When USC coach Clay Helton formally announced the departure of recruiting director Eric Ziskin a couple weeks ago, he likened the position to the general manager role in professional sports, underscoring its importance to the program while saying he would take the time necessary to find the best replacement.

Ziskin's exit created a rare public spotlight for a man who did his work behind the scenes for the Trojans, putting in as many as 100-110 hours a week during the football season and working 40-45 weekends a year, by his own count.

"That's what EZ did for us. You look at the job he did over several years now, if I can grab another EZ that would be great," Helton said. "He's hard to find, but we'll do a good job of locating him."

Most fans likely don't understand all that the position entails or how pivotal it is to a program's growth and success -- or just how important that next hire is for the Trojans at this especially critical point in Helton's tenure.

So Ziskin took time recently to go in-depth with TrojanSports.com about his tenure at USC, what it demanded and why it was time for him personally to move on to something new.

"Not that it was burning out or anyting like that, or I was tired of it or sick of it -- not anything like that. I just figured for my family, for our future, for our life, it wasn't going to be what I wanted to do long-term, so I figured I'd make the change now," he said.

Ziskin, a 2011 graduate of USC's Marshall School of Business who started with the football program at the lowest rungs as a student manager a decade ago, had left once before, spending 16 months living in Norway to be closer to his wife's family. Only to have Helton lure him back in the summer of 2016.

Returning with the title of assistant athletic director/recruiting & player personnel, he helped the Trojans land the No. 6-ranked recruiting class nationally in 2017 and the No. 3 class in 2018 before the program tumbled to No. 19 in the Rivals rankings with the 2019 class.

That most recent recruiting cycle -- which saw 5-star signee Bru McCoy transfer to Texas after starting classes at USC and 4-star WR commit Puka Nacua flip to Washington after National Signing Day -- took its toll, for sure.

But Ziskin says that isn't what prompted his departure -- at least not entirely. Though, he said it was really in the last month or so prior to his decision that he came to this point.

"That wasn't really like a breaking point or anything like that. It was more of one piece of the puzzle that caused me to take a step back, take a breath and really evaluate," he said.

The bottom line is it's a demanding job rarely defined by any sense of stability at most programs across the country.

To that end, Ziskin pulled back the curtain a bit on his time coordinating USC's recruiting efforts, from the highs to the lows and the stories that will stick with him moving forward.

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Ziskin got involved with the football program in the most entry-level of ways, as a team manager -- setting cones up on the field, chasing down loose balls or even "picking up the dirty socks in the locker room," as he put it.

But early on he saw an opportunity he felt worth pursuing, thanks in part to a crystallizing moment.

"I was a student when coach [Pete] Carroll was still here. I was driving coach Carroll's Mercedes to the airport to go pick up Bob Stoops because he was coming to speak at our coaching clinic, and I was thinking to myself, like, 'Wow, I'm driving Pete Carroll's car to pick up Bob Stoops. How stupid would I be to not try to make this work for the rest of my life. This is what I'm going to do,'" he recalled. "That was kind of the ah-ha moment that I was like, all right, I'm doing everything I can the next two and a half years of my life, everyday is a job interview, I'm trying to stick around and figure out a way I can stay at USC or within college football. I was lucky enough that it happened to be at USC."

As much as anyone, he credits former USC assistant and current LSU head coach Ed Orgeron for teaching him the business.

"I was fortunate enough to be taken under the wings of coach Orgeron, and he kind of taught me everything from the ground up and I just played follow the leader and listened and watched everything I could," Ziskin said. "... A lot of luck and a lot of work, just kind of worked my way up and through."

Which leads into one of the more memorable recruiting stories from his time with the Trojans -- and a valuable early lesson.

USC really wanted Leonard Williams, a massive 4-star defensive end from Daytona Beach, Fla., in the 2012 signing class.

Orgeron, USC's defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator at the time, was leading that pursuit along with defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin and then-head coach Lane Kiffin.

"Leonard told us the day before signing day he was going to Florida. And Coach O said, 'Uh uh. I'm going to give him a little bit of time and I'm going to make a couple phone calls and find the right person,'" Ziskin recalled. "Nobody could find him, from our school or from other schools, nobody knew where he was. Coach O was like, 'I know where he is. I'm going to call this guy and I'm going to get this done.' He was hiding out basically at one of his coach's offices at the school, and Coach O had found who that person was going to be and knew that this was going to happen, knew where he was going to be hiding and had built a relationship with this guy."

That guy was Keynodo Hudson, who was the point person in Williams' recruitment and is now the cornerbacks coach at Illinois.

"So the next day, signing day, there's 1,000 phone calls going back and forth -- Leonard's coming to USC, but he doesn't know how he's going to do it because he doesn't have a USC hat," Ziskin continued. "He can't find a mall in Daytona Beach where he can find a USC hat to do his press conference and put on a USC hat. Eventually he found one and he was a Trojan."

Williams was an instant star at USC, recording 64 tackles, 8 sacks and an interception while being named Pac-12 defensive freshman of the year. He was later taken with the No. 6 overall pick in the first round of the 2015 draft by the New York Jets.

For the next story that comes to mind, Ziskin says he can't use names, but it goes back to that same key principle of identifying who is the most important influencer or sounding board for a prospect in their recruitment.

"There was a player who actually during his high school career he lived with one of his high school coaches, and through this process we came to find out that this high school coach had become his legal guardian," he said. "Even though his mother was still involved in his life, the mom couldn't sign at the end of signing day, she couldn't sign the paper for him to go to school -- it had to be the legal guardian, high school coach. So it was quite a heated battle until the very end between us and another school, and they had kind of put all their eggs in the basket of the mom. And we knew that obviously mom was involved, she was important, we need to recruit her as well, and we did, [but] she couldn't sign the paper at the end of the day so we were recruiting both sides."

As the story goes, the other school focused so much on the prospect's mother that the high school coach and legal guardian was a bit offended. He was encouraging the prospect to go to USC and helped bring that fruition.

"The night before the dead period he was up in our office until midnight when we couldn't see him anymore, playing video games throughout the night, just kind of protected so nobody else could get to him. But the legal guardian brought him up to our office because he was on our side, he wanted the kid to come to USC," Ziskin said. "So it just goes back to the same principle of making sure you understand all the dynamics of the world that's around the kid and figuring out the information that really matters."