
The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast Brainfood Live on Air - Ep357 - Why You Need RecOps To Accelerate AI in TA
Jan 23, 2026
Will Ducey, Recruiting operations pro at Ashby who builds systems to help teams hire better. Jeremy Lyons, RecOps Collective co-founder who advises on scaling hiring processes. They discuss why RecOps is critical to roll out AI in talent acquisition. Short, punchy takes on RecOps origins, when to hire one, practical projects, and how RecOps embeds AI into everyday recruiting workflows.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
RecOps Is The Missing Gear For AI Adoption
- AI adoption in TA stalls because busy 360 recruiters lack bandwidth for process change.
- Hung Lee argues RecOps is the specialised function needed to implement, enable, and scale AI across recruiting workflows.
Hire RecOps Early To Fix Hiring Debt
- Start RecOps early: hire a RecOps person as one of the first TA hires to clean up processes.
- Will Ducey and others reported arriving as the minus-one and bringing teams to zero before scaling operations.
Measure RecOps By Team Health And Business Outcomes
- Measure RecOps with business health, NPS and qualitative recruiter feedback, not just throughput metrics.
- Will Ducey suggests recruiter surveys and candidate/hiring manager sentiment to guard against burning out teams.


