From October 21 to 23, 190+ recruiting ops practitioners, builders and talent leaders came to Convene in Chicago for RecOps Con 2026. Practitioners built the agenda, the labs were hands-on, and the hallway conversations ran long.
One question kept coming up in every room: AI is already in the workflow, so how do you keep it honest?
By the numbers
What we heard
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
RecOps Hacks
The day before the conference, builders spent a full day at the Palmer House with Viet and Tianna turning RecOps problems into working tools. They finished the builds on Day 1 and demoed them on the main stage on Day 2.
2026 RecOps Award winners
Thank you to everyone who nominated a colleague and voted.
Beyond the sessions
A welcome reception and dinner to open the week. A cocktail reception after Day 1, then TeamOhana’s RecOps Night Cap. A 6:30 AM Run with RecOps from the Palmer House, led by Reimbi (for the brave). And a Chicago send-off to the Art Institute and the river architecture tour.
Thank you
To our program committee, Tianna Johnson, Kari, Jackie Bycinthe and Viet Nguyen, who curated an agenda by practitioners, for practitioners.
To our sponsors: Ashby, Brighthire, CodeSignal, CoderPad, GoodTime, Juicebox, Metaview, Reimbi, TeamOhana, Teamtailor and Tofu.
To every speaker who took the stage, and to every attendee who showed up ready to share what’s actually working.
