Talent Acquisition Operations
Talent Acquisition Operations, Talent Operations, Talent Ops, People Operations?... many names for different flavors of what is usually the same function at its core: we manage and maintain the infrastructure for the recruitment team while improving efficiency and ensuring alignment with overall corporate strategy. What that looks like day to day varies from company to company, and the size and remit of your TA Ops function will be related to the size of your recruitment team and the complexity of your organization.
People Ops vs TA Ops
First off I want to call out the differences between People Ops and TA Ops. I view these as different functions existing side-by-side, but it’s likely that the role will be combined in a smaller organization and in some cases, one may be a sub-function of the other.
People Ops manages the employee-side of HR administration like benefits, payroll, timekeeping/attendance. It may also include areas like employee experience, learning and development, and compliance training and certifications.
Talent Acquisition Operations is concerned with the effectiveness of the TA function and focuses on things like recruiting process, recruiting process documentation, reporting and analytics, recruiter efficiency and upskilling, process improvements, capacity planning, systems and vendors, candidate experience, etc.
Other activities in the candidate to employee transition may be handled by either TA Ops or People Ops, or a different team altogether. These include post-offer activities such as offer letters and background checks, as well as the pre-employment activities such as system provisioning, verification of ID/work authorizaiton, tax documents etc.
TA Ops in more detail
The larger a recruiting function, the greater the benefit of having a dedicated TA Ops Manager or TA Ops team. Smaller recruiting functions may not need a dedicated Ops team and will instead share the most important aspects of the role amongst the other TA team members.
In my experience, TA Ops usually owns a few main areas:
Processes, policies, and compliance - defining the process, refining the process, communicating the process. Creating policies that lay out the rules of engagement between TA and the business, creating SLAs, and other policies required in recruiting (e.g. referral programs). Ensuring compliance with state and federal (national and regional) regulations relating to recruiting.
Systems and Vendor Management - Systems from a superuser or system admin perspective depending on whether there is a separate HRIS team in the organization. Vendor Management can be as basic as managing billing and invoicing, to managing entire procurement processes if there is no other team to handle it.
Training and Enablement - supporting the TA team through problem solving, by providing training, or sometimes via stakeholder management. Helping to upskill the TA team where required, and providing the TA team with resources they need at the right time.
Reporting and Analytics - reporting to measure the overall health of the TA function, to give early warning of things that could wrong, to show things that are going well, and to help tell that story to key stakeholders. Analytics to help make decisions and to put the TA team in a better position to advise the business. This can be a big part of recruiter enablement.
Candidate Experience - recruiting coordinators for a large team, facilitating candidate communications for a small team, owning the candidate flow and ensuring that each touchpoint adds value to the candidate experience and the overall candidate relationship.
Sourcing and pipelining (sometimes) - larger teams will have a dedicated sourcing team which may have a dotted line to TA Ops, but where there is no dedicated sourcing team, TA Ops will facilitate the sourcing workflow by outlining process and configuring available tools.
All of this is usually underpinned by general project and program management for the TA Team as a means to build capacity and capability in these areas. The aim should be to build a continuous improvement loop where the reporting and analytics inform decision making around which areas should be addressed in future projects as well as quantifying the impact of these projects.
If you think I missed something or if TA Ops means something totally different to you, let me know!