Why RecOps is Crucial for Modern Recruiting Success with Jeremy Lyons

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
2025 is going to be the best year that you've ever had, and we're going to help make that happen. We got two summits heading your way. First of all, in January, the Sales and Business Development Recruiting Summit. Make sure to get registered free for the live sessions or go VIP for the replays. And then the Recruiting Growth Summit is coming back for March. These events are going to help you start strong, run strong, so that way you can finish strong. So let's go. Make sure you get registered.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:25]:
You'll see the link in the show notes. All right, enjoy the podcast. Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast, I remember the first.

Jeremy Lyons [00:00:32]:
Time I was laid off. The first time I got laid off, I got laid off twice in one year. Rock Ops is a lot like watching Olympic gymnastics. We all watch it during the Olympics. We go, wow, that looks easy. Or, wow, that person really sucked today without thinking about, okay, that actually took a lot of skill and a lot of expertise to do. Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:15]:
I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast because I remember when I first started my recruiting career, the only thing I looked at was being an internal recruiter, staying agency recruiter, or growing to become an account manager, or one day starting my own recruiting firm. You know, I've done the internal, never was the account manager. Now I have my own business. But here's the thing. There are so many avenues and places that you can take your career if you know where to go and how to do it. Within the recruiting world, if you're passionate about the recruiting space, there are so many things that you can do. And I am so excited to have Jeremy Lyons with me today to talk about taking your career and moving over into the recruiting operations side of the house and having success there. So welcome to the podcast.

Jeremy Lyons [00:01:59]:
Thank you so much, Benjamin. Looking forward to talking to you about, you know, all things recruiting operations.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:05]:
Okay, so real quick, before we do a deep dive in your background, what the hell is recruiting operations?

Jeremy Lyons [00:02:10]:
You know, that's the funniest question. And I think that if you'd asked people five years ago, you would have gotten a whole bunch of different answers. But I think right now, what you're hearing more and more in this space, which is really great to hear, is recruiting operations is essentially, how do you make your recruiting team more efficient with less Resources and your recruiting operations teams, the side of the, of the house that's going to cover essentially like four major pillars. Five major pillars, depending on who you talk to. But an operations pillar, your data analytics, your programs and initiatives, your strategy. And then if you're a big enough place, maybe employer branding. But all of those things are really ecosystem driven. So it's not like you can say you're only doing one and not doing the other because all of those points are going to come connected at one point.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:01]:
Okay, so like your background, your story, how did you get into recruiting? How do you end up in re ops? Let's dive in.

Jeremy Lyons [00:03:08]:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think one of the more funny elements of my story is I'm second generation in recruiting. My mother was an executive recruiter for 30 plus years and my dad was a unit production manager in television. And at the dinner table, as we all did as kids, we'd say to our parents, you know, what do you love about your job? And my mother would give me her side of the list and my dad would give me his side and they said, what do you not like about your job? And my mom would give me her side of the list and my dad would give me his side of the list. And as I moved back post college, I worked in Japan, I came back, had an athlete moment, like, cool. I did the thing I really wanted to do. What do I do next? And I got into basically recruiting operations after about a year or so, trying new things because I started out as an RC and I fell in love with the story behind anything. And that is usually if you're a unit production manager in television, you're the person who has to know all the local laws, has to hire everybody. The studio shows up with a script, hands it to you, says, here's a pot of money, here's the script.

Jeremy Lyons [00:04:16]:
We need the first episode being shot, you know, in the next eight weeks and into production so we can put it out there for that pilot episode if we want to keep doing this. And that was sort of what I saw on the recruiting side where I'm like, hey, there's all these different other pieces that go into this beyond just talking to candidates. I really love them. And that was when we were starting to see all these new recruiting tools pop up and people kind of going, I don't really know how to use this thing to connect this thing to that thing or process for this or data for that. And I was like, I love all of that stuff, let's do more of it. And that's kind of how I got on that recruiting operations training.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:52]:
Okay, so like, you just, you know, you grew up in the recruiting space because your mom was a recruiter, but you kind of like, did you not want to just be a recruiter?

Jeremy Lyons [00:05:03]:
So growing up, the thing that I was told was, you're going to have to cold call candidates and cold call people. And I had an internship with a professional basketball team in the inside sales thing. And I did everything I could to avoid calling people that I didn't know. I just felt like I couldn't sell somebody on stuff. Now with how recruiting has changed and the technology for how it's changed, recruiting is less like, hey, let me just pure cold call somebody. You're going to send them a message usually first now. So it doesn't have that sort of like, oh, my God, I'm nervous on the phone element anymore in some spaces. I'm not saying that in all spaces because I know that medical recruiting, that's constantly calling people, that's constantly sending text messages and things like that.

