EPISODE #1
New tools and best practices in Coordinating Interviews, Stakeholder Management, and Continuous learning with Jeremy Lyons
In this episode, Jeremy Lyons, a recruitment operations expert, discusses the latest tools and technologies for coordinating interviews, the challenges in the interview process, stakeholder management, and continuous learning and development.
Episode #1
New tools and best practices in Coordinating Interviews, Stakeholder Management, and Continuous learning with Jeremy Lyons.
Guest Speaker: Jeremy Lyons, RecOps Collective
Host: Leo Popov, CEO & Co-Founder Wayy
Summary
In this episode, Jeremy Lyons, a recruitment operations expert, discusses the latest tools and technologies for coordinating interviews, the challenges in the interview process, stakeholder management, and continuous learning and development. He highlights the emergence of automated scheduling tools like Prelude and Calendly, as well as tools like Mode Good Time and Candidate.fyi that enhance the candidate experience. Jeremy also emphasizes the importance of managing stakeholders effectively, tailoring the approach for each stakeholder group, and utilizing tools like ATS for stakeholder management. He mentions Poetry and Purple as useful tools for learning and development in the talent acquisition space. Looking ahead, Jeremy predicts that AI will continue to dominate the recruitment field, prompting the need for better prompts and addressing bias. He advises listeners to critically evaluate their recruitment processes and focus on the why behind each step.
Keywords
recruitment operations, coordinating interviews, automated scheduling tools, candidate experience, stakeholder management, learning and development, AI in recruitment
Takeaways
Titles
The Dominance of AI in Recruitment and Addressing Bias
Evaluating and Improving Recruitment Processes for Success
Sound Bites
Chapters
00:00
Introduction and Overview
06:01
Challenges in the Interview Process
13:48
Effective Stakeholder Management
23:49
Addressing Biases and Ensuring a Human Element
26:19
Final Thoughts and Advice
New tools and best practices in Coordinating Interviews, Stakeholder Management, and Continuous learning with Jeremy Lyons.
Guest Speaker: Jeremy Lyons, RecOps Collective
Host: Leo Popov, CEO & Co-Founder Wayy
Summary
In this episode, Jeremy Lyons, a recruitment operations expert, discusses the latest tools and technologies for coordinating interviews, the challenges in the interview process, stakeholder management, and continuous learning and development. He highlights the emergence of automated scheduling tools like Prelude and Calendly, as well as tools like Mode Good Time and Candidate.fyi that enhance the candidate experience. Jeremy also emphasizes the importance of managing stakeholders effectively, tailoring the approach for each stakeholder group, and utilizing tools like ATS for stakeholder management. He mentions Poetry and Purple as useful tools for learning and development in the talent acquisition space. Looking ahead, Jeremy predicts that AI will continue to dominate the recruitment field, prompting the need for better prompts and addressing bias. He advises listeners to critically evaluate their recruitment processes and focus on the why behind each step.
Keywords
recruitment operations, coordinating interviews, automated scheduling tools, candidate experience, stakeholder management, learning and development, AI in recruitment
Takeaways
- Wayy.co Virtual Recruiter automates repetitive manual tasks in recruiting such as candidate search, contacts, screening, and scheduling.
- Automated scheduling tools like Prelude.co and Calendly.com have made coordinating interviews more efficient and streamlined.
- Tools like Mode Good Time and Candidate.fyi enhance the candidate experience by providing centralized information and allowing candidates to stay involved.
- Effective stakeholder management involves tailoring the approach for each stakeholder group, utilizing tools like ATS, and managing human emotions.
- Poetry and Purple are useful tools for learning and development in the talent acquisition space.
- AI will continue to dominate the recruitment field, prompting the need for better prompts and addressing bias.
- Evaluating and improving recruitment processes is crucial for success, focusing on the why behind each step.
Titles
The Dominance of AI in Recruitment and Addressing Bias
Evaluating and Improving Recruitment Processes for Success
Sound Bites
- "When I first started in TA recruiting coordination was you got some, the recruiter came to the coordinator and said, Hey, I need to get Leo scheduled. Uh, send Leo an email, get his availability, go and look at calendars."
- "Tools like Mode Good Time have started to put more technology into kind of the newer spaces of candidate experience."
- "There's been more development with those shadow interviews. You want to be able to say, hey, Jeremy's new to Wei. Leo, you want to make sure I'm not going to go totally rogue on an interview and ask a whole bunch of weird questions."
Chapters
00:00
Introduction and Overview
06:01
Challenges in the Interview Process
13:48
Effective Stakeholder Management
23:49
Addressing Biases and Ensuring a Human Element
26:19
Final Thoughts and Advice
Text transcript
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:01.971)
Hi everyone. Welcome to this. This is the Way Podcast, the show that brings you the lastest insights in trend from the world of talent acquisition, management and professional development. The podcast is presented by Way Company and I'm Leo Popov, your host. Today we're joined by Jeremy Lyons. Jeremy is a Los Angeles based recruitment operations expert and co-founder of RecOps Collective.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (00:24.334)
after the film.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:31.943)
He has significantly enhanced recruiting operations at companies like Verizon Media and Signal Sciences. He mentoring over 50 professionals and driving data-driven improvements in talent acquisition. Hi, Jeremy, did I get it right?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (00:51.142)
Yeah, yeah, you did Leo. Thank you so much.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:53.963)
Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, today we'll cover very important topics. We will go over coordinating interviews, stakeholder management, and continuous learning and development. Obviously, very important topics. Jeremy, can you describe some of the latest tools and technologies that you find useful for coordinating interviews today?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (01:18.782)
Yeah. So when I first started in TA recruiting coordination was you got some, the recruiter came to the coordinator and said, Hey, I need to get Leo scheduled. Uh, send Leo an email, get his availability, go and look at calendars. And, and, and basically.
