records that exist. So maybe if I make one up, like maybe most interviews scheduled in a single day, or maybe most dashboards built in a single day that were effective dashboards I'd have to give it some really serious thoughts.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes sense. Yeah. Back to your RC days and leveraging all the skills you picked up then, right?
Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, exactly. I definitely know what I wouldn't want my world record to be, which would be like most hours spent in meetings.
Tom Hacquoil: I'm with you on that. I'm totally with you on that.
Awesome, Jeremy. Thank you so much. We've gone through 10 questions. Really appreciate you joining me. If folks want to learn more about Jeremy and stay up to date with what he's doing, you can follow him on LinkedIn and please do go and subscribe to his newsletter the RecOps Roundup.
We'll put the links to both in the show notes. Thanks for joining me, Jeremy. All the best and thanks for listening.
Jeremy Lyons: Thank you so much, Tom.