Operations

While AI took center stage, conversations among TA leaders were heavy on team engagement, recruitment ROI, and innovative approaches to getting the work done. A sense of cautious optimism around hiring growth in 2024 spurred engaging discussions on how TA teams are meeting the reality of achieving business needs with limited resources. Specifically and not surprisingly, many leaders shared that their priorities are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of their teams without the option of growing team size. This continued focus on doing more with the same team or even fewer resources has put a renewed spotlight on recruiting operations and understanding what changes will actually have an impact. 

At the end of each year, we launch a benchmarking survey on Recruiting Productivity and Operating Metrics focused on recruiting team ratios, recruiter productivity, req loads, time to hire, diversity recruiting goals/tracking methods, cost per hire, and quality of hire. It’s been a tumultuous year for recruiting teams, so we were interested to see what has changed and what has not.

It’s been a fun several weeks where we’ve had an opportunity to get back to connecting in person with many of you. We hosted talent in person community events in Nashville, Raleigh, and San Francisco and a virtual event last week. We’re so energized by the work all of you are doing and hope to continue finding ways to bring the community together.

There were two significant events that occurred late last year that set off compounding impacts across the tech community. The first was Twitter abruptly laying off nearly half of the company and setting off a series of deeper cuts across the industry. The second was the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which quickly became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history… until Threads launched this year that is. The net impact for many recruiting leaders has been the expectation that their teams will need to do more with less. As with prior tech cycles and platform shifts, a burst of new tools have come into the market while existing vendors are racing to innovate. All with the promise of driving higher quality and greater efficiency across the recruiting process.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve met with some talent leaders that have had to significantly downsize their teams and are now faced with a lot of unpredictability and variability in hiring needs since they’re completely dependent on backfilling attrition. While other talent leaders we’ve talked to are at companies with healthy balance sheets that can retain more resources on their teams, but in the meantime are redesigning roles and reevaluating performance metrics given fewer roles needing to be filled in the short-term. Here are some takeaways from those conversations:

What does it mean to influence with data and drive operational excellence?