Jeremy Lyons [00:05:50]:
But now so much, especially on the tech side, it's people automatically applying. And so there's already that indicator of interest. You could already pick up the phone and call them and be like, hi, you know, saw you were interested. Let's have a conversation. So it's, it's changed. If I had known it was going to change into that, I may have thought like, hey, I, you know, I want to go on the pure recruiting side. And I have pure recruited in the past because I think having that experience helps them form the recruiting operations thing. Because when you go and you make a change on the recruiting op side, if you move a button and the recruiters are like, I need the button there because that's my record button.

Jeremy Lyons [00:06:28]:
And now you've moved it to the other thing and I'm constantly hitting something else. You have to know that and you learn some of that from doing some of that.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:36]:
I do want to talk about, like, how people can get into it later on, but I also want to kind of figure out because I think the recruiting world is evolving so fast with artificial intelligence and so many different tools and so many things, and we're seeing a huge flux of many parts of the recruiting process can now almost be automated. Now when you're looking at it like a re ops person, internal, and then also agency side of the house, like, how big do you think a team needs to be to actually hire a person focused on pure operations and not just a recruiting manager, you know, I.

Jeremy Lyons [00:07:09]:
Think that that's a great question. And my answer to that question is this. No matter the tools that are being built, the speed at which they are being built, there always will need to be at least a little bit of a human element in there because you're going to need something to qa. And so are we going to see AI tools that qa, the other AI tool to help make sure that you get the indicator? I don't know if we're there yet, doesn't mean it's not going to be there in the future. But I think one of the things that for me when I look at both of those things is a what's the size of your company? Because if you're a small, small, like you're at your seed stage and you're trying to go as fast as you can, say find product, market fit, and there are all these tools that are going to help you get there and those are all AI and you know, precise words and I mean that very literally, precise words on explaining things because it's not going to necessarily understand the language between the lines. Then you will still need people in different things. I think as the company gets bigger, you need re ops people, you need process people because those people are going to ensure the sort of like the maintenance side. Just because you can work on your own car doesn't mean that you can or you should.

Jeremy Lyons [00:08:24]:
There still needs to be a technician that you're going to take it to who's like this is the person who specializes in that thing. And I think that that's where RACOPS people are still going to be there because we're there to help optimize, we're there to help you think through your process. We're there to get you as precise as possible and we'll work with the tools so that you don't necessarily have to.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:43]:
And like on the agency side of the house, you know, how big does a company need to be where that investment into a reops person can make sense to skyrocket the business?

Jeremy Lyons [00:08:54]:
Well, I think that you've mentioned this in other podcast episodes too and you and I have talked about this, you know, on the side as well. I mean, I think once you get more than 10 people at your agency, you're probably in need of somebody there to just sort of make sure that everybody is staying aligned on training, making sure that everybody is aligned on business outcomes. Everybody has the right data so that they're focused on income generating activities as opposed to the admin side work. So I think once you're starting to creep up in size, you're probably better to get an operations person to be there to function in a lot of the behind the scenes work. And not to mention too, by adding an operations person to your team, you can offer more value to your clients because let's say as you're talking with them, they drop a hit. Like, you know what, my ATS is just not doing the thing that I need to do or, oh, you know what, Hey, I got to cut this meeting short because we need to build a new dashboard and it's going to take me this amount of time. You now have somebody on your team who can come in and say, well, actually, you know what, if you need somebody, you want to free up time for you, we got somebody who can come over here and help you. And that gives you another avenue for revenue, also gives you another way to talk to tool vendors and things like that and build relationships with those and expand your agency beyond just the like, hey, I like to recruit, let me go and just talk to candidates.

Jeremy Lyons [00:10:24]:
It's now giving you more income streams.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:27]:
I love that. It's one of the things I've seen in like a lot of conversations where, you know, if the agency model where it's the recruiter, account manager, owner always gets stuck at a certain number.

Jeremy Lyons [00:10:38]:
Yep. Well, would you say that that number.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:42]:
Is, I would say 6 to probably 12 is like the magic number where it's getting stuck and the owner just doesn't have enough time to, you know, focus on being the big biller, bringing in most of the business, but also trying to implement and train and everything that you're talking about doing.

Jeremy Lyons [00:10:57]:
One of the other things too that AI might also help owners do is you'll drop in all of your training docs and the AI will actually in turn monitor your recruiters and make sure that they have the trainings that they need and more readily available than just like a hey, here's confluence page or here's a notions page that we built out where you can go and you can find this. You now are building an internal resource that sort of helps aid them.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:24]:
Okay, so go back to the pillars of reops. Can you share those one more time?

