Recruiter Enablement

Resources you can use to help your recruiters win in their jobs.

Recruiter Enablement with Adam Gordon and John Vlastelica

What’s going on in the world of recruiter enablement? What’s missing from most recruiter enablement programs and work? And how do you scale recruiter enablement in a world where you need to localize so much by job family, geo, and function?

These are the topics our CEO, John Vlastelica, covered with Adam Gordon from Poetry in this 20 minute conversation, which is part of his podcast series on recruiter enablement.

For many Talent Acquisition leaders, enablement is more than just onboarding, policy, process, and systems training and intranet resources.  It’s designed to elevate the role of the recruiter beyond a transactional role to Talent Advisor.

Enablement should be in service to more than just improved ramp time, compliance, and productity.  So, where to start?

1

What do Talent Advisors do differently? 

Review the difference between a transactional recruiter and a Talent Advisor.  Then, download this self-diagnostic to see where your team has the biggest opportunities along eight dimensions used to evaluate talent advisor capabilities. And finally, check out this blog post to learn about five signals that indicate you’re already functioning as a talent advisor.

Talent Advisor Diagnostic Tool
Download Talent Advisor Diagnostic Tool

2

Want some free training-quality videos you can use to complement your in-house training?
We’ve got you.

How to be a
Strategic Talent
Acquisition Pro

How to Give Hiring Managers
what they Really Want:
Speed and Quality

How TA Leaders
Can Lead Holistically
In A World of HR Silos

3

Create a culture of curiosity
in your TA team.

Enablement can’t just be a “push” or top-down strategy.  You want your recruiters “pulling” and driving their own development.  That starts with culture.

Great Talent Advisors are curious.  And that curiosity makes them more valuable, more interesting, more insightful, and more aligned to the business needs. John Vlastelica wrote this article for LinkedIn’s Talent Blog, where he makes the case that curiosity may be the most important characteristic of great recruiters, and shares some of the key questions every recruiter should ask to get smarter.

How do we keep getting smarter?  Here are suggested blogs and newsletters to read to stay sharp on all things talent and business:

  • Global Technology, Startup, and Industry Updates, CB Insights
Free Talent Advisor Resources

Talent Conference recommendations:

  • Unleash – Spring (US) and Autumn (Europe) each year, for leaders only
  • Recfest – UK (Summer) and US (Autumn) each year – inexpensive and huge (5,000+ attend the festival in the UK)

4

Build your own recruiter training program. 

If you can’t afford to hire us to build you custom recruiting team training (we’ve done this for all kinds of companies, including Adobe, Adidas, Okta, Slack, Target, LVMH, Nike, Reddit, Canva, LinkedIn) or leverage our online recruiter training (companies like Cisco, Paramount, Accenture, IKEA, and Disney use our online training), you should build your own for free.

I’ve put together a list of steps you can take to create your own training program along with three relevant topics and resources you can cover in your first sessions. These topics reinforce the talent advisor mindset — that ability to help deliver more strategic value to your business, which is especially important for recruiters to be able to demonstrate during a hiring slowdown. We’ve also included facilitating questions that will provoke discussion and encourage your recruiters to implement next steps.

How to get your recruiter training program up and running

If you’re looking for some guidance on how to get your training session up and running, you can start with this simple framework:

Once you’ve decided on relevant topics and resources (more on our recommendations later), get the ball rolling by assigning a topic to a senior recruiter on your team. Ask them to do gather ideas from your team, present back their findings, and then show you how the topics they want to prioritize relates to your  team’s mission and broader goals for the year.

Next, choose a date for the session when everyone can attend and send out an invite several days in advance. In order to let your team gather their thoughts and come prepared, include any pertinent information (such as pre-reads, links, etc) in the invitation, plus key learning objectives and what you’d like each person on the team to take away from the training.  (This is particularly helpful for introverts, who may want time to process and prepare more than extroverts.)

We’ve found it’s helpful to frame the session around something practical, like “how to engage hiring managers to invest more time in top-of-funnel sourcing outreach” so the team knows exactly what they’re getting into.  The “how to” focus will ensure it’s not some high level academic topic that generates little “now what?” action post-training.

We’ve also found that consistency really helps with any kind of training. Here’s a sample of how you can structure a 90 minute mini-training session:

  • At the start of the session, the TA leader gives context (briefly) as to how this topic ties to the bigger team goals, and then hands it over to the senior recruiter introduces the topic, explains why the video or resource was selected, and the team then spends 30-45 minutes watching a video or listening to a presentation together.  If the team is all remote, you can maybe do a watch-party, where everyone watches it together (or if you have a huge team, maybe you have watch parties in 3 time zones).  Holding the pre-work time on people’s calendars will improve the chance that people will do the pre-work.
  • Next, the senior recruiter asks prepared facilitating questions to engage the team in discussion.
  • In the last 10 minutes of the training, the team leader jumps in. Their role is to work with the team to prioritize ideas and talk through next steps.

Recommended topics for your team’s development

Recorded sessions from LinkedIn Talent Connect is a great source for topics to cover with your team and you can find more content on YouTube and Slideshare. We’ve recommended three topics below – they’re timeless and loaded with practical, how-to information that will keep recruiters engaged, while also sparking interesting discussions and self-assessments.

