EP 226: Navigating Modern TA Operations in 2026

0:08Jeremy Lyons: Welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. Each episode, we sit down with a talent acquisition operator to unpack the breakthrough moments that shape their life and career and how those moments change the way they lead, hire, and build. Thank you to our partners. SecureVision, the number one embedded recruiting and RPO firm for technical, GTM, and G &A hiring. June, the go-to AI interviewer for teams that want to move fast and never miss out on top talent. And Jim, the only AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform.

0:46Jeremy Lyons: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. We got Jeremy Lyons with us. Jeremy is currently the co-founder over at RecOps Collective. Jeremy, thanks for joining me today.

0:55James Mackey: Thank you for having me.

0:57Jeremy Lyons: So I'm very excited for our conversation today. And before this call, we had our prep call and I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. And I'm really interested to learn more about the work that you're doing. I think it's a really exciting time in recruitment operations and how talent acquisition leaders are thinking about crafting TA solutions and driving better hiring outcomes. Really exciting things happening with tech. probably a little more challenging to figure out how to orchestrate different technical and people solutions to drive results. But yeah, I'm hoping to have a really interesting conversation around that.

1:31Jeremy Lyons: But maybe just to take a step back, could you tell everyone a little bit about what you do in your role and how you work with organizations?

1:39James Mackey: Yeah. So when it comes to how I work with different organizations and the work that I do, It's really a broad scope of things. RecOps is not necessarily just one item. It covers programs, it covers operations, it covers data analytics, it covers strategic work that the recruiting team is doing. Now, by and large, it's covering a lot of AI pieces and enablement pieces. Sometimes it's even covering employer brand. So it's really staying. It's really the most, I would say, maybe biasly, the most exciting place to be in recruiting because every day is different. Every technology piece changes something.

2:23James Mackey: Every social piece that somebody else puts out changes something. And so it really forces you to stay on your toes and work with people to really understand and also just very firmly stay networking because chances are you are working on something that is somebody else is probably working on. Maybe they have a different angle. Maybe you have a different angle. And it's really just this ability to stay connected in the ways that you need to stay connected.

2:55Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, definitely. So can you give me maybe like a, it'd be helpful to get an example of a recent engagement or project you've been working on?

3:04James Mackey: Yeah, yeah, no, it's so at least as part of my business, something else that I do is I do a lot of community work and there's been a very big renewed interest in the recruiting operations community and tailoring conferences to us. So I just helped a major rec tech player put on a huge conference. So that's been cool. And then really it's a number of brands of all shapes and sizes adopting new technology and helping do some implementation work, especially around tools like Ashby and Greenhouse and a few others.

3:41Jeremy Lyons: Nice. Yeah, that's great. That's great. And what types of organizations are you typically working with? Are these primarily startups, scale up, growth stage, enterprise? What do they typically look like?

3:51James Mackey: Yeah, so it's really, it's been across the board. It's been in pretty industry agnostic as well. It really boils down to what are people doing? What technology are people using? And how are they trying to use it? Definitely have seen kind of renewed interests in companies thinking about how do we think about people? How do we deploy our people, especially now we had that sort of everybody should use AI. conversation. Now it's, hey, all the AI companies got us very hooked on using themselves. And now I've switched to different payment models of like, instead of a flat monthly plan, it's now you're going to be paying by tokens.

4:33James Mackey: So now there's this return back to an interest in, into the people. But I think also now we're starting to see more and more data come out around people and AI and how that interaction is happening and how best to leverage it, as well as certainly a lot of legislation around that usage. So it's a lot of the conversations I have, which start out around AI and tool building and stuff like that actually really boil down to internal constructions about how companies think about their hiring. What can I do to help them develop their hiring culture? And so those projects have actually been really cool because they start out as a, hey, we were looking at the data and the data doesn't look right.

5:16James Mackey: And it's the data doesn't look right because your process around this isn't right. You're hiring, you're hiring teams haven't been doing this thing in a more modern way and sophisticated way. So how do we get, how do we get everybody up to speed? Yeah. Yeah.