Jeremy Lyons [00:11:29]:
Yeah. So we have operations pillar. Your operations pillar is usually covering things like your coordination, change management, tooling. It's literally, how are you making this machine run? Then you have a data analytics pillar, which is, all right, let's go back, let's look at all the data, let's get the insights. How are we doing with different elements.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:51]:
Stare at the data thing for a second. I'm going to talk data because like, here's the thing, like everybody says, data, data, data, data, data, data. I remember when I was the internal recruiter, like data, data, data, data, data. And I feel like nobody actually did anything with data. Like how can like a REOPS person come in and like make the data work or make the data make sense?

Jeremy Lyons [00:12:08]:
Yeah, I think the way that records people come in and they make the data work and they help to make the data make sense is actually by figure out what story they're trying to tell with the data first before you even start looking for it. I think one of the biggest questions in my circles and usually when people are talking about data, especially because on the rack ops side of the fence, the more you move up in rock ops, it's more about the data and the reporting and being able to tell that story for leadership. And it's less about the like, hey, let me go and get an interview schedule. So you moved. That's how one of the strategic elements of it is how do you use the data, how do you talk about the data? But I think that one of the key things that I've seen in the evolution of RAC ops, especially in the last five years has been instead of having recruiting, recruiting managers will come to us and say, well, we need to know what our time in funnel is or what is it looking like? Where are we getting stuck in the bottlenecks? And people just used to look at it and go, oh, well, we're getting stuck at on site. It must be the recruiter's fault. And now more sophisticated tools are there to say, well, actually we've had to reschedule a number of these interviews because certain X interviewer has dropped out every single time. So this isn't on the recruiting thing.

Jeremy Lyons [00:13:26]:
We're now talking about an inefficiency in supply line that's causing a problem on the conveyor belt and we need to figure out how we're going to fix that. And that goes back to the business, which makes recruiting again, be more of a strategic business partner to sort of say, are you really using this data or do you just want to make sure that like you're kind of just checking in on our actions and activity is very different to be measured than all other things because activities are just one small piece and that does not equate necessarily to great outcomes.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:58]:
When you're looking at the data, what are some of the biggest like data points that a reops person can look at and share. That's actually helping the business grow. And then secondly, what's the data that they're running into that actually helps the recruiters be more efficient?

Jeremy Lyons [00:14:14]:
This is actually up for a really big debate in our space, which is really kind of fun to see happen. On one side of the fence, there are the more traditional metrics that people in recruiting know of and talk about. That's your time to fill, time to hire, offer acceptance rates, a number of interviews to offers those kinds of very traditional metrics. And those traditional metrics are I think very easy for people outside of recruiting to understand because they're very similar to sales metrics. But the problem with that is that in most scenarios sales metrics, you want to see more people at the end of the funnel, you want more people buying your product. And the problem with recruiting is if you have that many people at the end, you don't have infinite job to sell. You have one or two. Or maybe if you're a bigger company and you're opening like if you're manufacturing, if you're in restaurants or things like that, you have a need to hire a hundred people.

Jeremy Lyons [00:15:19]:
But that has been an older, older metric. Now we're actually starting to talk like the more modern recruiting metrics that we're looking at are things like inefficiencies. Things like, I mean again I'll, I'll go back to that. Inefficiencies. There are a couple of companies that are kind of leading the charge that have started to talk about more about like, well, what are modern recruiting metrics? And one of those is Ashby and Benji at Ashby has consistently talked about, you know, what do those modern recruiting metrics look like? You know, it's looking at things that are specific so you know what you're looking for. You're looking at things that are done in real time. So you're not looking at like aggregate data and you're looking at like goal oriented data. So how are we tracking towards those goals that we're really looking at and trying to hit? So on their side they're advocating for things like looking at candidate experience, interview hours, per hire, pipeline diversity, activities by stage, candidate pass through rates, progress of hiring plans.

Jeremy Lyons [00:16:24]:
So it's things that are a little bit different that all sort of also can contribute to things like quality of hire. Now quality of hire is a big topic in the space. I will still say this thoroughly. I do not believe that we have arrived yet at the ability to do quality of hire. I also don't believe that quality of hire solely rests on recruiting. It is a team aggregated metric. And I still think for at least for the moment, a lot of people who are talking about quality of hire, it's a vanity metric. It's like going to the gym and doing bicep curls.

Jeremy Lyons [00:16:58]:
Like what are you going to do with that? You're going to come out and say like look, we hire great. Okay? Like it doesn't tell me much.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:08]:
I remember like years ago dealing with a manager. I think it was a HR manager that was really quality, quality of hire. And I was just like, I hated it with a passion. Cuz one of the teams I was recruiting on, the leader was.

