RecOps Is Just a Word. Or Is It?

Last week I was invited to join a virtual book club meeting. Normally I join these calls as a reader but this time I joined as the guest author.?

The organizer of the meeting Jeremy Lyons did an excellent job of providing me with some good context about his group. He even submitted a few questions ahead of time so I had an idea of the level of conversation we were about to have.?

What I loved most about the book club was that I could tell – just based on the questions that were asked – that these were “my people”. These were the people I wrote the book for!

The questions they asked were specific and insightful. I could tell they read it closely and were thinking about how to apply the concepts in their own recruiting environment. There was one particular question that really stood out to me though. And it didn’t come until the very end. Someone asked me:?

”What are you most excited about over the next few years as it relates to RecOps?”

At that moment, a bunch of thoughts raced through my head. Should I share that I’m excited about how AI is going to transform talent acquisition or how automation is going to streamline recruiting? Or something more boring like…how excited I am that more CEOs understand the importance of talent acquisition.

But when all the noise in my head died down, my mind went back to why I wrote the book in the first place. Before I share what that reason is, I’d like to tell you about something I heard on a podcast a few days later. It’s directly related and caused me to write this post.

WORDS MATTER

Recently, I was listening to a podcast called Making Sense with Sam Harris. He was interviewing a popular writer and blogger named Tim Urban. Tim is known for his stick-figure illustrations and the ability to speak on a wide variety of topics in ways that make you challenge your own points of view.?

While ranting on the topic of politics, Tim said something profound that caused me to stop my run and hit pause on the podcast until I got home and could sit down at a computer to write this post. Unknowingly, he nailed the main reason why I wrote RecOps and why I enjoyed the book club conversation so much. I’ll paraphrase what he said:

When you’re having a conversation, your thoughts are going to be constrained by the language we have. When you have a word for something, it becomes a concept in people’s minds. And then you can discuss it and develop nuanced ideas around that word.

For me, that word is obviously RecOps. But why is this word so important?

WORDS SPREAD IDEAS

In the recruiting industry, we have words that have sparked entire ecosystems of capabilities and innovations. “Sourcing” is one of them. “Candidate Experience” is another. If you think about other industries, we have words like “DevOps” in software development, “Sales Enablement” in Sales, and “Growth Hacking” in Marketing.

These words started out as nothing and now have an ecosystem of people, products and services that have contributed to the advancement of their respective verticals.?

When we don’t have a word for something, it limits our ability to expand upon the idea, build a community around it and make meaningful improvements over time.?

I titled the book “RecOps” is for this very reason -- to establish a word for this type of work that we do.

There are plenty of people out there optimizing recruiting functions. But the word “RecOps” isn’t widely used, understood or agreed upon. As a result, most people are just figuring things out as they go with no standards, no best practices and no direction. My goal was to put a stake in the ground on this emerging topic because I believe it has the ability to provide some structure that will help change the face of recruiting as whole.

THE POWER WORDS

So, when I was asked “What are you most excited about?” it became crystal clear to me that it was the same reason why I wrote the book. I explained that I was most excited to see conversations like the one we were having on that Zoom call taking place about a word that hadn't been widely discussed before. I was encouraged to see really smart people in the recruiting space debating the complexities of RecOps. And I was thrilled to see that it was happening on its own – without me needing to start it all.?

So thanks to Jeremy for having the book club and for all the attendees for joining to advance the conversation around this word "RecOps". This word has the power to be a big idea, the next important concept, an emerging profession, and (maybe someday) an entire industry. I’m happy to be a part of it and can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

If you’d like to learn more about RecOps and join the conversation, please visit https://RecOps.Org. Want the book? It's available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/3vyK66g