5:31Jeremy Lyons: I'm curious to hear from you as you say, more data is coming in around, particularly like with AI implementation and when it's appropriate to use people for certain certain emotions and when it's appropriate to leverage technology or how rather to use both alongside each other how could people use ai i'm curious what have been the most interesting findings for you potentially over the past three to six months findings in what specific sense would you say i think one thing i've given a lot of thought to is i feel like in 2025 25, people wanted to use AI. Everybody's AI, AI. There's this big kind of craze to implement modern tech.

6:13Jeremy Lyons: I think a lot of TA leaders felt, probably still feel a lot of pressure to be forward thinking and implementing the best technology. They don't want to be left behind. They don't want to come across as not feeling like they're in the know, even at times where maybe they don't feel from an outcome perspective, they don't even necessarily feel like they have to implement something new, they feel like they should, right? There's other teams where there's, of course, genuine, massive productivity gains that can be introduced through AI. But I think there was a lot of fumbling in 2024 and early 25, where people didn't really know how to implement it, like where it was going to be effective.

6:47Jeremy Lyons: And I think in 2026, we're starting to get a better sense of high leverage areas to implement AI. So I'm just curious if that's something you've experienced. And I certainly have, but I know my guests have heard from me punny. So my audience rather. So what are your thoughts?

7:03James Mackey: I think that what's interesting to me is one thing as a business owner and consultant is that you're always paying attention to the market because you have to think to yourself, what is happening next? So it puts you in a very particularly interesting spot because one, you're doing a lot of social listening and two, you're doing a lot of research because you need to know or be at least a step ahead of where other people are so that you're able to market your skills or add skills to your tool belt that you might not have had before. And so it's a very different piece that you're trying to capture.

7:46James Mackey: And I think one of the things that a lot of people made the mistake of was they rushed to say that they did the thing. But then when you started to dig in deeper as to like, why did they do the thing? You ran into certainly some issues where people couldn't articulate it. And I think that's why we've started to see a little bit more of a conversation around context engineering versus just prompt engineering. And I think that one of the other things that has been certainly quite interesting has been, I started out as an RC, in-house RC. And I love the RC work. I still think that it is a phenomenal position to be in and learn and grow and learn a ton about the recruiting space.

8:39yeah yeah yeah and back then i would still ask a lot of the same questions i ask now the only

8:47James Mackey: difference is that people are i think a lot more used to people trying to get more context and so the people who in the past might have been labeled a squeaky wheel because there's hey why are we doing this thing this way why let's have a conversation about this now are in positions where you need all that context. They understand all that context. They're training things in all that context. And I think largely speaking, a lot of how we recruit, how we talk to people, how we think about what we're doing has changed significantly because we all know we need these context-rich interactions in order to be able to be more effective at our job.

9:33Yeah. Yeah.

9:36Jeremy Lyons: Yeah, it's really cool, man. I am curious to get your thoughts just on where the market is today. What products, not necessarily product names, we can go that route too, but what use cases do you feel like are most interesting on the tech side right now? Use cases for AI. Use cases for AI.

9:56James Mackey: Yeah.

10:01Jeremy Lyons: If you had to, okay, how about this? Maybe if I put it this way. What if we had to pick like the one highest impact? And it's obviously different for most environments, like different environments. But if you had to pick one use case for AI and talent acquisition, what would it be? That's a more fun question.

10:18James Mackey: That is a more fun question. It's a deeper question, which is why I'm like... It's hard.

10:21Jeremy Lyons: It's like he's making you pause.

10:23James Mackey: The reason why I pause is because I've had a lot of conversations with people recently. And I know, for example, like Aptitude Research published a paper with Ashby where they pointed out scheduling is this incredibly impactful thing that ai should be handling nobody should be handling their own scheduling it should all just be ai and so the thing i don't know if i do so here's the and that's the exact reason why i was pausing to think earlier which is to me when i sit there and i look and i think about what does this space look like and what is the bulk job of what the recruiting coordinator does or other iterations.

11:03James Mackey: Now we're seeing candidate experience specialists or what the core of their job has been.