Jeremy Lyons [00:17:22]:
Like, I.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:23]:
Can'T help that he like burns people out. Like, like I bring good people. It's not my problem that the they're. The other one was like, it was, you know, in a war zone. I'm like, I get it, people want to leave a war zone. Like I can walk through everything that they're going to be involved in but when, you know, bombs are going off around their bed, I understand why they want to leave.

Jeremy Lyons [00:17:40]:
I've made the joke all the time, which is like, you know, quality of hire or blame. Recruiting for quality of hire is sort of like handing a teenager a Ferrari and then getting mad at them when they get a speeding ticket. Like what did you think was going to happen? And like, and that's sort of the same, same sort of idea too. It's like you could find a brilliant candidate if the hiring manager or the pro or the system or the company drives them into the ground. It wasn't that they were a bad candidate. There are other systemic problems that need to be solved. And that's not on recruiting to solve them because recruiting is not in those meetings to say to I'd say a hiring manager or the business. You know what, you're driving people into the ground and you need to listen to me because we've now hired the same position six times and each person has lasted six months.

Jeremy Lyons [00:18:30]:
Like why is that the trends now how do we fix that problem?

Benjamin Mena [00:18:34]:
There's another data point. Okay, so like we've talked about data being one of the pillars. What's the next pillar?

Jeremy Lyons [00:18:39]:
Programs and initiatives.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:41]:
Okay, so like you know, a reops person. How do you like, you know, tell those stories and get those initiatives moving?

Jeremy Lyons [00:18:48]:
Well, I think it's one of those things. We're recruiting operations folks where there is a heavy, heavy skill set. Investment in project management and now kind of Rack Ops 2025, talking about trends. And this has been talked about now. And it's going to kind of go forward because a lot of people are getting behind it is thinking about reops people as essentially your product managers or your recruiting team. Recruiting is our product. And so when that is a big mindset and that is how people are thinking about it. Rekov seems since their inception, which you could say was 15 years ago or 10 years ago, however you want to cut it, it's one of the newer ops functions.

Jeremy Lyons [00:19:39]:
We've had to use those skills brought over from other places to make recruiting teams think more strategically and build more strategically and then programmatically, usually it's things covering your referral programs, your internal mobility programs. Depending on the size of your company, it might be even covering early careers and your intern programs. So there's a wide breadth of things that you're touching on. And then to call something an initiative is, you know, let's just give it a big fancy word. But, you know, there are strategic things that companies want done and programatize them or you productize them.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:20]:
I love the thought process of looking at that as like either project management or a product management. You know, it's definitely a different train of thought that many people outside of the recruiting space don't have. Okay, what's the next pillar strategy? Let's dive in here. Like, what is it? Where do you take this? Like, we get the numbers, we get the jobs, we look at this, we get what's given to us as recruiters half the time. How do you make that move into like that strategy side of the house as reops?

Jeremy Lyons [00:20:46]:
You know, that I think is one of the hardest pieces in all of this because recruiting operations still is fighting off this stigma that we are coordinators and coordinator plus. And that just is because people still are learning that, hey, your recruiting coordinators can actually bridge into a number of different pathways. They could become your next sourcers, they can become your next recruiters, and they can become your operations people. And actually they can go off into other areas of the business, FP&A comp, other spaces, and actually give people a better impression on recruiting because they understand these pieces that are at play. And I think that that is, you know, you talked about AI earlier. You know, people are saying, well, why do I need a recruiting coordinator if I have AI that can do a scheduling tool? And I think that if you ultimately completely eliminate this position, you're going to make recruiting worse because there's nobody, then it's going to then get their Archival knowledge. And you're going to have the blind leading the blind on, on recruiting and continue to give recruiting a bad name, which it should not have. Recruiters can do so much more than just go find people.

Jeremy Lyons [00:21:58]:
We have other skills, we are in the business of people and so forth. Thinking about that strategy piece goes back to kind of what I mentioned before, which is the way you're going to move up is you're going to understand your data, you're going to understand the operational pieces for that. And so now when a company comes to you and they say to you, hey look, we need to build X thing and we need to roll out X thing with this number of peoples you get to sit there and go okay, strategically let's start, let's look at this capacity plan, let's look at all of these pieces that are now all coming together and you can create that synthetic story that comes together very neatly and people go okay, great. You think about the business like we think about the business and that opens the door. Now you can do that at a small, smaller level in re offs at any stage in the game. You just don't want to necessarily over engineer it because then people are going to kind of go look, you are at this stage, if you are trying to do things like this, you might not have the complete picture. And now you've made up a whole bunch of things to try and make yourself feel self important.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:10]:
Well and okay, a lot of the stuff that you've covered, like the people in the rec op space, have they ever had to deal with a political power struggle with HR on trying to get this stuff done 100%. How do you deal with like that power struggle of politics?

