By Johnny Campbell
Every talent acquisition leader eventually faces this question: Do I hire another recruiter to deal with the capacity issue, or do I make my existing team more efficient?
Most leaders assume the answer involves expensive new technology. A shiny AI tool. An enterprise platform upgrade. A six-figure investment and three months of implementation.
Molly Sly’s team at Sage took a different approach.
With a team of just three people supporting 35 recruiters across six countries, they increased capacity from 54 hires per recruiter per year to 71 – a 31% improvement – without buying a single major new tool.
How? By doing the basics brilliantly.
Last week on SocialTalent Live, Molly shared exactly how they did it. This is the first in our three-part series on The Rise of TA Operations, and it starts with the foundation: what a small, mighty TA Ops team can actually deliver when they focus on enablement over acquisition.
The Capacity Crisis Nobody Talks About
Here’s what Molly told us about the state of TA before her enablement team was established two years ago:
“Your recruiters need support. They don’t have the time to stop and figure out why a process is taking so long. So they just kind of suffer through it because no one has the time to stop and say, wait, can we change this?”
Sound familiar?
During our live poll, 75% of attendees said they now have a dedicated TA Operations function or person. That’s a massive shift. Ten or fifteen years ago, virtually nobody had this role. Now it’s becoming essential.
The catalyst at Sage was a perfect storm: budget pressures, a global restructuring, and the recognition that “everyone’s being asked to do more with less.” Leadership made a critical decision – take three people off requisitions and create a global TA enablement team.
Molly’s team handles “anything that is not filling a requisition” – process efficiencies, tech tool adoption, forecasting, scalability, and programs. As Molly describes it, TA Ops is really “Rec Ops plus Enablement combined.” Rec Ops focuses on infrastructure, process, and data. Enablement focuses on training, content, and making sure recruiters have everything they need to excel.
The question was: Could three people really make a difference supporting 35 recruiters filling roles across thirteen to sixteen countries?
The answer: Absolutely. But only if they were strategic about it.
The Four Initiatives That Drove 31% Capacity Increase
1. Hiring Manager Training: Stopping the Endless Candidate Shopping
One of Molly’s biggest insights: “So many of our hiring managers have never even had training, no matter how many years of experience they have.”
The result: Hiring managers who lacked confidence in their interview process. Who kept asking to see “just one more candidate.” Who delayed decisions because they weren’t sure they were asking the right questions.
This wasn’t just frustrating for recruiters – it was destroying capacity.
Molly’s team implemented structured interview training for hiring managers, helping them:
- Understand what a structured interview plan looks like
- Ensure each interviewer assesses different criteria
- Ask the right questions to evaluate candidates confidently
The impact: “It gives the managers confidence to pull the trigger and not just keep shopping around, which was super frustrating, I think, for every recruiter that ever lived.”
Faster hiring. Higher quality of hire. Less recruiter burnout. All from investing in the people who actually make the hiring decision.
2. Global Standardization via SharePoint: The Repository That Saved 4 Hours Per Recruiter Per Month
Before the enablement team, every recruiter at Sage was recreating the wheel. Building their own templates. Searching for resources. Figuring things out from scratch.
Molly’s team built a SharePoint site – a single repository where recruiters could find absolutely everything they needed. Templates. Process documentation. Guidelines. All clearly defined, easy to find.
The adoption challenge was real. As Molly joked: “I really felt like at the beginning I needed to just have a tattoo on my forehead that said ‘It’s in the SharePoint’ because people were like, ‘Hey, where’s this thing?’ It’s in the SharePoint.”
They hammered the message home. Every meeting, every question, every new resource: “It’s in the SharePoint. Here’s the link. It’s in the SharePoint.”
Eventually, it worked. When Molly’s analyst, Sylvia, looked at the SharePoint data to measure ROI, they found:
- 800 monthly visits
- 2.5 minutes average per visit
- Saving recruiters 5-10 minutes each time they accessed it
- Total impact: ~4 hours saved per recruiter per month
That’s not just efficiency – that’s capacity reclaimed. Time that recruiters can spend actually recruiting instead of searching for a template they know exists somewhere.
3. Simple Tech Optimization: Making What You Have Actually Work
Here’s where Molly’s approach really shines – it’s not about buying new tools. It’s about using the tools you already have more effectively.
Her team focused on:
ATS Dashboard Setup: Small changes to how recruiters set up their dashboards saved massive amounts of time. “Even just some simple ways to have the ATS and their dashboard set up can really save them some massive amounts of time,” Molly explained.