11:13James Mackey: The piece that I come back to is, okay, if we automate the hell out of this, how do we train the next generation to do the thing? because you learn so much in these entry level roles that are being automated out so now it's you know that whole debate where it's like you need the five years of experience but in order to get the five years of experience you have to get the job that's going to give you the five years of experience loop i think that ai has been very disrupt will be and has been very disruptive to that loop. And now it becomes, where are people going to develop the skills that they need to be effective in other places where they have the context to be effective at it?

11:59So I don't know.

12:01James Mackey: It's a very interesting question that I don't think I've sat on long enough to have an answer where I'm like, this is the most exciting thing because what I say today when as we're recording this on a friday could be completely obsolete by monday when one of the

12:20Jeremy Lyons: students one of the labs releases a new model yeah for sure for sure yeah it and it also it's like it's a cool soundbite but the reality is it's going to be different based on the environment yeah i mean like scheduling is obviously a massive pain i think the hard part where to have it fully automated is that sometimes the problem is that you have really busy executives and it just takes rescheduling and scheduling and it pay you have this internal thing yeah could ai technically sure but sometimes when there's a need to last minute reprioritize a candidate to push them in a week sooner to close those things it's not something that i just even for instance like i know ebay and some bigger companies they use technology like ai for scheduling but they still have a human that's watching the conversations it can jump in at any time to override it so i think that there's still for instance even when it's scheduling it's it seems it sounds like very basic and entry level and oh anybody can that's the type of work to automate it's like yes and no it's yes it's a junior level role but there is still a level of complexity to it that i think it's there's to some extent there needs to be someone helping drive speed with it to help it move faster.

13:37Jeremy Lyons: You're just going to lose candidates. Well, and it's interesting that you take that

13:42James Mackey: angle, not because I think that it's a bad angle to take. I think the reason why I personally think of it as being quite interesting is that it all comes back to humanity in a way. And tools like this, because I know a lot of scheduling tools in the rec tech space, have great relationships with them offer product feedback to them and everything like that the the difficulty is not actually in the tech the difficulty in it is yeah the hiring managers it's it's the people yeah it's the you're a busy guy i'm a busy guy and if i have an assistant i have to give all of my the assistant my context and most people because we still are operating in an idea around tools in a very specific kind of way and this is the stuff that I oftentimes talk about with recruiting operations teams all over the place is you need to actually sit people down and say what is the thing that we're trying to do and get them to really tease out the Like the value of stuff.

15:00James Mackey: And so there's nothing that I can do right now that would make you more curious, better detailed, anything like that. If that is not already base software that you have in you. I've jokingly said if people want to get really good at AI and building AI for themselves, the first thing that they should do is book a therapy appointment. and the reason for that is quite simply because if you book a therapy appointment and you learn the techniques to be able to break down how you think and how you do all the things that you need to do you will be better at ai because you will be able to say to somebody this is why this specific problem upsets me this is why i need a solution to this specific problem this is what i would consider a good solution to this problem and you're able to basically like tony stark pull the thing apart look at it in a whole bunch of ways pull things out and then slam it back together because you're like i know how to partition my brain to explain very detail to somebody else why this has value and a lot of people are able to do that

16:24Jeremy Lyons: So scheduling, it is an interesting one. What else are you looking at right now? Of course, we have all the AI note takers and integrating with the ATS and managing and helping update scorecards, that kind of thing. You have AI sourcing, you have AI screening and interviewing. What have you else been focused on with your customers right now, like recently?

16:50James Mackey: I know we've spent the bulk part talking about AI and I think everybody is probably, Jesus, can people stop talking about AI for five minutes?

16:58Jeremy Lyons: I don't, but it's changing. The issue is that it's changing every like five minutes. Yeah, it's changing. But the thing about it is that it's still addressing a fundamental human problems and

17:11James Mackey: pieces like that. So I think the most interesting things that I'm actually working on with my clients is hiring cultures and really being very defined about what do they, what do, how is somebody going to be successful within their culture?

17:30Jeremy Lyons: Oh, so you're talking like, okay, so that's more on like the post talent acquisition when you're talking about how to be successful within a culture. Well, but the thing about it though is, so part of it is post talent acquisition.