Jeremy Lyons [00:23:24]:
I mean that's the, I guess that's the million dollar question for a lot of people because and we see this all the time when companies are going through layoffs. The rec ops team doesn't necessarily inherit a people operations team underneath that. Usually the people operations team basically says cool, we're going to take the wreck off side and we're going to do your job now. And the problem with that is the rack op side you think very differently about how people are entering your system versus the people op side is thinking about how are we getting them to basically stay or process everything in our hris very different questions that are being asked and trying to solve for. So when it comes to that power struggle, one of the things that is very, I think unique to recruiting operations is that we are constantly talking to every department. If we are not the Ones who are in control of our employer branding. We're probably talking to marketing every other week or whenever we're going to go and we're going to make a change to a job descriptions verbiage. We're talking to marketing and we're talking to legal.

Jeremy Lyons [00:24:31]:
We're trying to develop a brand voice so that when we use our prompts, that's like marketing. What's our brand voice? What do we need to be having? We're getting that information from marketing. So Marketing knows us, FP&A and comp teams know us because we got to put in the information in some way, shape or form and they want to know about our opinions on things. Legal knows who we are, the business knows who we are. And so you have. It becomes that Game of Thrones thing where you have to know who the power players are in each organization. But once you know who those power players are, most people generally are happy with hiring people. You're the fun people.

Jeremy Lyons [00:25:13]:
And so when it comes to that HR battle, ultimately we haven't won a ton in the past, but I'm going to see, I think that it's changing now. And I think operations roles are also changing now, especially aided by, you know, AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:29]:
I had to ask because I feel like, you know, that's, I've seen over the years that my time internally, like almost like an HR manager or the recruiting manager was kind of handling some of this operational stuff and then HR would come in and like, no, no, no, that's all us. You know, it's just like the power struggle that I never wanted to be part of.

Jeremy Lyons [00:25:46]:
Yeah. And I think that in some organizations, especially older organizations that are adapting and going through digital transformations and strategic transformations and especially with how the market has been in the last couple of years, people are trying to add new skills and that is fine, great, add the new skills. But you can't necessarily throw everybody into the fire and just all of a sudden think that they're going to be able to do things the same way. We see it all the time when layoffs happen. Even internally where it's like, hey, cool, well we're going to lay off all of the recruiting operations team because we have a very process driven recruiter who can do all the things that they do. And what people don't see is that person is really good at covering their funnel. And when now you're asking them to do it for everybody on the team, things change. And the rack ops team is there to sort of not police, but the RAC ops team is there to sort of say, like, look, you made one exception one time, and now all of the data that are showing aphas is you're making this exception every time.

Jeremy Lyons [00:26:55]:
When do we need to actually quit making this as an exception and make this process?

Benjamin Mena [00:27:00]:
What's one of the biggest mistakes that reops people do?

Jeremy Lyons [00:27:03]:
I love that question. And I think that there are a number of people who will give different answers to it in my space. I think the biggest mistake that a lot of people in ruckops make is we think that giving our teams the data and giving our teams the process will explain the full story. And instead of explaining the why, and not every time do you need to go in and be like, hey, Benjamin, you know, I built this dashboard for you and I designed it with these things in mind. And why did that was this. And here's a book report. No one's going to read your book report. And I think that one of the things that we do out of that is we make our job look really.

Jeremy Lyons [00:27:52]:
I've made this analogy before. Ruck ops is a lot like watching Olympic gymnastics. We all watch it during the Olympics. We go, wow, that looks easy, or, wow, that person really sucked today without thinking about, okay, that actually took a lot of skill and a lot of expertise to do do. And that's the same problem that recruiting operations has, is that as gymnasts, we're doing all the apparatuses on our recruiting team, and some of us actually even still do recruit or resourcing or we're doing other elements is that we make it look so easy. It's actually really, really hard. We're essentially the Ginger Rogers of the recruiting team. We got to do everything that Red Astaire is doing backwards and in heels.

Jeremy Lyons [00:28:44]:
I'm not even sure people will get that reference anymore.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:47]:
Before we jump over to the quickfire questions, is there anything else that you want to share about recruiting operations and reops?