put something on the calendar, hear a few templates, and then send the confirmation emails. A lot of manual steps. And in recent, I would say, three, maybe three to five years, we started to see more automated scheduling tools come up. When I first started hearing about them, it was companies like Prelude.
which is sadly going to be closing in 2025. But they really sort of had kicked off a whole automated scheduling aspect of things to make the coordinators lives easier. And so now we've got a number of really great tools that have kind of taken what they originally started and have built onto it.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (02:26.456)
Is it something like Calendly? Like I use Calendly like other any tools or it is mostly?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (02:32.338)
Yeah. So I mean, when you think about recruiting tools, usually most recruiting tools end up being tools that have been in other places. And then somebody looked at it and went, Hey, this looks like something that recruiting could use. And it sounds like something recruiting could use. Why don't we make some a version of it for recruiting to use? And Calendly had actually bought Prelude. So there's a connection there. But now what we're starting to see as recruiting has become more
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (03:01.806)
kind of a drive from the candidate side and a drive from the internal side. On the internal side, people have started to say, well, we wanna do more shadow interviewing. We wanna do more candidate experience pieces and a large portion of the candidate experience is really within the scheduling. And so tools like mode Good Time, have started to put more technology into kind of the newer spaces
experience. Candidate.fyi has created kind of a whole portal so that now you can put information in there for candidates to stay involved. So it's not just sort of this, hey I got sent the calendar thing, now I'm waiting to be scheduled, now I'm sort of sitting there waiting with something to do. Now you can put in more information that's centralized. You can do all those scheduling pieces. Now on the internal side,
There's been more development with those shadow interviews. You want to be able to say, hey, Jeremy's new to Wei. Leo, you want to make sure I'm not going to go totally rogue on an interview and ask a whole bunch of weird questions. So you want me to follow you around to a couple of interviews. Now these tools are making it much easier to do because that's normally been maintained in a spreadsheet. So.
As these things have been improved improving. And I mean, now those tools will also kind of take into account different time zones, so you're not worried about. You know, when I put this thing on this calendar, is it, did I put it in PSD, did I put it in, in mountain? Like where, where did it go? And that used to be a really.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (04:37.745)
Uh.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (04:42.019)
And yeah.
Nowadays when there is a lot of remote jobs, like it is important you like talking with people and even not even within us like you talk with people internationally you hiring internationally that's
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (04:58.782)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's become a much bigger thing. And, you know, I remember knowing most time zones from where I was just simply because I'd be scheduling interviews in Europe, I'd be scheduling interviews in Japan, I'd be scheduling interviews in Mexico, and you're sitting there going, why do you have 10 different clocks going in your head?
It's just the evolution of it and people want more efficiency, people want to be involved in different kinds of ways. And many of these scheduling tools are allowing people to now not so much focus on just getting the schedule out, but really like using that energy and that time to build relationships with the candidates. And that's exciting to see.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (05:47.119)
Yeah, that's a very good development and saves a lot of time. But I assume there is still a lot of challenges there. What are the main interview challenges that you see nowadays?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (06:01.886)
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest interview challenges that I see right now, and it's kind of this, it's been a shift that people have been talking about for a while now is, well, what happens if you want a candidate to just be able to build their own interview panel, basically? And that's kind of building on the...
idea, especially that's been one of the trends for 2024 that rec recruiting teams are going to have to do more with less. And so where are really easy places where you can automate stuff, especially if you have the information upfront. And one of the easy places to do that would be, okay, well, how do we make scheduling happen easier? And a lot of tools, a lot of ATS is out there right now. Um,
can sometimes have issues with candidates sort of picking the times and then cross-reference, on the other side, cross-referencing who the interviewers are and making that schedule work with the schedule that the candidate has sort of said, this is when I want to have my interviews. So I think that that's the system side that's a struggle right now. And then I think, too.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (07:09.981)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (07:17.994)
And I tell people this all the time when it comes to a candidate, recruiting has built this house. And we are in this house and we live in this house.
interviewers, hiring managers, candidates, applicants, they're all guests in the house. So their reaction to certain things are very different than like us where we sort of like know where we put the blender.
there's a little bit more anxiety around that. And so a lot of the times you have to do a little bit more hand holding for people to sort of make sure that people feel very, very comfortable. So there's still the human element of...
scheduling and everything like that, that is important for people to maintain and recognize. And that changes significantly when you start talking about different cultures and you start talking about different groups of people because they've each had different experiences and that's been passed down in communities.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (08:25.275)
Yeah, that's very interesting. I remember I was experimenting when hiring for my company with like video interviewing software. Like what is your opinion about video interview where like asynchronous when people can write video applications.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (08:45.67)
Oh, so you're kind of talking about what happens when you sort of, you record your answers to your questions so that somebody can review it later. You know, that's something that I've been hearing a lot more about. There were, there's a tool out there that was talking about, well, we made our entire interview process asynchronous. I personally don't think that it's that technology is there yet.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (08:54.247)
Correct. Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (09:13.49)
I think that there are certainly, you could certainly record yourself giving an answer to something and that can be fine. You know, at this point in time, most of the world has spent a significant amount of time recording basically like this on video chats.