17:46James Mackey: I think part of it is also when people start talking about this quality of hire as a metric. It's a business. Like one, it's amorphous. We don't have a good definition for it. Two, it's a business metric. It's not a recruiting metric.

18:02Jeremy Lyons: Thank you. It's just, it's almost mildly obnoxious to try to put that on a TA team to own as a core metric of success. It's not, look, it sounds really cool in theory, but it's not something that I think should be a core TA metric.

18:17James Mackey: Oh, yeah. No, I don't think that it's a core TA metric. I think that much in the same way, like I think right now what we're all trying to get to, TA not just included, but everybody is trying to get to, is what are business metrics and how do we pull those in to tell a story? So what's the impact on marketing on sales? What's the impact of sales on marketing? What's the impact of social on all the things? What's the impact that recruiting has on HR? What's the impact that HR has on sales? All these things. All these things are just like all departments. And now we're starting to get very good because we have all these data sets being pulled into one and into an MCP and stuff like that, where we could start to say, what does your Salesforce data look like?

19:07James Mackey: What does your recruiting data look like? And now expose it. But more simply than that, I think that a lot of companies now are trying to figure themselves out in a constructive way. And that could be, at least on the talent side, as simple as, are we building things to replace us or are we building things to co-pilot with us? And that's not just how are we using AI, that's how are we building something to have more people involved or less people involved? And how are we successful at that? And some companies want to build to replace. Some companies want to build to co-pilot. And you have to be at least flexible enough to know, is this an environment that I will work well in?

20:04James Mackey: Because not everybody will. And that, I think, is starting to become more and more of a value for our culture. Yeah.

20:13Jeremy Lyons: When you're talking about building a hiring culture with your customers, it sounds like what you're also talking about is, so there's an aspect of it like AI enablement, co-pilot marketing, agentic. There's that aspect too. But what do you, when you talk about making a change to recruiting culture, hiring culture, what can you give us an example? Maybe you don't have to name the name of a customer, but like, I don't know, just walk me through like maybe a situation where you walked into a customer environment where there was issues with hiring culture, how they're reviewing talent acquisition or whatnot, and what you were able to do to address it and get them on the right track.

20:46James Mackey: Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there was a company that I worked with where the recruiting team had hit the ground running. When you see that meme of somebody turning on a treadmill really high and the person jumps on it and gets thrown off, that was the expectation was, we've turned this treadmill up to 12 miles an hour, we're dropping a recruiting team on it, go and sprint. And they had totally new tech that many of them hadn't been familiar with. And so naturally, when you get confronted with totally new tech that you haven't used before, you're probably going to default to what you've done in the past.

21:24James Mackey: Not all tools accommodate such a thing. But procedurally, one of the things that this team had done was created a single point of failure by saying, okay, one person will be sending out all of our offer letters. and this was problematic in a couple of ways because the way they would end up using the system is james i'd say hey james i'm gonna send you an offer here's the offer isn't it great and you'd be like yeah it's great i accept they'd be marking the candidate as hired in the system but the problem is you didn't get a formal offer letter yet you've accepted a verbal But now all the data around offer acceptance rate looks really screwy too.

22:19James Mackey: And so while that looks like a systems issue and it looks like a process issue and it looks like all these things from the outside, really what it boiled down to was an enablement issue. And you had to understand that the bulk of these recruiters and individuals had come from a very specific type of hiring culture where the recruiting HR handoff happened after the candidate had verbally accepted an offer. And that can run very differently in different places, but that ultimately was not going to be long-term successful at this specific company. So I worked with them to switch everything. So now that the recruiters could send the offer letters, there wasn't a single point of failure.

23:15James Mackey: When a candidate signed the offer letter, it tracked it in the system and flipped things over. It did specific things that ultimately changed how the recruiting team itself operated, because now they had more control. They could look at things that could be, they had a better grasp of their data versus them being like on a Friday night, you mentioned you're on the East Coast, I'm on the West Coast, me firing off a text to you and at 10 o 'clock your time, seven o 'clock my time, James, I need you to get this offer letter out in the next five minutes. And you're like, I'm sitting down to have dinner with my family.

