This month the GBD team spent three packed days at the Transform Conference in Las Vegas. It was fun catching up with so many of you in our community!

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. 

We’ve been working on fractional recruiting operations engagements with companies on different sides of the growth curve - lean teams optimizing for steady state and flat headcount as well as companies in hiring sprints (mostly in the AI space). We thought it might be helpful to share some of the operational challenges that are coming up and how we’ve been partnering with teams to address them: 

• Unpredictable hiring demand - many teams are facing steady state or flat headcount and looking at attrition and backfills to determine hiring demand. This is resulting in significant pressure on quality for each hire, hiring for larger scope and generally more experience, and shifts in headcount as backfills arise to prioritize the best place to invest the headcount across teams. Scaling companies are hiring in sprints based on market reaction to product launches and impact to revenue/user growth. Even in these companies, the mindset is that sustained momentum is not assumed in the current market. some text
  • Actions you can take:some text
    • Build partner networks and/or drive deeper relationships with existing partners to support hiring spikes and roll off when hiring slows. Take this as a nudge to engage (or grow) your network of flexible augmented resources that know your company and in-demand roles. 
    • Understand people program priorities that could impact attrition. If performance measurement, compensation philosophy, evolving location requirements are on your roadmap, be aware of the impact these may have on employee engagement. Stay close to HR partners on timing and rollouts while looking at the data to get a signal on the impact to attrition rates. 
    • Set a capacity baseline and define triggers that would unlock the need for additional recruiting resources (if demand hits x, we need y, for z period of time). Starting with using historical productivity metrics to create a baseline. Be sure to include any efficiency gains based on investments being made in recruiting operations. 
    • Lead your team through change by keeping them positive and focused on outcomes in your control. This can be especially important when hiring is limiting growth opportunities or if you're seeking ways to smooth the peaks and valleys of headcount.

• Driving more efficiency - there’s more pressure than ever to demonstrate the team is focused on this, but productivity improvements are dependent on so many factors including things the business owns. some text
  • Actions you can take:some text
    • Use data to highlight areas that impact efficiency in your process and identify bottlenecks or time lags. Data-driven transparency around time to kickoff a role after approvals, scheduling delays, conversion rates and withdrawal reasons all can play a role in spotlighting areas of operational inefficiencies. The longer recruiters are supporting roles, the fewer roles they can fill overall. Setting up a self service dashboard is a big win for business alignment. 
    • Optimize your interview process by revisiting your interviewer philosophy and design. Intentional alignment on role requirements and what is assessed in an interview remains a critical enablement tool regardless of hiring volume.   
    • Evaluate and get creative with your technology budgets to unearth underutilized tools and find ways to restructure existing contracts. For example, does your company need LI Enterprise or could you get the same results with fewer LI Recruiter seats and rely on more flexible and much cheaper Lite licenses? If you have an ATS that hasn’t been a good fit with how your company operates, now is the time to evaluate and either optimize or make a change. Create guidelines for your team on what AI tools they can/cannot play with and challenge the team (consider making it a goal) to get in the AI lab to research, experiment, and share what they’re learning.

If your team needs a boost with fractional recruiting operations or a flexible augmented recruiting partner, or if you work for a VC firm that could use some extra Talent Partner reach, please get in touch! This is the in-house building work that we really enjoy and love seeing the positive impact it has on talent teams.