you know, even before COVID. So there's a familiarity with screens and videos and all that. And then everybody just has to make sure you're looking at the camera and not into the little box that yourself trying to do this and it doesn't become performative. But I think that one of the things that is difficult to do with that in an interview setting, and I'm not saying it's not gonna get there, is that-
When you go to work, it's not just so much going to work, collecting a paycheck and going home. You're going to work because you want to either work on the product that's there because you have a connection to it.
or you want to work with the people because the people are bright and you know that you can learn something and this feeds into sort of that continuous learning and development. I think that if people sort of feel like it hasn't been a human process from the beginning, they're going to feel like it hasn't been a human process through the entire thing. And that's that first impression.
Do I think we'll get to a point where the very first interview or some of the interviews will be recorded? Yeah, I mean, we're getting there. You have companies like Bright Hire, you have MetaView, you have things that are transcribing the interview, giving an analysis of that and really making sure people are held accountable to their answers. And that's fantastic.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (10:55.19)
Um, but I do still think that there's a human element there, as long as people are doing the work that you're going to need to be able to have a conversation with somebody at some point in the interview process.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (11:06.615)
And I also feel that there will be shift in perception. Similar as like during the COVID, everyone become like very comfortable with video conferences. Before it wasn't a thing. And I think with like using more technology, more automation in these processes as well, like it's coming there. And I'm excited to see how it will, where the balance will stop between them. Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (11:32.574)
Yeah. Well, and I think it also just depends on the people. That's the thing that's really been interesting is that, like for me personally, you know, I work remote, but I love getting to meet my co-workers. There's just a relationship there that for me is really, really important. Like people working with me can be can be an adventure. And I say that because
I like to crack jokes, I like to use more of my body so that people can understand when something is a joke versus when I'm being serious or anything like that. And sometimes it's just as easy to cross-hear information. I'm one of those people that really thrives on being in a place where I can hear everything that's going on, I can interpret everything that's going on.
as opposed to having very direct conversations with somebody that is on a video and that's a very direct sort of thing. Not every team works like that. There are some people who are like, all I need to know is like, shoot me an email in the morning about what you need done at the end of the day and do not talk to me for the rest of it. And that's okay. We just can't be forcing people into very specific boxes. And I think we're gonna hit a point actually in interviewing.
And I've said this for years now, where the candidate is basically going to have a choose your own adventure where they can say like, look, actually, maybe they're neurodivergent and talking with people is really, really difficult. And the role they have is not going to be someone where they're going to have to talk to a lot of people. They could say, you know, give me all of the interview pieces upfront. I'm going to do them.
and they're gonna have a no-touch kind of interview.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (13:21.827)
Yeah, I like that idea that there are different people with different personalities. For someone, this might be the best case. For another one, I want to talk personally. And Jeremy, you mentioned that there are many stakeholders involved in typical interview process. And how do you manage stakeholders? How do you organize everything?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:33.771)
Exactly.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:41.867)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:48.33)
I mean, every stakeholder has to be managed differently. So when we talk about stakeholders, when it comes to, let's talk about, because we were just talking about interviewing, we talk about stakeholders there. You have, especially as a recruiting coordinator or on the RecOps side, you have your recruiter, you have your hiring manager, you have the interviewers, you have the candidates.
And then if you even wanted to go kind of wild on it, you could call the tools a stakeholder too. Because you have to manage the tools and how the tools are interacting with one another as well. So for your recruiters, normally they want to know sort of the like, hey, when has the candidate been touched with? Like when did you reach out to the candidate? How did you get everything scheduled? What does that look like?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (14:24.092)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (14:38.198)
When you start talking to the hiring managers, they want to know the data, like how many interviews did we have this week? Where are we at with people in the funnel? Where are we at with the top of the funnel? Those kinds of questions. For the interviewers, it's the...
Hey, you know, you got me scheduled for six interviews this week. And like each interview is going to take me an hour. I'm about to lose six hours of business time. And that's not even accounting for what I usually like to say, which is the 30 minutes before the interview, when somebody is now worried about missing the interview. So they're not working at their peak productivity. And then the 30 minutes after the interview. So now you've just taken 12 hours out for each interview effectively on it, on them. And then you have the candidates.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (15:23.132)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (15:26.68)
are going, hey, I gave you my availability five minutes ago. Why have I not seen the confirmation? And there's different pieces and there's different cares and different avenues. And so a lot of on the rec ops side, and I say this to everybody, it's like the biggest thing that you can do is learn how to manage the most combustible element on the planet. And that is human emotion.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (15:54.276)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (15:54.578)
And it's not only other people's emotion, it's your own emotion. Because there are times where people are gonna come at you and say, you messed this up. And you're like, you sent me an email five minutes ago telling me to lay this out and I'd already done the thing that you wanted me to. Like, that's, you know, it's all about kind of how are you balancing those human elements when you do anything to...
Leo, CEO @Wayy (16:13.211)
Okay.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (16:25.17)
do the things that you need to do. And then obviously the stakeholder management on the tool side, you're constantly doing tool maintenance on the rec-op side. You're coming up with new processes to make sure that things flow better, that have better data. You're talking to that company's, your CSM and making tool recommendations to fit things that you know other people are going to need.