Jeremy Lyons [00:28:53]:
Yeah, I think we're at a really interesting, pivotal time in our development right now. I think one of the things that we're going to start to see is reops people into TA leadership positions. Because you been so close to the data and you've been so close to the strategic side of it that you can now transition into a leadership position on ta. And I would not be surprised to see in the next 10 years, rack up people who are chief people officers or VPs on a people team that started out in recruiting and got to that level or even a split, or you have a chief talent officer and what do those recruiting operations folks do? Because ultimately that's an area that we can go.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:40]:
I love it. Well, jumping over the quickfire questions and this is like, don't have to be quick answers, especially this first one. But how can somebody go from sitting in the recruiting chair, they're listening to this as a recruiter and like, hey, you know what? I've always loved the operational side of the house. How can I actually become a recOps person?

Jeremy Lyons [00:29:57]:
So there's reOps, the skill set, and there's reOps, the mindset and the rac ops, the mindset piece. You have to be thinking about system design and like human centered design and first principles. Because one, if you want to start making that transition, start looking at your funnel, your place, your process, and try to think, if I had to add 10 people, 15 people, 20 people to this at once, could I do it? And if so, what is the waste in my process right now that I could eliminate? And then you start eliminating those things or you start automating those things. That would be how I would start to think about if, like, hey, look, I'm trying to get onto the other side of the fence is thinking about my process and process orientation like that. Another way could be start investing a ton of time into learning the tools and learning the space. Because if you understand the tools and how the tools can inform your process or what you need to do to change the process in the the tools that will make you infinitely more valuable. And that is a lot of what we do in the recruiting operations side is the change management and the enablement and all those pieces. And then finally, it's under taking time to really understand what does the data mean? What do these stories show you? Because ultimately, again, a metric is just a number until you have provided a story and meaning to it.

Jeremy Lyons [00:31:24]:
So start learning how to tell data stories.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:28]:
And how does somebody have that conversation about like wanting to get into reops? Do they have it at the company that they're working at, or do they have to go create a new opportunity somewhere else?

Jeremy Lyons [00:31:39]:
What I've seen actually in the last five years is a lot of teams kind of going, hey, we need a recruiting operations person. But we don't know. We don't want to go out and grab somebody. So we're going to grab somebody internally who's expressed interest on this side. So I think it's having an open conversation with your managers. If you're at an agency or outside of, you know, a company. I think it's in taking the time to really Put more skill points into the business side of things and the operational side of things and then reach out to people in the communities. There's a number of resources out there and people who will talk to you about what does it take to be in recruiting operations.

Jeremy Lyons [00:32:22]:
Like you're Luke Eaton or Luke Eaton. He's great. He will take time to sit down with people. I will take time to sit down with people. I think people still kind of have this like magnets and magic aspect to the reops space. There's a lot of work that you can already be doing in your process. And some people go, you know what? I love that. I heard that.

Jeremy Lyons [00:32:41]:
I'm going to go off and do it. Some people go, you know what? I heard it. It wasn't what I thought it was. I don't really love it. I'm not going to do it. And we go, great, you know what? But now you know, you have the information.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:54]:
I love that. Now talking about like, you know, tools and stuff like that and implementations and fun and stuff like that. Do you have a favorite rec tech tool since you get to try so many?

Jeremy Lyons [00:33:05]:
A rec tech tool, I was going to say, actually my favorite rec tech tool is a piece of paper and a pen, which, you know, I might get heat for that. But I think if you can write your idea down and be able to articulate your idea and think of all of the different gaps and the blind spots, I actually think that that is more impressive than any tool that is out there. Because if you're going to be able to articulate in language your idea and the direction, then any AI tool that works on prompt engineering, you're going to be light years ahead of things like that. But there are also tools that cover different things. I mean, so I can't just say just one. I can certainly say ones that are my like watch list for 2025 that I've been very excited about. Yeah, say those. Say those.

Jeremy Lyons [00:33:58]:
Okay, ones that I'm excited about. Talent, llama, brain trust candidate, FYI, Atlas. You know, those are just kind of a couple that are on my list. You know, we'll see where those ones go.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:12]:
It's fun to like watch all the stuff coming at you. All these crazy tools.

Jeremy Lyons [00:34:16]:
Yeah, no, I mean and that's the thing too is like a lot of. I think a lot of people in recruiting operations think that we have to build our tools like recruiting operation. If you thought recruiting departments gay or companies gave recruiting a lot of budget recruiting then gives back ops pretty small, small things. So we have to learn how to build a lot of the things that we use. I remember building interview request queues with Google sheets and Google Slides and Google Forms and all of that. I can build things like that because somebody went, we need this. And I went, cool. Well, here's this tool that can do this.

