Unsung Heroes of the Recruitment Operations Process

Take a step back and think about the entire recruitment process, for just a second – there are a lot of people involved in the battle to bring in the best talent.

From the time a job is posted to the agency fee getting paid, there is a lot that happens. On the front lines, you’ve got corporate recruiters, hiring managers, and agencies. Most of our blog posts relate to what they go through, because they seem to be who the world sees.

There is another key aspect in the war to bring in the best talent that everyone knows and few blog about: Recruitment Operations. They go by many names: Recruitment Ops, Operations Specialists, Procurement, and more. Today, we tip our hats to these unsung heroes; diligently working away to make the front line efforts of corporate recruiters, hiring managers, and agencies run as smoothly as possible.

Recruitment Ops Make It All Happen

This is not easy. Operations is entirely dedicated to making it all happen efficiently, smoothly, and…according to policy. That last one is a doozy, and often gives them a bad reputation.

Everyone seems to have something to complain about. Recruiters complain about how long it takes “procurement” to approve and on-board a new vendor, hiring managers complain about having to follow company standard T’s and C’s, and headhunters have a whole list of complaints: slow APS appeals of candidates, slow contract approvals, and slow payment.

Well, everyone else can be haters if they want to; at BountyJobs, we love you! We embrace recruitment operations, because we know that they are really the grease that makes the wheel turn. Cheers to all that you do; and here’s our top three reasons we applaud you.

3 Reasons to Applaud Recruitment Operations

1. You maintain the preferred vendor list. A typical enterprise has built up a centralized list of 100 or more “approved” recruiting agencies, all which recruitment operations is expected to maintain. Many times, and perhaps archaically, these lists are kept on nothing more than a spreadsheet. No real objective metrics can be stored, so there are constant questions about quality, performance, and whether or not the company is still even using a certain recruiting agency.

   We recently on-boarded a nationwide hospital system made up of several independent hospitals; each with their own list of hundreds of preferred agencies. Sound like a nightmare? Well who maintained it? Operations of course. Cheers for handling the nightmare no one else saw, and we’re glad we could give you a way to make it better.

2. You renew ALL of those contracts. The only thing worse than maintaining the “approved list” of hundreds of preferred vendors? Renewing, negotiating, standardizing, and updating the contracts for all of those vendors. Every. Single. Contract. Each has different guaranteed periods. Each agency has its own hiring manager champion to argue why they need special treatment.

   Each agency works like mad to go around you to plead their case for special terms. Most of the recruiting departments we work with used to build extra hours into every week just to update contracts. One operations specialist came to us in a panic 4 years ago because she had made it a practice to spend an entire month updating over 200 contracts. True story.

3. You get ALL the heat. Despite putting up with all of the above, recruitment operations gets yelled at. A lot. Recruiters bark because vendor lists always seem obsolete. They yell because they always want to on-board new niche agencies to get specialized jobs filled.

   According to everyone, the approval and on-boarding process can’t happen fast enough. Yep, that is more yelling from all fronts. Being seen as the gatekeeper is the worst.

Recruitment ops may not be the front line in the fight for the best talent, but they sure are an imperative piece, and at BountyJobs we love you and feel your pain.

The bad news is that ops has to face all of these problems before BountyJobs, but the good news is that we make those problems go away so recruiting operations can spend time on things they love, like finding new ways to streamline and improve recruiting for their recruiters. Let us know how we can help spread the love.

Like, share and tell us in the comments.

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