Week of May 5th, 2025
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Using LLMs for Input on How RecOps Can Drive Financial and Business Impact by Jeremy Lyons
The response last week to asking multiple LLMs for tips on how RecOps professionals could adopt a product management mindset in their work got a good response. So, this week, I decided to go back to the well and see what I could pull from them on how RecOps professionals could demonstrate they are driving financial and business impact. This started as a conversation about ways to dispute the old refrain that talent acquisition is a cost center.
According to ChatGPT
Model/Link: 4.5, Link 🔗
Connect recruiting metrics to financial performance: Demonstrate the value of Recruiting Operations by linking metrics like reduced time-to-fill and lower turnover directly to cost savings and revenue gains. Highlight how quicker hires minimize lost productivity and revenue, while improved retention reduces training and replacement costs.
Quantify hiring quality: Collaborate with Finance and HR to quantify the performance of new hires against critical business outcomes (e.g., sales quotas achieved, product innovations launched). Clearly showing these contributions positions recruiting as a strategic revenue enabler rather than simply a cost center.
Translate recruiting efficiency into business savings: Showcase the operational improvements and technology implementations you've led to drive down recruiting costs per hire and optimize spending. Frame these improvements in terms of budget reallocation opportunities that allow the company to invest more strategically elsewhere.
Forecast and budget strategically: Leverage financial planning experience to help the business anticipate hiring needs and align recruiting activities with broader business forecasts. Proactive forecasting helps the company reduce unexpected costs and efficiently scale its workforce during growth periods.
According to Perplexity
Model/Link: R1 1776, Link 🔗
Partner with Finance on ROI Models - Develop cost-avoidance analyses (e.g., reduced agency fees via internal recruiting) or revenue-lost calculations for vacant roles. Use FP&A frameworks to forecast how strategic hiring (e.g., scaling a new product team) ties to projected revenue growth.
Position Talent as a Strategic Enabler - Map hiring plans to business goals (e.g., entering new markets, launching products) to show TA’s role in executing strategy. Share success stories: “The 10 engineers hired in Q1 contributed to a 15% faster product launch, driving $2M in incremental sales.”
According Gemini
Model/Link: Flash 2.5 (experimental), No link available to be provided for 2.5 Flash but here is one for 2.5 Pro courtesy of Perplexity
Focus on Efficiency & Cost Savings: Beyond just cost-per-hire, highlight operational efficiencies. Think about reducing administrative overhead, optimizing technology spend, and improving process flows. From an FP&A perspective, these savings directly impact the bottom line.
Quantify Time-to-Productivity: Connect faster, smoother onboarding processes (facilitated by Ops) to quicker ramp-up times for new hires. Reduced time-to-productivity directly translates to earlier revenue generation or contribution to business goals, a key metric in business performance.
Leverage Data for Strategic Insights: Use operational data to forecast needs, identify bottlenecks, and measure the effectiveness of different sourcing channels or process changes. Providing data-driven insights supports strategic workforce planning and resource allocation, much like financial modeling informs business strategy.
According to Claude
Model/Link: 3.7 Sonnet, Link 🔗
Translate hiring into revenue metrics – Calculate the revenue per employee and quantify how quickly new hires reach productivity. For instance, if each engineer generates $350K in product value, filling 10 engineering roles one month faster represents $350K in captured value that would have otherwise been lost.
Quantify cost avoidance – Document how improved candidate quality and hiring processes reduce turnover costs. A 5% reduction in first-year attrition for 200 annual hires at an average replacement cost of $50K equals $500K in direct savings, not counting productivity gains.
Develop an opportunity cost framework – Create dashboards showing the financial impact of open roles by department. For critical revenue-generating positions, calculate the daily cost of vacancy (e.g., "Each day this sales position remains unfilled costs approximately $2,400 in lost revenue opportunity").
Partner with Finance – Work with FP&A to incorporate recruiting metrics into company planning models. When headcount fulfillment directly connects to business outcomes in financial projections, recruiting's strategic value becomes evident to leadership.
Implement ROI analyses – Compare talent acquisition investments against business outcomes with metrics like quality of hire, time to productivity, and hiring manager satisfaction – just as marketing teams measure campaign performance against sales results.
Final Thought:
After running it through these models, it was interesting to see where they were aligned and where they varied. One consistent theme, which caught my attention, was a dependency on bringing up quality of hire, which as we have seen lacks a universal measuring scheme and definition. Another consistent theme was increasing the partnership between TA and Finance as a way to translate TA words into general business terms.
Let me know your thoughts, though, or other suggestions you have for another combination in the comments.
Weekly Survey
RecOps - The GPT
RecOps - Available in the OpenAI store and free to use.
Articles / Industry News
📖 🎧 Articles/Graphics/Podcasts/Posts On Our Radar (sorted by type - Bolded denotes individuals)
Brandon Chu’s The First Principles of Product Management (article)
hireEZ’s Agentic AI vs. generative AI: What recruiters need to know (blog)
CodeSignal / Ashby’s Leveraging AI for a Human-Centric Hiring Process (playbook)
Screenloop’s Master the ATS Switch (playbook)
Shannon Ogborn and Bryan Power on Offer Accepted’s Discussing Simplifying Recruiting Metrics to Improve Team Performance (podcast)
Anju Laura’s Guess Which is RecOps (post)
candidate.fyi’s Offer to RCs looking for their next roles (post)
Metaview’s Fighting the rise of fake candidates (video)
📰 Product News
Ashby (AiO) - Feature update: Permission Automation by Hiring Team role
Brighthire (Interview Intelligence) - Partnership: HIGHER Community
Cronofy (Scheduling) - Feature release: Flexible Scheduling Templates for Any Hiring Workflow and April Product Updates
CultureBot (Slack App) - Product launch: CultureOS Calibration
Endorsed (Resume Review) - Feature Release: Upgraded AI Company Filters
Humanly (Conversational AI) - Raises $7m for innovation
JazzHR (ATS) - Product updates: Spring 2025
Juicebox (Sourcing/CRM) - Feature updates: Send On Behalf Of, Build Company Presets with CSV, Revamped Company Pages, Better contact data across all talent profiles, Ability to export profiles added to a sequence, Improved AI Model and reasoning on Autopilot
Poetry (Hiring Enablement) - Integration: Expanded Greenhouse integration
Permanent Articles
Recruiting Operations: Dictionary & Resources
Events
Week of May 12th
TeamOhana and Luke Eaton’s Happy Hour
25th Meetup - From Volume to Value: The New Era of Recruitment Metrics
Week of May 19th
Week of May 26th
Week of June 2nd
Talent Collective’s Talentsphere Summit. For an additional 10% off, use the code RECOPS.
Greenhouse’s Open for Ops (SF)
Growth by Design Talent’s Becoming a Trusted Advisor Training
Week of June 9th
Greenhouse’s Open for Ops (NY)
Week of June 23rd
Week of July 21st
Week of September 29th
Week of November 3rd
Job Search
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
Talent Acquisition leader with 20+ years of experience and a proven track record of building recruiting operations from the ground up while driving end-to-end talent strategies across scaling organizations. Known for blending operational rigor with strategic vision, leading cross-functional initiatives in hiring experience design, employer branding, team enablement, and systems transformation. Enabled companies like Headway, Braze, and Angi to double in size without compromising hiring quality or candidate experience.
Roles I’m Looking For
Talent Acquisition Operations Leader
TA/HR Project Manager
Recruiting Operations Lead/Sr. Associate
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.
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🎉 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.
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Until next week, Regulators 😊