Jeremy Lyons [00:34:53]:
And they go, we're not giving you budget for that tool. And so go figure it out yourself. And you're like, great, cool. Like love being MacGyver. And that's something that you kind of have to love in our space.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:03]:
Do you have a favorite book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Jeremy Lyons [00:35:07]:
So I was thinking about this the other day because somebody else asked me that and there are two that stick out to me. Or two, maybe three. One is starts with why by Simon Sinak. Because especially in our space, we have to understand why we're doing the thing we're doing and where's the constellation that we're trying to head to. And then Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely because there's one thing that humans can be, it is predictably irrational. You can show up with all of the facts and people are still going to not believe you. So I think behavioral, anything behavioral, econ wise, which was, I got my minor in econ, Anything behavioral, econ wise, that shows up, you're like, yep, that does it. And then this one would probably be just really out of left field, which would be the Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:57]:
That's a good one.

Jeremy Lyons [00:35:58]:
Yep. Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:59]:
So you've kind of like been crafting your own journey in the reops space.

Jeremy Lyons [00:36:06]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:07]:
Like having to learn things yourself, having to like, almost like, you know, cut the path yourself. What do you think has been a huge contribution to your success in the Reops world?

Jeremy Lyons [00:36:19]:
You know, I. That is a fantastic question. I still don't view myself as successful and I think that that is a huge motivator for me. But I also, if I were to say I'm successful, I measure it in learning and trying not to make the same mistake twice. And that has been something that in my career, you know, I've made mistakes and owning those mistakes, but understanding how did I get to those mistakes? What were the conversations? What did I miss? Because I then can tell people in their careers how to be successful because maybe I missed the boat on the right thing at the right time, but they will see something in their journey that will help them. So I've again, don't view myself as successful, but I think that other people might tell you differently. Which I think is cool and interesting to think about.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:19]:
Well, I mean, going back to that journey of, like, you know, getting to where you've gotten in the rec op space, you've probably had some, like, hard weeks, hard months, like, hard times.

Jeremy Lyons [00:37:28]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:28]:
Because, like, when you're crafting your own journey, like, there are parts of this journey that fucking suck. How do you get through those moments?

Jeremy Lyons [00:37:36]:
You know, I get through those moments by knowing that this is temporary and I know that none of this is going to kill me. And because I've been through those situations, it's like I've. I remember the first time I was laid off, the first time I got laid off, I got laid off twice in one year. And that's happened essentially two times in my career where I've gone through two departures in the same year. And so for me, it's getting through those hard times. It's looking at it and going, okay, this sucks. What can I do outside of this work stuff that will make me feel better? What does my support network look like? What does my executive team on my professional career look like? And I've been very, very lucky to have really wonderful people on both of those sides who are people that will go, yeah, I'll pick up the phone, or I'll just sit with you in silence. And sometimes that's all you need is just somebody who's going to sit there and sit there with you and go, yeah, this sucks.

Jeremy Lyons [00:38:42]:
But you know what? You're stronger than this. You've seen this before. Or this is how I've gotten through that. And I think to, like, my conversations with Shannon Ogborn, Brandon, Jeff, Stephanie Basinger, like Luke Eaton. Like, these are people who I've met professionally, have become very close personal friends with, and they've gotten me through hard times, or they've taught me something about myself. And I think that that is really an important thing is how do you keep learning? How do you keep developing? Because not everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows. Quote Tom Petty, some days are diamonds and some days are rocks. So, you know, sometimes you just have to kick those rocks and see through to the.

Jeremy Lyons [00:39:19]:
To the good parts.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:20]:
You just mentioned an incredible list of people that have, like, kind of given you advice and helped you throughout the time period. But how about this? Take a step back to the very beginning of your reops journey. Like, with everything you know now, the people you've spoken with, the companies you've helped implement this for, if you can go back and give yourself some advice, what would you tell yourself, say what.

Jeremy Lyons [00:39:40]:
You want out loud.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:42]:
What do you mean by that?

Jeremy Lyons [00:39:44]:
So when I started out my reops career, and even now, people will ask me, what do you want? And at first, when I first heard that question, I would give something of an ambiguous answer that I thought was actually specific. I'd say, like, well, I really like what I'm doing right now, so I want to do more of it. Which wasn't telling people, where do I want to go in my career. And one of the things that a lot of people have said to me who've worked with me, who go, you have all of these talents, all of these skills. What do you want to do with them? And the thing for me has always been, well, I'm not sure what the future looks like. So I really like what I'm doing right now because I'm still learning, I'm still developing on. I'll come back to you. But the people who are going to get ahead are the people who, who say, I want to be a manager.