And I think that's why it's one of those things where when you, whenever you're going to use a tool or get a tool, adopt it, one of the biggest conversations you have is how can I get feedback on what's your release cycle? Um, because the worst thing could be when you're sitting there going, Hey, I, I need this thing and companies are like, yeah, that's Q4 2026. You're like.
You know, what am I gonna do?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (17:17.106)
Correct. Are there like any tools exist for stakeholders management? Like what tools or software you use for that? Or it is old school approach.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (17:30.758)
Well, I think that there are certainly a lot of people who have been repurposing project management tools, like your Asana's, your Mondays, tools like Smartsheet, tools like that. But I think that they also, you don't necessarily need to go out and get one of those tools if people understand at the base the tools that you're using.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (17:38.481)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (17:55.566)
and giving people the education around the tools that you're using. Like your ATS can very easily be a stakeholder management tool. It's just, sometimes people don't know that's where to go and people don't want to admit that they don't understand. And so you have to kind of continue to do that education piece along the way so people understand where to go.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (18:18.531)
Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, let's cover also the learning and development parts. This is like very, obviously very important. And is there anything new that appeared on the market recently? Anything that you tried and especially like for this?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (18:41.258)
Yeah, so I think there are two out there that immediately come to mind when people have started to talk to me about learning and development and learning management tools. So I think, especially in the TA space, two that I'm looking at are Poetry, which is a recruiter enablement platform, and Purple, P-U-R-P-L. On
Leo, CEO @Wayy (18:57.34)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (19:08.194)
Poetry is really great because for the longest time in recruiting in TA, we've had folders upon folders with documents in them.
And when people have left or people are new or things have happened, there's never been a centralized place for us to like go and find that information. And also it's become, you know, maybe you have something that's buried in one doc and things like that, that you're, that you need for another thing. And it becomes more difficult. And I've really liked how poetry has sort of taken all of that into an idea and said,
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (19:48.272)
store everything. And that I think is really, really helpful. And I know people will say, well, couldn't you organize your Google Docs or your OneDrive like that or build a Notion page or something? You could, but ultimately, I think that there are still limitations to that. And I just like what poetry is building and how they're building it.
Purple, on the other hand, while it's not that enablement platform where you're going to store all of your documents like poetry is, what Purple does is there's a lot of webinars that they've built out. And they built out a webinar library so you can go and you can learn. And that, I think, is really, really helpful because it's not the stuffy kind of learning. It's the stuff that people are actually doing on the ground.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (20:32.877)
Uh-huh.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (20:45.154)
by the people who are actually doing it. And I think that they've built a really, really good collection of people to talk and build information for.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (20:56.515)
Yeah, that's, I also like these tools when you can build your learning materials and tools available right away for your team. And looking ahead, what do you think, what trends will be dominating in these fields that we mentioned? Like in recruiting in general and in fields that we discussed.
specific technologies or methodologies we should be paying attention to.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (21:34.014)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's impossible right now to not say AI as a trend that is going to continue to dominate in the next five years. It's impossible to say it because there are so many companies that are building AI tools or building AI elements into things. I think one of the continued trends that is going to kind of pop up out of that is what are the best prompts?
because each tool is probably going to respond to prompts very differently. Uh, I think that it's also going to be where, where is the LLM for this tool coming from, um, because I think one of the things that we've noticed or started to notice is bias and AI, which for everybody, it makes sense that.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (22:19.968)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (22:24.466)
AI would be biased because if you're training it on what's called the wealth sum of human knowledge, that's inherently biased. And so certain groups are getting, and we've seen it with AI do that. And I think the other thing too, it'll be, um, how do you use data to tell a story? Um, I think when you start, one of the bigger things that has been built into most of these tools is data.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (22:28.411)
People.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (22:54.318)
And people want to see or understand what's their performance. How do these tools make them better?
Um, and I would love to kind of see, especially when it comes to sourcing tools or things like that, people really starting to build in, you know, unconscious bias pieces so that somebody could say, like at the end of a session where a recruiter is going through and reviewing resumes, there's something that could pop up and sort of say like, you, you went through a hundred resumes.
You rejected 75 of them. Within that 75, the common thread that could have shown up was you rejected everybody from this particular university that got this particular degree and had worked for this particular company. Why?
And I think that prompting of the why question is going to be very, very crucial in the next five years about why are we using this tool? Why is this the technology we're choosing to use and why are we building it this way?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (23:50.567)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (24:02.806)
Because without the Y we're just going to end up having a whole bunch of stuff everywhere and no real clear vision on how to use it. And I think that that's, that will also kind of lean into recruitings being very, very strict, like focused on the, like, we have this specific tool for doing a lot more than just this one little specific thing, unless the one specific thing is like this tool.
