01
AI systems need maintenance, not just a launch.
Bryan Hong’s session, The Four Gates, covered checking a process before you automate it, building validation gates, and catching drift before a system quietly breaks. Anita from Zapier built an AI onboarding coach live with Claude Skills and the Zapier MCP.
02
Talent Engineering is real, but nobody agrees yet on what it is.
Tianna Johnson, Viet Nguyen, Caitlin Cooke and Wes Richards debated whether it’s a new discipline or what strong recruiting ops teams were already doing, and who should own it.
03
RecOps belongs in headcount planning.
Connor Carion (Render) made the case that talent ops is the chief of staff to the head of talent and should own every hire, from the revenue plan to day 90. Bernardo Sosa (Vercel) went through which recruiting metrics still matter at a high-growth AI company and which are noise.
04
Hiring fraud is now an operations problem.
Jason Zoltak and the Tofu team showed how fraud rings get through a hiring funnel, where they fail, and what to do at each stage. Their candidate fraud guide is linked in the attendee Slack.
05
Assessment is being rebuilt for the AI era.
CodeSignal, CoderPad and Brighthire each ran labs on skills-first hiring, assessing people who work with AI, and rolling out AI interviews without losing candidate trust.
06
Solo operators need a brain trust.
The Team of 1 session brought solo and small-team RecOps leads together to talk about owning the whole function, making hard calls on priorities, and building community outside their own company.
