This year at our Recruiting Operations and Analytics Colloquium meeting, the discussion with 50 Talent Acquisition leaders started with determining the key responsibilities of both Operations and Analytics team members.  After a day and a half of collaboration among participating members, it became increasingly clear that the realized value of these specialized roles continues to grow and that input from these functional segments within their organizations is increasing across the board.  As it was our first time consolidating the Analytics and Operations themes into a single meeting, one question was obviously in need of addressing...
Has Analytics within Talent Acquisition become part of Operations or does it remain separate?
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Perhaps the most interesting discovery when breaking down the skills required to be successful in recruiting operations and analytics was in regards to whom is being hired to perform the duties found within the analytics roles inside of enterprise-sized organizations.  What was once a splintering of Excel savvy recruiters or recruiting coordinators pushed into stretch assignments has become a small army of professionals with data and analytics backgrounds and degrees.  Some of those soldiers were even stolen straight from other departments, off of unrelated (to Talent Aquisition) requisitions, or brought into recruiting with minimal if any, talent acquisition experience.
Top Operations Responsibilities: The back-end of successful recruiting operations
The logical question arises as we move into 2018 and see the scope and scale of "Operations" expanding within Talent Acquisition: Is Operations a catch-all category?  The answer isn't quite as obvious and comes back to us with mixed responses.

Operations does continue to be the location where all things that nobody else wants to pick up comes to rest.  However, the work and expertise coming out of this functional group show evidence of transforming not just the recruiting department, but the overall business as well, with its output.  Just within our membership as late as last year, we saw a foreshadowing of this in our Operations Colloquium meeting (reminder: no Analytics) when our participating members highlighted these areas as points where they felt they were making the most impact:

* Measurably improve business results
* Deliver consistent quality hires
* Generate insights on market supply
* Provide competitive intelligence

Today, there’s a definite impact on those business influencers where TA Operations professionals are spending their time:

* Systems technologies
* Vendor management
* Best practice business process
* Implementation changes/training
* Scheduling
* Internal mobility “transition assistance”
* Everything that doesn’t get picked up by other departments in recruiting - the “catch-all”
* Transformation: identifying what TA needs and then drive those processes regardless of where they sit in the business.
* Project management
* Compliance
* Market research

[Competitive Practices Survey and Benchmark Reporting | CareerXroads.com]
Top Analytics Responsibilities: Doing more with data
As the discussion continued it became clear that the responsibilities of the Analytics teams were to showcase where the company is at within that data and analytics process.  When discussing the focus last year, small groups were speaking from an experienced perspective: a company that has sound da...