closes candidates and has 100% success rate for us. You know, that might be useful to some companies, but to others, it might be a luxury and we need to move away.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (24:42.799)
Yeah, and probably there will be technology that will identify biases as well, because now there is AI that identify like, uh, whether this text or video was generated with the help of AI. And, uh, I think there will be technology like, uh, helping people to see the biases and make better decisions.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:05.26)
Yeah.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:09.463)
And I also a big believer in technology. I think that will, yeah, one moment. My dog is crazy. Can you hear the barking, by the way? Okay, yeah, I will just start it again.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:17.826)
Sure. Well, yeah, just a little bit.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:32.527)
Yeah, give me one moment.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:34.766)
Sure.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:50.43)
Okay.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:53.891)
Yeah, and I'm also... One moment.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:59.618)
Hehehe
Leo, CEO @Wayy (26:31.747)
She like always quiet, but when we started the recording, she like barking and now like the postman like knocked the door and she like went crazy after that. Okay.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (26:47.651)
Yeah, I believe in technology will play a pivotal role in recruitment and in many industries, obviously. So I believe that the future is like more hybrid when co-pilots will significantly improve our productivity and like for any professionals. And this is what we do at Wei. So we're creating this Wei virtual recruiter that pretty much automates all...
most time consuming manual tasks, such as like sourcing candidate based on detailed skill profile, crafting personalized messages to increase engagement and managing the communication and screening for candidates end to end. So we believe that as a result recruiters will be able to focus their time on meaningful conversations with top candidates and they don't need to spend
manual stuff. So that will be a very big help. And before we wrap up, any final thoughts or advice for our listeners, Jeremy?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (27:58.506)
Yeah, kind of just thinking about what you just said too, I think one of the things that I will say is that process informs outcomes. And so the thing that I would say to people to leave it to is think about what your process is. Think about if you would wanna go through that process yourself.
and think about the whys behind each thing and take that back to like first principles.
And it might seem like a tedious task to do, but you'll start to see where there are holes in your, in things that are causing other problems and will cause other problems down the line so that you can strategically think about how to solve those. And I think that's where having your RecOps team enabled and supported really can help a recruiting team be successful with what they are trying to do. So that I would believe people.
with that sort of takeaway is definitely look at your process and be very thoughtful about all the why questions you ask down that road.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (29:09.107)
That is amazing advice. And thank you, Jeremy, for sharing your valuable insights with us today. And thank you to listeners for tuning in. So we will put in comments all the useful tools that were mentioned during the conversation, and as well as a link to profile, to Jeremy's profile if you don't mind. So maybe somebody would like to ask more questions or share something, please reach out.
And don't forget to subscribe to This Is The Way podcast for more discussions about new tools and best practices in hiring management and professional development. Also submit your comments about topics you would like us to cover, and see you in the next episode. Thanks everyone. Bye.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (29:58.614)
Yeah. Thank you, everyone.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:01.971)
Hi everyone. Welcome to this. This is the Way Podcast, the show that brings you the lastest insights in trend from the world of talent acquisition, management and professional development. The podcast is presented by Way Company and I'm Leo Popov, your host. Today we're joined by Jeremy Lyons. Jeremy is a Los Angeles based recruitment operations expert and co-founder of RecOps Collective.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (00:24.334)
after the film.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:31.943)
He has significantly enhanced recruiting operations at companies like Verizon Media and Signal Sciences. He mentoring over 50 professionals and driving data-driven improvements in talent acquisition. Hi, Jeremy, did I get it right?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (00:51.142)
Yeah, yeah, you did Leo. Thank you so much.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (00:53.963)
Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, today we'll cover very important topics. We will go over coordinating interviews, stakeholder management, and continuous learning and development. Obviously, very important topics. Jeremy, can you describe some of the latest tools and technologies that you find useful for coordinating interviews today?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (01:18.782)
Yeah. So when I first started in TA recruiting coordination was you got some, the recruiter came to the coordinator and said, Hey, I need to get Leo scheduled. Uh, send Leo an email, get his availability, go and look at calendars. And, and, and basically.
put something on the calendar, hear a few templates, and then send the confirmation emails. A lot of manual steps. And in recent, I would say, three, maybe three to five years, we started to see more automated scheduling tools come up. When I first started hearing about them, it was companies like Prelude.
which is sadly going to be closing in 2025. But they really sort of had kicked off a whole automated scheduling aspect of things to make the coordinators lives easier. And so now we've got a number of really great tools that have kind of taken what they originally started and have built onto it.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (02:26.456)
Is it something like Calendly? Like I use Calendly like other any tools or it is mostly?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (02:32.338)
Yeah. So I mean, when you think about recruiting tools, usually most recruiting tools end up being tools that have been in other places. And then somebody looked at it and went, Hey, this looks like something that recruiting could use. And it sounds like something recruiting could use. Why don't we make some a version of it for recruiting to use? And Calendly had actually bought Prelude. So there's a connection there. But now what we're starting to see as recruiting has become more
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (03:01.806)
kind of a drive from the candidate side and a drive from the internal side. On the internal side, people have started to say, well, we wanna do more shadow interviewing. We wanna do more candidate experience pieces and a large portion of the candidate experience is really within the scheduling. And so tools like mode Good Time, have started to put more technology into kind of the newer spaces
experience. Candidate.fyi has created kind of a whole portal so that now you can put information in there for candidates to stay involved. So it's not just sort of this, hey I got sent the calendar thing, now I'm waiting to be scheduled, now I'm sort of sitting there waiting with something to do. Now you can put in more information that's centralized. You can do all those scheduling pieces. Now on the internal side,
There's been more development with those shadow interviews. You want to be able to say, hey, Jeremy's new to Wei. Leo, you want to make sure I'm not going to go totally rogue on an interview and ask a whole bunch of weird questions. So you want me to follow you around to a couple of interviews. Now these tools are making it much easier to do because that's normally been maintained in a spreadsheet. So.