Teams Premium Transcription: Instead of expensive interview intelligence platforms, Sage uses Microsoft Teams Premium to transcribe interviews and generate summaries for hiring managers.
But here’s the critical part – they did it right, with proper legal consent.
Molly’s team checked with their legal department first. The guidance? Don’t use the recording function (video recordings create bias risk and make hiring managers wonder “why are you letting me watch you do your job?”). But transcription is fine as long as recruiters get explicit consent.
The script: “Hey Johnny, I would love to turn on the transcription function. I’m still gonna be taking some notes, but I wanna be more invested in what you’re saying. I wanna dial in. And that way, I can get a summary at the end. Are you fine with that?”
As long as the candidate says yes, you’re good to go. And if they ask for the notes later, you share them – it was a conversation between you and them anyway.
4. Proper Onboarding: No More “Everyone Gets Trained Differently”
Before the enablement team existed, every recruiter at Sage was trained differently depending on who their manager was and when they joined.
Now? “We hire a new recruiter, they go through an onboarding process and we make sure they’re trained in all the things they need to be trained in.”
This might seem basic, but it’s foundational. When every recruiter starts with the same knowledge, same tools, same approach, you eliminate the inefficiency of 35 people all doing things slightly differently.
The ROI Conversation: From 54 to 71 (and What’s Actually Sustainable)
Here’s the number that mattered to Sage leadership:
For years, the company used 54 hires per recruiter per year as the standard for workforce planning. Need to hire 1,000 people? You’ll need about 19 recruiters. That was the math.
Then Molly’s analyst, Sylvia, looked at what recruiters were actually delivering with the enablement team in place:
71 hires per recruiter per year.
But – and this is important – Molly was honest about what that meant: “That is not a sustainable number. Our recruiters have absolutely been, I mean, they’ve been killing themselves. They’ve been killing it and killing themselves probably in the process as well.”
So what IS sustainable?
Molly and Sylvia settled on 61-62 hires per recruiter per year as the new baseline. That’s still a 15-20% improvement over the old standard, with the capacity to surge up to 40% when necessary and properly supported.
This is how you make the business case for TA Ops: not with vague promises of “efficiency,” but with concrete capacity numbers that directly impact workforce planning and budget.
As Molly put it: “We weren’t taking the time to say, ‘Hey, how do we sing for our supper? What are the metrics to show that our enablement team is making an impact?'”
Now they can.
The Philosophy: Lean, Learning, and Leading
Molly’s approach to TA Ops is refreshingly lean. It’s not about massive transformation projects or enterprise software rollouts. It’s about:
A growth mindset: The team uses SocialTalent for their recruiters’ ongoing development. They ask recruiters to invest in their own learning, not just rely on formal training.
Making tools work smarter: When they DO bring in new technology (they’re currently onboarding LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant), they don’t just “throw recruiters a new tool.” Molly’s team entrenches themselves in it first, figures out how to make it as easy as possible for recruiters to adopt, and drives training and adoption carefully.
Understanding that tools only work if people use them: “You can’t just throw recruiters a new tool. They don’t have time to stop. If they go in and use it once or twice and it doesn’t work for them, then they’re never going to touch it again. So it’s our team that tries to figure out – how can we make that more useful? How can we show them that it actually could help them if they try it maybe a different way?”
This is the reality of TA Operations done well: it’s not glamorous. It’s not about being first to adopt every new AI tool. It’s about enabling your team to do their best work by removing friction, providing resources, and optimizing what you already have.
The Positioning Shift for Sage’s TA Ops Team
Molly’s team is called “Global TA Enablement” at Sage, not “TA Ops.” But regardless of the title, they’re delivering what every TA Ops function should deliver: measurable capacity gains for recruiters, without requiring massive budget increases.
Three people. Thirty-five recruiters. Six countries. Thirteen to sixteen markets. A 31% capacity increase.
It’s proof that TA Operations doesn’t have to be expensive. It has to be intentional.
In our next article in this series (publishing on Monday), we’ll explore what Tyler Weeks from Marriott taught us about measuring TA Ops effectiveness – including why your time-to-fill data is probably lying to you, and what metrics actually matter.
But for now, if you’re a TA leader wondering whether you need a TA Ops function, or if your existing Ops team is wondering how to prove their value, Molly’s story gives you the blueprint:
Start with the basics. Measure the impact. Enable your team to be brilliant.
WATCH MOLLY’S FULL SEGMENT to hear more about how Sage’s enablement team drives capacity gains, including audience Q&A about SharePoint adoption, legal considerations for AI transcription, and the evolution of the TA Ops role.