23:53James Mackey: The week is over. And that being like, why are you holding things up? It's like, I'm not just like, I'm a human being and I have a life and I have a family and I need to eat dinner and all those things. Also, if you're having dinner at 10 o 'clock at night, you know, totally.

24:11Jeremy Lyons: Yeah. It's like you don't need a different eating at home culture.

24:15James Mackey: Look, plenty of cultures eat late at night. Things go into the evening and those cultures have siestas as well, which like I'll take a nap time.

24:23Jeremy Lyons: Yeah. Hey, so you're also pretty big into creating content, right? If I'm not mistaken. So this rec ops roundup, that's, is that a newsletter that you put together or? Yep. Oh, so yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that, man.

24:34James Mackey: Yeah. So the RecOps Roundup started out as a very big passion project for me because as a RecOps professional, most of the information that I'm getting is sourced from all over the web. You've got data folks talking about data pieces that you might not see if you don't know the right people to follow anything like that. You've got tool updates that you have to be maintaining in your brain and you're not sure where those things are. And so really it started out as a digest of, hey, here are jobs that are open. Here are updates from vendors. Here are events that are coming up. Historically, the recruiting operations, TA operations world, we've been locked.

25:17James Mackey: We were very heads down internally in our own company. So we don't necessarily know what's going on outside of it. So it helps people to focus in and lock in. And And part of what I do with it is make sure that people also have bite-sized advice for how to be better at the work that they're doing every day. And I have not taken any vendor money for the newsletter. Some people might call that smart. Some people might call that stupid. But the reason for that is it's a neutral resource for everybody to use.

25:53Jeremy Lyons: Yeah. I'll find a way to do both. we should talk about that. That'd be cool though if you'd help that because those things, it's pretty expensive to produce, right? You put so much time into these types of things. You got to get some sponsorship slots or something.

26:06James Mackey: It's, you know what? It is the time. There is a time cost. Yeah, that's probably the biggest part, right?

26:11Jeremy Lyons: And that's huge. That's hugely expensive in a way.

26:13James Mackey: Yeah. At the same time though, there's one way to look at it, which is, oh my God, I'm spending all this time putting this thing together. The thing about it is that I'm already reading those articles to be better myself about it. So it's a forcing mechanism that I have to read it to share it to my community. And so I'm learning at the same time. And the thing about it is no one can learn for you. You can only learn for you. And so I consider it every week, it's an investment in myself, but it's an investment in my in my community that pays dividends for other people that I just get to share that's awesome yeah man that's cool right as you can imagine the podcast is a pretty massive

27:02Jeremy Lyons: investment but I also have team members that are doing a lot of the work on the production side too so yeah it's interesting I've been talking with folks about sponsoring too and I do I am neutral and so it's like talking with them it's funny because we'll talk about sponsorship plus slots like to be clear i'm gonna if i think a tool is better than this than the other whatever i'm gonna talk about it we can give you the shout out you can get the slot i can even try to help help make intros but i'm also going to introduce them to a competitor if i think it's the right the right move so you just and that's what i've been having those conversations lately is like how do you feel about that to be clear here's how i can help but it's not exclusive it's not so i'm navigating that right now too but i have decided yeah we're going to start to bring on sponsors because it's just it's expensive to the show's just gotten to a point where it's like we want sponsorship slots at this point where i start to yeah no it's so there's a few things

27:55James Mackey: that i would tell the people maybe you're a listener maybe to your listeners this is an important thing is that for a lot of people who maybe you've been laid off maybe if you've always had this burning desire to start your own recruiting operations or recruiting thing and you're going to go solo, especially on the recruiting operations side. The thing that I say for a lot of people to do, the advice that I give is one, take stock in the tools that you know really well and reach out to those vendors and say, hey, look, I'm starting to go. I'm going to go solo. Do you have a partnership agreement that we can sign so that when I refer you, I get, you know, it's mutually beneficial to us both.

28:41James Mackey: And that can be anywhere between 10 to 20 % of first year contract for most vendors. Some vendors are even greater when they're like, Hey, if they renew, we'll give you a cut of whatever the renewal is. So that's an avenue of business that most people don't. The other thing too, is a lot of the vendors.