As these things have been improved improving. And I mean, now those tools will also kind of take into account different time zones, so you're not worried about. You know, when I put this thing on this calendar, is it, did I put it in PSD, did I put it in, in mountain? Like where, where did it go? And that used to be a really.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (04:37.745)
Uh.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (04:42.019)
And yeah.
Nowadays when there is a lot of remote jobs, like it is important you like talking with people and even not even within us like you talk with people internationally you hiring internationally that's
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (04:58.782)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, it's become a much bigger thing. And, you know, I remember knowing most time zones from where I was just simply because I'd be scheduling interviews in Europe, I'd be scheduling interviews in Japan, I'd be scheduling interviews in Mexico, and you're sitting there going, why do you have 10 different clocks going in your head?
It's just the evolution of it and people want more efficiency, people want to be involved in different kinds of ways. And many of these scheduling tools are allowing people to now not so much focus on just getting the schedule out, but really like using that energy and that time to build relationships with the candidates. And that's exciting to see.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (05:47.119)
Yeah, that's a very good development and saves a lot of time. But I assume there is still a lot of challenges there. What are the main interview challenges that you see nowadays?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (06:01.886)
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest interview challenges that I see right now, and it's kind of this, it's been a shift that people have been talking about for a while now is, well, what happens if you want a candidate to just be able to build their own interview panel, basically? And that's kind of building on the...
idea, especially that's been one of the trends for 2024 that rec recruiting teams are going to have to do more with less. And so where are really easy places where you can automate stuff, especially if you have the information upfront. And one of the easy places to do that would be, okay, well, how do we make scheduling happen easier? And a lot of tools, a lot of ATS is out there right now. Um,
can sometimes have issues with candidates sort of picking the times and then cross-reference, on the other side, cross-referencing who the interviewers are and making that schedule work with the schedule that the candidate has sort of said, this is when I want to have my interviews. So I think that that's the system side that's a struggle right now. And then I think, too.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (07:09.981)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (07:17.994)
And I tell people this all the time when it comes to a candidate, recruiting has built this house. And we are in this house and we live in this house.
interviewers, hiring managers, candidates, applicants, they're all guests in the house. So their reaction to certain things are very different than like us where we sort of like know where we put the blender.
there's a little bit more anxiety around that. And so a lot of the times you have to do a little bit more hand holding for people to sort of make sure that people feel very, very comfortable. So there's still the human element of...
scheduling and everything like that, that is important for people to maintain and recognize. And that changes significantly when you start talking about different cultures and you start talking about different groups of people because they've each had different experiences and that's been passed down in communities.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (08:25.275)
Yeah, that's very interesting. I remember I was experimenting when hiring for my company with like video interviewing software. Like what is your opinion about video interview where like asynchronous when people can write video applications.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (08:45.67)
Oh, so you're kind of talking about what happens when you sort of, you record your answers to your questions so that somebody can review it later. You know, that's something that I've been hearing a lot more about. There were, there's a tool out there that was talking about, well, we made our entire interview process asynchronous. I personally don't think that it's that technology is there yet.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (08:54.247)
Correct. Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (09:13.49)
I think that there are certainly, you could certainly record yourself giving an answer to something and that can be fine. You know, at this point in time, most of the world has spent a significant amount of time recording basically like this on video chats.
you know, even before COVID. So there's a familiarity with screens and videos and all that. And then everybody just has to make sure you're looking at the camera and not into the little box that yourself trying to do this and it doesn't become performative. But I think that one of the things that is difficult to do with that in an interview setting, and I'm not saying it's not gonna get there, is that-
When you go to work, it's not just so much going to work, collecting a paycheck and going home. You're going to work because you want to either work on the product that's there because you have a connection to it.
or you want to work with the people because the people are bright and you know that you can learn something and this feeds into sort of that continuous learning and development. I think that if people sort of feel like it hasn't been a human process from the beginning, they're going to feel like it hasn't been a human process through the entire thing. And that's that first impression.
Do I think we'll get to a point where the very first interview or some of the interviews will be recorded? Yeah, I mean, we're getting there. You have companies like Bright Hire, you have MetaView, you have things that are transcribing the interview, giving an analysis of that and really making sure people are held accountable to their answers. And that's fantastic.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (10:55.19)
Um, but I do still think that there's a human element there, as long as people are doing the work that you're going to need to be able to have a conversation with somebody at some point in the interview process.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (11:06.615)
And I also feel that there will be shift in perception. Similar as like during the COVID, everyone become like very comfortable with video conferences. Before it wasn't a thing. And I think with like using more technology, more automation in these processes as well, like it's coming there. And I'm excited to see how it will, where the balance will stop between them. Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (11:32.574)
Yeah. Well, and I think it also just depends on the people. That's the thing that's really been interesting is that, like for me personally, you know, I work remote, but I love getting to meet my co-workers. There's just a relationship there that for me is really, really important. Like people working with me can be can be an adventure. And I say that because
I like to crack jokes, I like to use more of my body so that people can understand when something is a joke versus when I'm being serious or anything like that. And sometimes it's just as easy to cross-hear information. I'm one of those people that really thrives on being in a place where I can hear everything that's going on, I can interpret everything that's going on.
as opposed to having very direct conversations with somebody that is on a video and that's a very direct sort of thing. Not every team works like that. There are some people who are like, all I need to know is like, shoot me an email in the morning about what you need done at the end of the day and do not talk to me for the rest of it. And that's okay. We just can't be forcing people into very specific boxes. And I think we're gonna hit a point actually in interviewing.