Description: There’s no skill that’s more fundamental and evergreen to recruiters than the ability to become a talent advisor. You can build this training session around John Vlastelica’s #1 rated talk at LinkedIn Talent Connect (watch the video above and read a recap here). You’ll learn how to be more strategic by reviewing nine real-world practices of recruiting teams who are delivering that Talent Advisor experience to their businesses.

Questions to facilitate discussion:

  1. Who on our team already has very engaged hiring managers, who invests in sourcing and outreach today? How did you influence them to invest time in top-of-funnel? What kind of results do you get from their efforts – have you seen improvements in speed, quality, diversity?
  2. What are we doing today to give our candidates access to information on how to be successful? What else can we do (or should we do) if our goal is to target candidates who may not know how to prep for an interview with a company like ours? What else should we do to make our process fairer?
  3. What would we need to do to be able to move to a more proactive req opening process, where we’re telling the business when they need to open reqs, versus waiting for them to tell us?
  4. In the past, do you think we had a lot of false-negative hiring decisions? How do we know? How do we need to coach managers to reduce false-negative decisions?

What team leaders can ask to encourage next steps:

Of the best practices shared in the video and recap, which 2-3 would be at the intersection of HIGH impact and EASY to implement for us?

Description: This topic, recommended by our Principal Consultant Ben Gotkin, highlights Glen Cathey’s solution to building successful talent pipelines: implementing a supply chain management (SCM) approach. Build this training session around Glen’s blog post and presentation deck (find them both here) and your team can learn how this approach can help prevent the “leaks” that often occur when building a talent pipeline.

Questions to facilitate discussion:

  1. What have we done historically in regard to pipelining? What successes and failures have we had in our efforts to build talent pipelines?
  2. What is our plan for when hiring picks back up? What can we anticipate in terms of the funnel (candidates to screens to interviews to offers to hires)? How can we optimize our process for speed? What information would we need from the business now? What would be the smart questions that we would need to ask?
  3. Who should we be targeting now and why? What’s our message? How do we get these prospects engaged and keep them engaged?
  4. We can’t do this for the entire business, so what would be the areas of our business that would benefit the most from this approach? Should we pilot this? If so, with whom?

What team leaders can say to encourage next steps:

Let’s identify the areas of the business where this approach would have HIGH impact and be EASY for us to implement. Assign a Project Team and build out a Project Plan to be ready to present to the business and implement in X days. This should also include a case for the opportunity that exists here, including why we need to stay proactive in recruiting now and not repeat the mistakes that businesses have made during previous hiring slowdowns and recessions.

Description: With many of us working remotely, it can be difficult to build trust and connect with people in the same way as when we were able to communicate face-to-face. This session, recommended by Matt Grove, principal consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, is built around a TED Talk by Celeste Headlee (watch the video below). It provides 10 tips for having better conversations and will teach your team how to have more meaningful and productive conversations in today’s remote work environment. After all, good conversations are key to establishing and maintaining trust with our businesses, our colleagues, and our candidates.

Questions to facilitate discussion:

  1. Self-assessment time: On a scale of 1-10 (10 being world-class), how would you rate yourself as an interviewer? How would you rate yourself as a listener? Are they different, and if so, why?
  2. Which of the tips from the TED Talk would you want to implement first and why? What value does it offer your business partner or hiring manager? What value does it offer your candidates?
  3. What are the biggest obstacles to implementing at least one of these tips in your own conversations with hiring managers? What are the biggest obstacles to using this approach with candidates? Are there obstacles that you are creating yourself that you can remove easily?
  4. How can you use ideas like these to help coach your hiring teams to be better phone and video interviewers?
  5. Highlight 3-4 people on the team with different communication styles. What do they do that makes them unique and effective as a communicator? Get each person to share any best practices that they would like to highlight for the team.

What team leaders can say to encourage next steps:

What are 2-3 actions you will commit to implementing in the next 30 days to improve the productivity of conversations that you have with colleagues, hiring leaders, and candidates? How will you hold yourself accountable? How can your colleagues help you succeed with these? How can your business partners help? How can your manager help?

5

Link to some of our favorite articles on your intranet site and send out reminders every other week to read one and be prepared to discuss them at an upcoming team meeting.

Recommended Articles

Great interview training

Finally, if you want to explore working with us, please reach out. 

World class companies hire us to help them improve the capabilities of their recruiting, recruiting leadership, interviewing, and hiring manager teams.

For over 15 years, we’ve been

Our goal is to help you deliver more speed, quality, and diversity ROI with your limited budget and time.  As former practitioners, we bring a very real-world approach, and because we custom-build everything so that it addresses your needs, you get to put what we build for you into action right away.

“Amazing 2-day learning experience.  I put my learning to use before I even made it back to the office.”

Talent Acquisition Manager, Nike

“Excellent!  This is an important component of our plan to achieve our mission, and I’ll be requiring all of my hiring managers to attend this training.  5/5.”

VP/Hiring Manager, Electronic Arts

“World class!”

Chief HR Officer, Nubank (former CHRO Uber and Twitter)

Not ready to invest in consulting or training services?  No worries.  Just follow our blog and our socials Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to stay up to date on our free content.  And feel free to follow John Vlastelica our CEO on LinkedIn to follow his regular posts and articles on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog.