Week of June 23rd, 2025
Your weekly source for RecOps articles, news, and more.
Your contributions make our community newsletter possible. Packed with valuable and, most importantly, neutral content, this newsletter includes articles, engaging images/graphics, and job openings/searchers in the RecOps space. It is a love letter by the RecOps community for the RecOps community.
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Editor Note: For the next two weeks, we are taking a small hiatus. Similar to February, we will put out issues but articles/industry news, available jobs, etc, will be missing. Regular scheduled programming will resume the week of July 14th.
The Overestimation of Curiosity
Curiosity is having a moment. You see and hear it everywhere from skill-based job descriptions to LinkedIn influence posts to podcasts. Maybe curiosity never left but it needed a Justin Timberlake-style revival and AI is providing the catchy song for it. Regardless, curiosity is a must and in TA/RecOps we have curiosity in spades. The thing is… our stakeholders don’t. Well, maybe “don’t” isn’t entirely accurate and the more accurate thing to say is “They don’t have curiosity in the same things we do.”
Here is the problem: if recruiters are TA/RecOps’ main stakeholder group (depending on who you talk to), why is that problematic? Let’s dive in.
Why aren’t Recruiters as curious as RecOps professionals?
The knee-jerk answer here is: Recruiters are totally curious! How could you get on a phone or video for hours a day and talk to candidates if they aren’t curious. To wit, the difference there is the same as the one for listening and hearing.
Let’s take the role product launch (aka intake sync, role intake, etc). Most recruiters are hearing keywords from the HM that they can use for their candidate search or words to put in the JD. The listening portion comes when the HM says “we need someone with value selling capabilities.” Value selling isn’t one particular thing but a list conglomeration of a number of different skills and you need to be curious enough to drill into what skills that means.
As system builders, RecOps professionals need to listen for all the details but when we put out information, we need to know what the Recruiters are hearing. So we say, “Hey we have this cool new tool that is going to do XYZ” and wait for questions which never come. What we don’t think about often enough is that the Recruiters heard: New Tool, New Process, I need to change’ And that is the crux.
How can we encourage people on our teams to be more curious?
The biggest mistake here is that we throw information out there expecting people to be curious but we don’t tell people what to be curious about. We don’t provide the Why. Because we don’t tell people what to be curious about, they don’t get curious. To foster a better environment that encourages curiosity, we need to start building the sandbox and then explain why people should get in.
But we know they are worried about breaking something or they are overwhelmed so they don’t have time.
This is a valid concern. To address the first part: breaking something. This is where sandbox accounts or dummy data can be your friend. This is also where free trial accounts can be your friend. If you have access to sandbox, set up accounts for your groups. If you don’t, name a very specific role in a test department to isolate it and then make a habit of removing it at the end of every week. Now to the overwhelmed piece. Much like with prompt engineering, if you ask an open-ended question, you aren’t going to get great results. Instead, provide framing like, “Hey, I know you are slammed. If you can give me just 5 minutes a day on this, it can make things better,” then the Recruiter knows that you aren’t asking for a lot and they can structure it.
Weekly Survey
RecOps - The GPT
RecOps - Available in the OpenAI store and free to use.
Call for Volunteers
RecOps pro Viet Nguyen has built a tool to help non-technical folks be able to recruit from GitHub and understand what they are seeing. He has a private beta going. Volunteer through this link.
Articles / Industry News
📖 🎧 Articles/Graphics/Podcasts/Posts On Our Radar (sorted by type - Bolded denotes individuals)
Robert de Luca’s How to Use Salary Ranges to Improve Your Job Posts (article)
Katrina Kibben’s Over-Screening on Bias: Focus On What Matters In Hiring (article)
Growth By Design Talent’s Why your hiring managers are losing top candidates (and how to fix it)
Tim Sackett’s 2025 Top Recruiting Technologies! (guide)
Happy@Work with Tatiana Koval and Craig Fisher’s Hiring Humans The RIGHT Way To Build A Top Team Now (podcast)
Elevate Your AIQ’s Ep 71: What Improv Can Teach Us About Culture, Adaptability and Human-Centricity with Joel Zeff (podcast)
Molly Sly and Johnny Campbell’s Building TA Ops as the Backbone of Hiring at Sage (video)
JobSync’s How will AI Change Recruiting Operations Replay (video)
📰 Product News
Ashby (AiO) - Product Update: AI feedback summaries on mobile
AssessFirst (Assessment) - Product Release: AI Assistant is now LIVE and available to ALL customers 🚀
Braintrust (Conversational AI) - Product Update: Now available in 10 languages. Article: FAQ
Gem (AiO) - Product Update: June 2025 Releases
Juicebox (Sourcing/CRM) - Product Release: Find Similar Profiles. Product Updates: Private Agents, Paused Sequence Filter, Improved Add-To-ATS
Lever (ATS) - Produce Release: Spring 2025. Integrations: EarnBetter, Textmetrics, and Vire (Post)
Metaview (Interview Transcription) - Announcement: Series B and the products it will help build
Reimbi (Candidate Reimbursement) - Product Update: Stronger Greenhouse integration
Permanent Articles
Recruiting Operations: Dictionary & Resources
Events
Week of June 30th
Week of July 7th
Gem’s Demo Day: See the new Gem Scheduling in Action, Recruiting real talk: The unspoken truths of 2025
Recruiting Brainfood’s Live On Air - Ep316 - Forget Filters: 1,000 AI Recruiters On-Demand
Talivity’s From Hyped to Hired: What Actually Works in AI for Talent Acquisition
Week of July 14th
SelectSoftware Reviews’ Hiring in the AI Era: How to Embrace and Evaluate the AI-Enabled Candidate
Beamery’s The Skills Intelligence Paradox: Turning Skills Data Into Strategic Workforce Impact
Week of July 21st
Week of August 4th
Recruiting Brainfood’s Ep322 - RecOps & AI - How to Accelerate AI Adoption in TA with Mark Harman, Victoria Murphy, and Stephen Collopy
Week of August 11th
Week of September 29th
Week of November 3rd
Job Search
University of Texas, Austin - Director, Recruiting Operations
Bee Talent Solutions - Talent Acquisition Operations Consultant
Here is the list of previously listed jobs, which may or may not be available.
Additional Resource
We consolidated this section into job search resources on our Linktree.
Boolean Strings for Specific ATS Job Search
We’ve consolidated our list of Boolean search strings for RecOps professionals to make them more accessible for everyone. Check out the list here. Kaitlyn Elting also built a generator for you if you are worried about your attention to detail.
Thank you to Steve Levy for contributing so many beautiful and Gabi Preston-Phypers for QA help. Follow both of them for excellent Boolean and sourcing content.
#YourNextHire / People Looking In the RecOps Community
Short Bio
I’ve spent the last 10+ years working in Recruitment Coordination and Operations roles across financial services, professional services and most recently, in a tech start-up. Over that time, I’ve developed a passion for building scalable processes, improving candidate and stakeholder experiences, and enabling teams to do their best work. Most recently, I’ve led cross-functional projects in systems optimisation, compliance, and TA data reporting. I really enjoy bringing structure and clarity to how a team operates, and I’m always looking for opportunities to keep learning and drive meaningful process improvements.
List of roles you are looking for:
Talent/Recruiting Operations Project Manager
Talent/Recruiting Operations Specialist or Lead
Are you a RecOps professional looking for work? If you have 5 minutes, take the opportunity to complete this quick questionnaire. Not only will you be featured in an upcoming Roundup, it will also help us mention your name when people ask for referrals.
Here is a Google Sheet View for a list of people who were previously featured and are still looking.
🎉 Reminders and Disclaimers 🎉
If you’d like to contribute a job, an article (one you found or wrote), or you are a company and have a product update you want featured, contact Jeremy Lyons.
Please use this form if you or someone you know would like to be featured in our #YourNextHire section. The only condition is that you are a RecOps professional.
Disclaimer #1: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and they do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the analysis do not reflect the position of any entity other than the author. As critically thinking professionals, these views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time. They are not to be held in perpetuity.
Disclaimer #2: We are sponsor-free. No company below has paid us to advertise their products or share their open jobs. If that changes, we will deliberately call out where we stand to benefit. Additionally, sharing these opportunities and information should not be read as support for these companies or their practices. Regarding jobs, we share these opportunities with the community and only post roles from the company's website. We encourage possible candidates to research each one, as their inclusion does not mean we support the companies or their values.
Until next week, Regulators 😊