And I've said this for years now, where the candidate is basically going to have a choose your own adventure where they can say like, look, actually, maybe they're neurodivergent and talking with people is really, really difficult. And the role they have is not going to be someone where they're going to have to talk to a lot of people. They could say, you know, give me all of the interview pieces upfront. I'm going to do them.
and they're gonna have a no-touch kind of interview.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (13:21.827)
Yeah, I like that idea that there are different people with different personalities. For someone, this might be the best case. For another one, I want to talk personally. And Jeremy, you mentioned that there are many stakeholders involved in typical interview process. And how do you manage stakeholders? How do you organize everything?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:33.771)
Exactly.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:41.867)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (13:48.33)
I mean, every stakeholder has to be managed differently. So when we talk about stakeholders, when it comes to, let's talk about, because we were just talking about interviewing, we talk about stakeholders there. You have, especially as a recruiting coordinator or on the RecOps side, you have your recruiter, you have your hiring manager, you have the interviewers, you have the candidates.
And then if you even wanted to go kind of wild on it, you could call the tools a stakeholder too. Because you have to manage the tools and how the tools are interacting with one another as well. So for your recruiters, normally they want to know sort of the like, hey, when has the candidate been touched with? Like when did you reach out to the candidate? How did you get everything scheduled? What does that look like?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (14:24.092)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (14:38.198)
When you start talking to the hiring managers, they want to know the data, like how many interviews did we have this week? Where are we at with people in the funnel? Where are we at with the top of the funnel? Those kinds of questions. For the interviewers, it's the...
Hey, you know, you got me scheduled for six interviews this week. And like each interview is going to take me an hour. I'm about to lose six hours of business time. And that's not even accounting for what I usually like to say, which is the 30 minutes before the interview, when somebody is now worried about missing the interview. So they're not working at their peak productivity. And then the 30 minutes after the interview. So now you've just taken 12 hours out for each interview effectively on it, on them. And then you have the candidates.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (15:23.132)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (15:26.68)
are going, hey, I gave you my availability five minutes ago. Why have I not seen the confirmation? And there's different pieces and there's different cares and different avenues. And so a lot of on the rec ops side, and I say this to everybody, it's like the biggest thing that you can do is learn how to manage the most combustible element on the planet. And that is human emotion.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (15:54.276)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (15:54.578)
And it's not only other people's emotion, it's your own emotion. Because there are times where people are gonna come at you and say, you messed this up. And you're like, you sent me an email five minutes ago telling me to lay this out and I'd already done the thing that you wanted me to. Like, that's, you know, it's all about kind of how are you balancing those human elements when you do anything to...
Leo, CEO @Wayy (16:13.211)
Okay.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (16:25.17)
do the things that you need to do. And then obviously the stakeholder management on the tool side, you're constantly doing tool maintenance on the rec-op side. You're coming up with new processes to make sure that things flow better, that have better data. You're talking to that company's, your CSM and making tool recommendations to fit things that you know other people are going to need.
And I think that's why it's one of those things where when you, whenever you're going to use a tool or get a tool, adopt it, one of the biggest conversations you have is how can I get feedback on what's your release cycle? Um, because the worst thing could be when you're sitting there going, Hey, I, I need this thing and companies are like, yeah, that's Q4 2026. You're like.
You know, what am I gonna do?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (17:17.106)
Correct. Are there like any tools exist for stakeholders management? Like what tools or software you use for that? Or it is old school approach.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (17:30.758)
Well, I think that there are certainly a lot of people who have been repurposing project management tools, like your Asana's, your Mondays, tools like Smartsheet, tools like that. But I think that they also, you don't necessarily need to go out and get one of those tools if people understand at the base the tools that you're using.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (17:38.481)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (17:55.566)
and giving people the education around the tools that you're using. Like your ATS can very easily be a stakeholder management tool. It's just, sometimes people don't know that's where to go and people don't want to admit that they don't understand. And so you have to kind of continue to do that education piece along the way so people understand where to go.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (18:18.531)
Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, let's cover also the learning and development parts. This is like very, obviously very important. And is there anything new that appeared on the market recently? Anything that you tried and especially like for this?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (18:41.258)
Yeah, so I think there are two out there that immediately come to mind when people have started to talk to me about learning and development and learning management tools. So I think, especially in the TA space, two that I'm looking at are Poetry, which is a recruiter enablement platform, and Purple, P-U-R-P-L. On
Leo, CEO @Wayy (18:57.34)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (19:08.194)
Poetry is really great because for the longest time in recruiting in TA, we've had folders upon folders with documents in them.
And when people have left or people are new or things have happened, there's never been a centralized place for us to like go and find that information. And also it's become, you know, maybe you have something that's buried in one doc and things like that, that you're, that you need for another thing. And it becomes more difficult. And I've really liked how poetry has sort of taken all of that into an idea and said,
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (19:48.272)
store everything. And that I think is really, really helpful. And I know people will say, well, couldn't you organize your Google Docs or your OneDrive like that or build a Notion page or something? You could, but ultimately, I think that there are still limitations to that. And I just like what poetry is building and how they're building it.
