Introduction

Ashlie Collins (00:02.369)
Hello and welcome to Hire We Go, where we are chatting all things talent acquisition transformation. Whether you’re an HR vet or someone who’s simply fascinated by how to find, attract and engage talent, you are in the right place. I’m your host Ashley Collins, Director of Solutions here at Jovio. And joining me today is Jeremy Lyons, co-founder and recruiting operations consultant at RecOps Collective.

Jeremy, thank you so much for being here. Can you kick things off by telling us a little bit about yourself and RecOps Collective?

Jeremy Lyons (00:34.646)
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me Ashley and to the JVO team for reaching out. Jeremy Lyons, I’ve been in the recruiting operations space now for nine plus years. I’ve been in the recruiting space for a lot longer because I am second generation recruiter. And I started RecOps Collective about four years ago because there was a really, really strong need to galvanize the recruiting operations community. We need to have resources that were

practitioner-led, we needed conferences where we had our own space to talk. that is the effort that I have been leading, not just through the brand, but through working with several other companies as well to make that vision a reality. And I think four years in, we’re starting to see more more discussion around recruiting operations folks and what we do and the talent engineer role as the next iteration. it’s really, really exciting to see that

Ashlie Collins (01:03.341)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (01:23.681)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (01:31.394)
the work that I’ve done with the community has been able to build that far.

Ashlie Collins (01:35.595)
that’s amazing. And I was really keen to pick your brain today on, mean, like everyone’s chatting about AI, everybody has AI, AI is everywhere. So from your perspective, how can folks get started with AI without turning their hiring process completely upside down?

Jeremy Lyons (01:55.182)
Well, I think the first thing that you do is you go back to the original AI in Allen Iverson. no, jokes aside, I think one of the things that when I think about AI and AI usage, especially in hiring processes before you even turn yourself, turn anything upside down is you really have to understand the hiring organization, the culture, the hiring organization that you have, the hiring culture that you have, the infrastructure around you, how you hire.

and what your touch points are. that is start. think a lot of people right now are starting on AI because they’re just like, Hey, let’s just pick something and say that we’re doing it. But they don’t really know how that’s connected into every, into every little decision that they’re making. And so usually when I talk with companies that want to incorporate AI into their hiring process, the questions that I’m asking are really more human driven around, okay, well what

Ashlie Collins (02:33.698)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (02:40.909)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Lyons (02:52.29)
What are you doing right now that if you were to stop doing, you’d be totally okay with because you could offload that cognitive load. And what you find is when you break down the human elements, that’s where you can find the elements to bring more AI in or be more sophisticated with how you bring AI in because you’re able to specifically discuss use cases, specifically discuss context pieces that are really, really, really important.

Ashlie Collins (03:00.876)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (03:17.825)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (03:21.996)
before you just sort of jump in and then you get to the end of a solution through prompting and you’re just like, this looks great. And you realize, well, wait, if I had articulated this outlier or this type of situation or this sort of thing, that we would be ahead of the game. And another great point to that is, you know, I hear a lot of people talk about capacity planning and elements around capacity planning and how can AI help with the capacity planning?

Ashlie Collins (03:31.713)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (03:46.646)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (03:51.854)
As you go in, you just look at your recruiter’s ability to hire or load or manage the requisitions. Something that you might not actually think about is, do we even have the interviewer’s, the interviewer capacity to meet the capacity that we’re trying to do? And that’s a different question. But if you don’t do the breakdown, if you don’t do the touch points and you don’t do that like deep soul searching psychology on your own self and hiring culture,

Ashlie Collins (04:05.804)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (04:19.99)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (04:21.142)
you’re just going to be throwing something on top of it that just makes you accelerate bad faster.

Ashlie Collins (04:26.636)
Yeah, I think that’s such a good point and just getting it all into a proper flow diagram, exactly where are we, where are the break points and how do we solve for that? And I think it’s interesting because it ties into something else that I was hoping to talk to you a little bit about, is identifying, finding and fixing hidden friction in the candidate journey, which I think really…

ties together with this? Like, do you think AI has a role to play in that?

Jeremy Lyons (04:59.214)
You know, I think that that’s a good question. I do think that AI has a role to play in that. But I think that one of the pieces that I think AI will play in that is how do we centralize all of our information in recruiting? And that’s the stuff that’s happening in the system and outside of the system to be able to really identify trends or spikes or things that we might not have identified or thought about before.

Ashlie Collins (05:28.086)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (05:29.486)
When I think about that, I think about the data that we talk about when it comes to the difference between like a sales recruiting cycle, a marketing recruiting cycle, an engineering recruiting cycle, product, because those usually in companies have, mean at least as far as sales goes, have very distinct cycles. And the thing that doesn’t show up in the data, especially if you just hand off your data to somebody else,

Ashlie Collins (05:40.096)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (05:49.44)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (05:57.974)
is you’d be like, why did we interview low that week? Like, why did it seem like we had a high number of cancellations this week? And if nobody sort of knows on your recruiting team or even the AI hasn’t been programmed to calculate, like, it’s end of quarter or it’s beginning of quarter, or we had a president’s club thing, you just see these bottomed out spikes in the sales department. And that is, I think, something when we look at those hidden friction points.

Ashlie Collins (06:18.155)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (06:22.369)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (06:27.948)
that are things that we all know because we’ve worked there or we’ve had experience there or anything like that. But you have to articulate that. And I think that’s the part where, again, is another hidden friction point within AI and within the candidaturity is that there are a number of these like parts where we just sort of make assumptions and we design for the top 10%. We don’t tend to make the assumptions and design for the bottom 10%.

Ashlie Collins (06:28.139)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (06:34.827)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (06:38.827)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (06:52.565)
Yeah.

Jeremy Lyons (06:57.122)
And that bottom 10%, if you bring that up, actually really does a good job of helping fix overall problems because you’ve articulated, hey, look, this is an edge case. Let’s design out the edge case.

Ashlie Collins (06:57.249)
Yeah.

Ashlie Collins (07:11.806)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And really just thinking through that knowledge base and how you’re training your AI and making sure that we’re factoring for how it extracts intelligence and how it surfaces insights so that you can take meaningful action. So remarkable. Thank you so much for letting us pick your brain today. I hope you all heard something that you can take forward with you to make your lives a little bit easier out there. And until next time.

Jeremy Lyons (07:40.654)
Thank you so much.

Ashlie Collins (07:42.061)
Thank you.