THE RECRUITING OPERATIONS CONFERENCE
That's a wrap on year 3!
200 recruiting ops practitioners spent 2 full days sharing real workflows, trading ideas, and digging into the tools, agents, and AI they're exploring and building. Thank you for being part of it.
200+
recruiting ops practitioners, builders and talent leaders
20+
sessions across workshops, talks, panels and demos
13
sponsors running labs and hosting experiences
1
community connected over learning, shared meals and a lot of coffee
A transformative gathering for the doers, innovators & systems thinkers shaping the future of recruiting.
What we heard
One question kept coming up in every room: AI is already in the workflow, so how do you keep it honest? Six themes came up.
01
AI systems need maintenance, not just a launch.
02
Talent Engineering is real and what it is is being defined in real time.
03
RecOps belongs in headcount planning.
04
Candidate fraud is now an operations problem.
05
Assessment is being rebuilt for the AI era.
06
Solo operators need a brain trust.
Opening Session
A Portfolio-Level View of the State of Recruiting
Patrick O'Neil, Head of Talent at Thrive Capital
Wahab Owolabi, Head of People at Doss
Sponsor · Juicebox
Talent's Chief of Staff- How Talent Ops Turns Hiring Plans Into Results
David P, Co-Founder & CEO at Juicebox
Connor Carion, Senior Manager, Talent Operations at Render
Sponsor · Tofu
How fraud rings get through your hiring funnel
Jason Zoltak, Co-Founder & CEO at Tofu
2026 RECOPS AWARDS
Congratulations to this year's winners.
RECRUITING OPS MVP
Sandhya Miryala
Krasan
INNOVATION IN TALENT TECH
Janelisse Guasp
SimSpace
Emily Paik
Kit
AI TRAILBLAZERS IN TALENT
Jack Allen
Box
ATS WHISPERER
Evan LaBranche
People Culture Talent
Thank you to everyone who nominated a colleague and voted.
Beyond the sessions
Some of the best moments happened outside the session rooms. The week opened a day early with RecOps Hacks, where builders spent a full day at the Palmer House with Viet and Tianna turning real RecOps problems into working tools. That evening, a welcome reception and dinner brought everyone together before Day 1.
The hackathon teams finished their builds on Day 1 and demoed them on the main stage on Day 2. In between, the conversations kept going at a cocktail reception, TeamOhana’s RecOps Night Cap, and a 6:30 AM Run with RecOps from the Palmer House, led by Reimbi (for the brave). We closed with a Chicago send-off to the Art Institute and the river architecture tour.
Thank you.
2026 Program Committee
Curated an agenda by practitioners, for practitioners.
Kari Robinson
Recruiting Operations Consultant at Pattern Recruiting Operations
Jackie Bycinthe
Senior Talent Operations Specialist at Tides
Viet Nguyen
Founder at Talent Collective
Tianna Johnson
Founder at People Culture Talent
Our Attendees
To the speakers who took the stage, our sponsors and to every attendee who showed up ready to engage fully with the commuity!
RecOps Con 2027