Purple, on the other hand, while it's not that enablement platform where you're going to store all of your documents like poetry is, what Purple does is there's a lot of webinars that they've built out. And they built out a webinar library so you can go and you can learn. And that, I think, is really, really helpful because it's not the stuffy kind of learning. It's the stuff that people are actually doing on the ground.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (20:32.877)
Uh-huh.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (20:45.154)
by the people who are actually doing it. And I think that they've built a really, really good collection of people to talk and build information for.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (20:56.515)
Yeah, that's, I also like these tools when you can build your learning materials and tools available right away for your team. And looking ahead, what do you think, what trends will be dominating in these fields that we mentioned? Like in recruiting in general and in fields that we discussed.
specific technologies or methodologies we should be paying attention to.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (21:34.014)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's impossible right now to not say AI as a trend that is going to continue to dominate in the next five years. It's impossible to say it because there are so many companies that are building AI tools or building AI elements into things. I think one of the continued trends that is going to kind of pop up out of that is what are the best prompts?
because each tool is probably going to respond to prompts very differently. Uh, I think that it's also going to be where, where is the LLM for this tool coming from, um, because I think one of the things that we've noticed or started to notice is bias and AI, which for everybody, it makes sense that.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (22:19.968)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (22:24.466)
AI would be biased because if you're training it on what's called the wealth sum of human knowledge, that's inherently biased. And so certain groups are getting, and we've seen it with AI do that. And I think the other thing too, it'll be, um, how do you use data to tell a story? Um, I think when you start, one of the bigger things that has been built into most of these tools is data.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (22:28.411)
People.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (22:54.318)
And people want to see or understand what's their performance. How do these tools make them better?
Um, and I would love to kind of see, especially when it comes to sourcing tools or things like that, people really starting to build in, you know, unconscious bias pieces so that somebody could say, like at the end of a session where a recruiter is going through and reviewing resumes, there's something that could pop up and sort of say like, you, you went through a hundred resumes.
You rejected 75 of them. Within that 75, the common thread that could have shown up was you rejected everybody from this particular university that got this particular degree and had worked for this particular company. Why?
And I think that prompting of the why question is going to be very, very crucial in the next five years about why are we using this tool? Why is this the technology we're choosing to use and why are we building it this way?
Leo, CEO @Wayy (23:50.567)
Yeah.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (24:02.806)
Because without the Y we're just going to end up having a whole bunch of stuff everywhere and no real clear vision on how to use it. And I think that that's, that will also kind of lean into recruitings being very, very strict, like focused on the, like, we have this specific tool for doing a lot more than just this one little specific thing, unless the one specific thing is like this tool.
closes candidates and has 100% success rate for us. You know, that might be useful to some companies, but to others, it might be a luxury and we need to move away.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (24:42.799)
Yeah, and probably there will be technology that will identify biases as well, because now there is AI that identify like, uh, whether this text or video was generated with the help of AI. And, uh, I think there will be technology like, uh, helping people to see the biases and make better decisions.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:05.26)
Yeah.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:09.463)
And I also a big believer in technology. I think that will, yeah, one moment. My dog is crazy. Can you hear the barking, by the way? Okay, yeah, I will just start it again.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:17.826)
Sure. Well, yeah, just a little bit.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:32.527)
Yeah, give me one moment.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:34.766)
Sure.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:50.43)
Okay.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (25:53.891)
Yeah, and I'm also... One moment.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (25:59.618)
Hehehe
Leo, CEO @Wayy (26:31.747)
She like always quiet, but when we started the recording, she like barking and now like the postman like knocked the door and she like went crazy after that. Okay.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (26:47.651)
Yeah, I believe in technology will play a pivotal role in recruitment and in many industries, obviously. So I believe that the future is like more hybrid when co-pilots will significantly improve our productivity and like for any professionals. And this is what we do at Wei. So we're creating this Wei virtual recruiter that pretty much automates all...
most time consuming manual tasks, such as like sourcing candidate based on detailed skill profile, crafting personalized messages to increase engagement and managing the communication and screening for candidates end to end. So we believe that as a result recruiters will be able to focus their time on meaningful conversations with top candidates and they don't need to spend
manual stuff. So that will be a very big help. And before we wrap up, any final thoughts or advice for our listeners, Jeremy?
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (27:58.506)
Yeah, kind of just thinking about what you just said too, I think one of the things that I will say is that process informs outcomes. And so the thing that I would say to people to leave it to is think about what your process is. Think about if you would wanna go through that process yourself.
and think about the whys behind each thing and take that back to like first principles.
And it might seem like a tedious task to do, but you'll start to see where there are holes in your, in things that are causing other problems and will cause other problems down the line so that you can strategically think about how to solve those. And I think that's where having your RecOps team enabled and supported really can help a recruiting team be successful with what they are trying to do. So that I would believe people.
with that sort of takeaway is definitely look at your process and be very thoughtful about all the why questions you ask down that road.
Leo, CEO @Wayy (29:09.107)
That is amazing advice. And thank you, Jeremy, for sharing your valuable insights with us today. And thank you to listeners for tuning in. So we will put in comments all the useful tools that were mentioned during the conversation, and as well as a link to profile, to Jeremy's profile if you don't mind. So maybe somebody would like to ask more questions or share something, please reach out.
And don't forget to subscribe to This Is The Way podcast for more discussions about new tools and best practices in hiring management and professional development. Also submit your comments about topics you would like us to cover, and see you in the next episode. Thanks everyone. Bye.
Jeremy Lyons (RecOps Collective) (29:58.614)
Yeah. Thank you, everyone.
