Registration & Continental Breakfast

Get to know other attendees over a light delicious breakfast featuring fresh juice, bagels with cream cheese and jams, pastries, and seasonal fruit.  

Welcome Remarks

A Portfolio-Level View of the State of Recruiting with Patrick O'Neill (Thrive Cap)

The Four Gates: A Method for AI Systems in Recruiting Ops.

Building the agent is the easy part. This session is the discipline nobody teaches: diagnosing your process before you automate, validation gates that keep AI output trustworthy, drift detection so systems don't silently rot, and knowing when not to build. You leave with a four-part method, not a demo.

Community Showcase Morning Break

Take a well-deserved break and recharge with something sweet, courtesy of our friends at Ashby. Whether you need a sugar boost, a caffeine fix, or just a few moments to connect with fellow attendees, this treat break is the perfect pause between sessions.

RecOps Labs: The RecOps (Declassified) AI Survival Guide

AI is changing recruiting fast, but the hard part isn’t adding more tools. It’s figuring out where AI actually belongs in your recruiting operation and how to make it useful. In this hands-on lab, you’ll work through a practical framework for evaluating and applying AI across your recruiting workflow. You’ll walk away knowing what successful AI implementation looks like, learning from real examples of leading recruiting teams, and with a practical checklist to pressure-test your own stack.

RecOps Labs: From Pilot to Program: The AI Interview Rollout Playbook

A great AI interview rollout is one where everyone comes out ahead: candidates who feel respected, recruiters who get their time back, and hiring managers who trust what they receive. Getting there takes more than turning the technology on. In this working session, a talent leader who has taken AI screening interviews from pilot to program shares how they designed the candidate experience, brought recruiters and hiring managers along, and worked through the questions their legal and compliance partners raised. You will leave with a readiness assessment you can run against your own organization and a clear view of where to start.

RecOps Labs: Show, Don't Screen: Scaling Skills-First Hiring with AI

Resumes were never a great signal, and now that candidates can generate a polished one in seconds, they're even less useful. Recruiters are buried in applications that all look the same. Adding filters won't fix that. What works is seeing what candidates can actually do, earlier in the process, so qualified people reach hiring managers sooner. Join Valerie Keller, Head of Customer Experience at CodeSignal, for a practical look at how recruiting teams are replacing proxies with realistic, role-based assessments for any role. Valerie will walk through real hiring scenarios, share why candidates prefer showing their skills to being screened on keywords, and lay out how to build a skills-first process that holds up at scale.

RecOps Labs: Beyond the Hiring Tracker: Workforce Planning in Practice

Most RecOps teams inherit workforce planning as a hiring tracker that leadership quickly outgrows. Talent leaders Danielle French of Pure Storage, Amy Amato of Sprout Social, and Bev Carleton of TeamOhana give an honest look at how a large organization moves past it: identifying the problem, building support for change, redesigning workflows, and measuring progress. If you recognize the problem, you’ll leave knowing exactly where to start.

Lunch

The Rise of Talent Engineering

AI has dramatically lowered the barrier between having an idea and actually building it. Recruiting teams can now create systems, automate workflows, and turn processes (and increasingly, judgment) into repeatable infrastructure in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. But Talent Engineering raises bigger questions than what we can build. Is this actually a new discipline, or an evolution of work great recruiting teams were already doing? Who is best equipped to do it? Does Talent Engineering become a dedicated role, or simply how modern talent teams operate? And as more of recruiting can be engineered, where are the limits? In this fireside conversation, three operators who are building this work day to day get candid about how we got here, what's changing inside talent teams, and what Talent Engineering means for the people, roles, and skills shaping the future of recruiting.

Workshop: Building an AI Onboarding Coach with Claude Skills

In this hands-on session, Anita will walk through how she built an AI onboarding coach using Claude Skills and the Zapier MCP. Attendees will see the build in action and leave with a practical framework they can adapt to their own onboarding or workflow challenges, whether or not they have direct MCP access.

Workshop: RecOps Hacks

For Hackathon participates to finish building tool from prior day, test it and validate.

RecOps Labs: AI Beyond Code: What This Means for Assessing ANY Job Skill

Everyone's panicking about how to assess a developer who uses AI. Here's what most teams haven't clocked: tech is just the first domain to hit this wall. Writing, analysis, design, sales, support, they're all right behind it. By 2027, "uses AI" describes everyone you hire.
So the real prize isn't a clever dev-screening hack. Crack fair assessment for an AI-assisted developer and you've got the blueprint for assessing anyone who works with AI. Same engine, any role.
This is the "we already have that answer" moment. What CoderPad built for Engineering isn't an Eng tool, it's the hiring infrastructure for the AI era. In this session we'll show you how the assessment model that works for developers becomes the one you point at every function in the building.

RecOps Labs: Inside Recruiting Operations with Ashby

Recruiting Operations has always been at the heart of how Ashby was built. In this interactive session, we’ll explore proprietary insights from millions of candidates to unpack benchmarks across application review, referrals, tooling usage, and more. Rather than a traditional presentation, we’ll gather classroom-style to discuss the findings together — comparing experiences, sharing perspectives, and making sense of what the data means for modern RecOps teams.

Community Showcase / Afternoon Treat

Take a well-deserved break and recharge with something sweet, courtesy of our friends at Ashby. Whether you need a sugar boost, a caffeine fix, or just a few moments to connect with fellow attendees, this treat break is the perfect pause between sessions.

Talent’s Chief of Staff: How Talent Ops Turns Hiring Plans into Results

Most hiring teams only own a third of the hiring process. Finance decides which roles open and when, the People team steps in once a new hire starts, and talent ops is often left managing everything in between. Connor Carion has a different philosophy. Talent ops is the chief of staff to the head of talent, and it should own every hire from the revenue plan to the 90-day mark. Today, he leads Talent Operations at Render, where he built the function from scratch through a $100M Series C extension and is now growing his own team. Join us for a candid conversation on how talent ops can get a seat in headcount planning, how to partner with finance, and what the next generation of talent ops teams will look like.

RecOps Awards

Cocktail Reception

Unwind and connect after a packed day of insights and inspiration. Join us for drinks, light bites, and great conversation with fellow RecOps pros. Whether you're debriefing sessions, swapping ideas, or just vibing with new friends, this is your time to relax and celebrate the community.

Talent Leaders Dinner

Connect with fellow attendees, speakers, and Chicago-area talent leaders over dinner and conversation. Sponsored by our friends at Juicebox
RSVP Required

RecOps Night Cap

Join us for great views, good company, and amazing vibes to close out the first night of RecOps Con! Sponsored by our friends at TeamOhana
RSVP required.