28:59Jeremy Lyons: The cool thing with that, just to double click on that for a second is you can do that. It doesn't have to be only with that. You can go, you don't have to give that. It's not, this doesn't make you give bias advice. You can literally, all of these companies will give you partnership agreements. So you can, for all those companies in the space, all of them are willing to do some kind of rev share situation, as you said. So you can just build up partnerships with all of these major companies. It's a really smart move.

29:24James Mackey: Yeah. Though, having said that, I think a lot of partnership groups, they're not going to just hand out, hand these things out.

29:31Jeremy Lyons: You don't say not do them to consultants. It has to be established firms or.

29:34James Mackey: oh i think it's just that people want to see people be represented like sometimes i think some companies feel like maybe that's a conflict of interest between if you're an in-house person and that it's think about when you if you're an in-house team and you run a referral bonus program and basically you have one person who's like hey look i figured out i can refer all these people I've now made up my entire months or my entire year's worth of salary and referral bonuses. And now I'm like doing part of my job, but I know that the real recruiter.

30:09Jeremy Lyons: Yeah.

30:09James Mackey: Yeah. I've now become a recruiter because maybe you're offering 10, 15 ,000 and they look at their, what they're getting paid and they look at that and they go, look, I can easily pull in an additional a hundred K in referral revenue. And you're not actually focused on your. Yeah. Pulls you away from your job.

30:27Jeremy Lyons: Have you known anybody who's done that?

30:29James Mackey: Oh yeah. No, I've seen it at bigger.

30:31Jeremy Lyons: Successfully?

30:32James Mackey: Much bigger companies. I think what usually happens is somebody, you see it, if you're running a referral program, you see that somebody has shown up a lot and then you're like, wait a minute. And then you go and you look at their performance and you go, wait a minute. And then somebody goes inevitably, wait a minute. And you start connecting all the dots. And usually at that point in time, somebody has a conference, pulls that person aside and has a conversation with them.

30:56Jeremy Lyons: that's okay just fyi you'll have to do your job yeah we hired you to do something do the thing

31:03James Mackey: but partnership agreements are good then the other thing too is if you're a solo person or you're going solo i think the other thing too that people don't realize is you really have to love what you do because you're going to spend only 20 to 30 percent of your time doing that thing because the other 70 % of the time is going to be doing biz dev work. And so one of the things that can be really helpful if you've built a really good relationship with these brands and you're going solo is getting a integration partner or implementation partner agreement in place too. Because these brands, if you're a very good brand ambassador, will feed you business.

31:47James Mackey: and that at least in your first year or two can make all the difference in the world between you having an okay year or you having an okay to a bad year or having a very very good year because literally you they built you they build you your runway until you've got your branding in and you've built credibility and you have enough referrals and then the final thing that i would say is don't be afraid to partner up with somebody who already has an established brand if they'll take you on and teach you. And to that end too, I think one of the things that people don't totally understand is the consultant market.

32:29James Mackey: A lot of people know other people. And so, especially on the recruiting operations side, there are a lot of consultant recruiters who don't want to have to do the operations work. They just want to go in there and they want to put butts in seats. So if they have someone like you and they know you, they can refer you. And so you can follow along in this very symbiotic relationship because inevitably somebody's going to say, Hey, do you know a great recruiter or do you know a great people operations person or a great head of fractional head of whatever? And you go, yeah, actually you open it up and you refer them and you get referral agreements going in place with those things.

33:10James Mackey: So there's, There's a big market there that shows up. And I think going back to your initial point, I think the newsletter certainly helps my business because people see it in my space every week. And people, it helps you to develop a lot of credibility. People want to talk to you. Brands want to have their names featured. and to your point the other thing too is and this is the dark side of neutrality is if you come out the gate neutral it's a lot harder than coming out the gate as a huge supporter of a one of a tool yeah i mean you have to almost fight to be neutral and gain particularly if you

33:51Jeremy Lyons: want to partner up with brands and that's like yeah what's interesting right now because it's so i own two companies and i have the podcast and one of my companies is an embedded recruiting an RPO firm. The other one is June, which is an AI interviewing product. And then I have the podcast. And as you can imagine, both my companies sponsor the podcast. And then we have a couple other partnerships we're onboarding to help with that as well. But yeah, I've just had to be very clear with any partners that we bring on. It's like, look, we're not exclusive. We're not doing that. And we'd love to partner up with you on this.