Jeremy Lyons [00:40:41]:
Because the minute that somebody asks them the question of what do you want? And early in my career, I didn't say this was, if you can't tell people what you want like those people can, they don't know how to help you. And if people don't know how to help you, you are now going to be a tool in their toolbox for how they can use you, for them to get ahead, not necessarily for how you are going to get ahead, and they are going to help you get ahead. And I would have told myself earlier, like when people ask that, what do you want? I would have said, I want to be this, I want to be that. I want to have these opportunities. And I just simply didn't know that yet. I think the other thing that I might tell myself very early on in my career going back even further is, hey, there are all these really cool jobs that are out there. Things like sales engineering, being an implementation specialist, doing all these things that are really cool jobs. If you take more time to invest in the technical side, it's not as big and scary as you think it is.

Jeremy Lyons [00:41:45]:
Get to the revenue side some way, shape or form. Don't necessarily think that you always have to just stay on the recruiting side of the fence.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:53]:
Awesome. Now, you know, looking kind of back at, you know, the reops space and the community that's been growing, is there stuff that, like, you wish more reops people would say but really aren't talking about?

Jeremy Lyons [00:42:06]:
I think I wish that people in my space would talk about their journeys for how they got here. I think we all. We try to play coy about it, but there's a lot of struggle that a lot of us have, like, gone through to get to the positions that we've gotten through. And I think that we tend to try to make it look really rosy for people. But ultimately, I would just love for everybody to share their story about how they got to where they got to, because I think there's a lot of learnings in that that other people will pick up from and can relate to. And I think that that's sort of something of the quiet part out loud, because there are also very tough things on the recruiting operations side that we get asked to do that might not always, you know, fly under the, like, this is something you want to talk about out loud. And so I think taking those situations out of those quiet circles and talking about them would actually be really, really good.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:00]:
And, you know, looking at a recruiter that has questions about re ops and this and that whole space. Yeah, you know, I'm sure you get probably asked, like, a ton of questions, like, is there a question that you wish a recruiter would actually ask you?

Jeremy Lyons [00:43:14]:
Yeah, I'll take it from the interviewing lens. I think it's the question that they should have asked instead of inferring an answer. It is really hard to interview a recruiting operations person because you really have to be tight on what you're focusing that not only is this person going to do now, but what this person is going to do later. And so a lot of people hire for the now and then think that the person that they're hiring for can't do the thing later, but they didn't ask that question. So there have been meetings and things where I've interviewed and then I've gotten feedback, and it's like, well, we didn't see you talk about data or talk about the strategic side. And I go, you didn't ask that question. So if you don't ask the question and now you're trying to infer the answer, hit recruiting. The ops people back up on the other side and say, hey, look, you know, I'm sorry, I didn't ask you this question.

Jeremy Lyons [00:44:08]:
You have five minutes to come on. Just give me a quick one. Or, hey, here's the question. Send me an email with your answer. Because ultimately, we know the game. We know how recruiting is being played. You don't have to be coy with us around the, like, any other side. Like, we design these processes.

Jeremy Lyons [00:44:26]:
We go through These processes, we probably know your system. We probably know how the thing was configured to get to where we were getting to. So just asking the question that should have been asked instead of trying to make an inference on our ability. I think that's the question that I wish recruiters would ask.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:44]:
Awesome. Now, when it comes to if anybody wants to follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Jeremy Lyons [00:44:50]:
I have a newsletter that I put out weekly, and if I'm not putting it out that week, I will tell you why I'm not putting it out that week. You can find that on LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I respond to my messages. I also have that newsletter come out on substack. Reops.substack.com still don't know how I got that one, but hey, I'll take the URL. But ultimately, like, reach out and take a look at things. And also there's my Reops collective.

Jeremy Lyons [00:45:20]:
Com, where you can read old content and content libraries. That is coming from an unbiased angle.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:27]:
Awesome. And is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners before I let you go?

Jeremy Lyons [00:45:31]:
Always be trying new things in the space. Push, push the space. Because the space, even if it pushes back, will still get a lot stronger. And you know what, recruiters, we people in the recruiting space, we do so much more than just find people. Remember that.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:47]:
Well, Jeremy, I just want to say thank you for coming on. Like, you know, there are so many people that absolutely are passionate about the recruiting space and the impact that they can make within the industry and for companies. But it's just not too often you see the opportunity to really shift out of the recruiting chair and into something different. So thank you for kind of like building out the pathway and the blueprint that somebody can actually make that job. And for the listeners, I know we're coming into the end of 2024, walking into 2025. Make 2025 the year of personal abundance. Keep crushing it, guys.

Jeremy Lyons [00:46:19]:
See ya.