34:19Jeremy Lyons: And at the same time, we're going to make recommendations based on my expertise. Ultimately, that's my brand. I'm not, there's no, and there's been a couple of times where I spoke with, I'm not going to name the name, but they didn't really love that. They didn't love the idea of they're like, if we're going to be partnering on XYZ, then we want to, you're also going to be potentially recommending our competitor. It's like, look, yeah, it just depends. Like if that's okay with you or not, I totally understand. But just like I would, I'm going to recommend the best company to the right person. To me, that's critically important because I, unfortunately I am so plugged into the podcast that it gives me access to like all of these different companies and products and solutions And I think it's definitely important to stay neutral as a, when you have a job similar to ours, we do different things, but similar in a lot of ways in some respects.

35:07Jeremy Lyons: And I think it's like, this can be associated, but I think people also have to trust that you'll make recommendations outside of the brand affiliation that you have, right?

35:15James Mackey: like yeah and i think there's a thing in that there's an element into that is brands have to brands aren't atms and they have to protect themselves too which is a thing that will definitely happen and so within all that you do have to be very clear that it's when they when brands get upset they say why didn't you recommend us for this or why didn't you recommend us for that, you have to be very clear with them that like, look, this was not the ICP, that the customer was not the ICP. Or I've certainly run into this a number of times where businesses have been like, I've heard you say negative things about us.

36:01James Mackey: And it's, I'm not saying negative things about you. What I'm saying is that you might not be the right fit based on the information that has been shared with me. I'm saving you churn. I'm saving you. Yeah, it's like I'm saving you the headache of dealing with this company that isn't the right fit. And you are not a company that is the right fit for everything. And that's also can be very hard. So it works out.

36:36Jeremy Lyons: So, hey, Jeremy, so what's the rest of 2026 look like for you? What are you going to be working on

36:40James Mackey: over the next few months a lot of implementation work i've got something fun that i think i'm going to be able to cook up and lovable yeah what are you working on oh come on man tell us

36:57James Mackey: no one can say no i'm not saying that i'm committed to this but i thought it would be fun to do a situation create a game that is like a situation simulator of certain recruiting operations things that people do I thought it'd be fun to do an RPG like Rack Ops thing and I thought I could do it in level bowl so I need to play with that a little bit

37:25Jeremy Lyons: dude let me know when you do if you want somebody to check it out

37:28James Mackey: we'll do we'll do

37:30Jeremy Lyons: a lot of fun. I mean, cool to see what you come up with. Yeah,

37:34James Mackey: no, it's just something creative and fun for the whimsy. Yeah,

37:38Jeremy Lyons: there you go. Nice. Nice. Good stuff, man. Hey, Jeremy, look, this has been a lot of fun. I'm really grateful that you came on the show today and shared some about yourself and your expertise. And we have a lot of talent leaders tuning in. So just for everybody tuning in, I definitely recommend giving Jeremy opportunities to talk to you about his solutions and how he can help. And Jeremy was also introduced by somebody that I know pretty well and respect a whole lot over at Zendesk. So that's, if you remember Everett who initially affected us, good people. Anyways, thank you. Thanks for coming on today.

38:09James Mackey: Definitely. And I would say too, look, definitely reach out if you just want to talk about recruiting operations and TA operations stuff. This is the stuff that I enjoy. So find me on LinkedIn, find me on my sub stack, and definitely always feel free to just reach out and ask questions. Yeah.

38:24Jeremy Lyons: And we're going to, we'll drop your LinkedIn profile in the description of the episode for everybody. So perfect. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.

38:38Jeremy Lyons: Thank you for listening to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future conversations. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. And if you have a guest recommendation, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to message me anytime. Thank you to our partners, Secure Vision, the number one embedded recruiting and RPO provider for technical, GTM, and G &A hiring. June, the go-to AI interviewer for teams that want to move fast and never miss out on top talent. And Jem, the only AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.