A Great Candidate Experience Starts with Recruiter Enablement

Let’s face it recruiters are time poor.

Inefficient processes, poor ways of working, requisition overload and way too much demand on a recruiter’s time are the root causes of a poor candidate experience.

So what is recruiter enablement and how will that help?

Recruiter enablement is about creating the environment that enables recruiters to excel in their roles via the use of technology, the provision of training, process improvement and data analytics.

Whilst reasonably a new function in the world of Talent Acquisition, companies are already investing in their Recruiter Enablement functions upon the realization that recruiters cannot enable themselves from the side of their own desk.

Technology

The investment in technology and the optimization of current technology that will free up recruiter time.

The automation of tasks that are a drain on a recruiter’s time. Think administrative tasks, data transfer, interview booking, candidate updates, hiring manager updates, reporting, offer management, onboarding and a host of other tasks that seemingly take priority over providing a great candidate experience.

Enablement is about making sure that your team has the best possible tools to source, attract, assess and onboard talent and that they fit seamlessly into your hiring process. Are your tech recruiters able to find and engage with top tech talent efficiently, how does that differ from your GTM recruiters?

It’s about ensuring your teams have the best possible technology to allow recruiters to do what they do best, engage with talent rather than spending their precious time bogged down in admin or trying to find tech work arounds.

Training

I know from my inhouse days that customised and bespoke training for TA folk was very low on L&D’s budget priorities.

Most internal teams don’t have dedicated L&D capability for their TA functions. If they’re lucky, the TA team may get one TA focused L&D session every year.

Enablement is about continuous & personalised training and development for TA teams.

Tech Recruiters may get some customised training, GTM Recruiters may get another. Custom training for teams based in different geographies is another example. It’s about giving your TA folk real L&D opportunities that not only supercharge their delivery but also their own careers.

If recruiters are able to source more efficiently, write better job adverts and manage their stakeholders better this gives them more time to focus on the candidate experience.

Requisition Overload

The most requisitions I ever had was 92, it’s safe to say that this was also the period where I provided the very worst candidate experience.

Demand planning, requisition and resource allocation, requisition prioritization and reactive recruiting all play a part in requisition overload.

Enablement plays key role in recruitment demand planning, resource management and capacity planning to ensure recruiters are not overburdened with requisitions to the detriment of candidate experience.

Process Improvement

Most businesses, particularly tech businesses, constantly review and tweak their standard processes, it’s not uncommon for some of these businesses to employ a whole team of people to constantly do this job.

Who’s doing it in TA? A recruiter at the side of their desk? A TA Leader or HR function trying to look at what improvements can be made amongst a million other priorities?

When was the last time you reviewed your hiring process? When did you make a tweak, analyse the impact and pivot? Is your process draining your recruiter’s time? Is it giving candidates or hiring managers a really poor experience?

This is where enablement helps. Analysing the process, looking for improvements, testing them, learning from them and always adapting.

Talent Analytics

Whilst most recruiters and TA folk are really good at market mapping, or pulling their own reports from the ATS or LinkedIn. Who is pulling it all together? Who is tracking it over time? Who is looking at key data points and how they relate to tooling, to process and to training?

What are our metrics at each stage of the funnel, how can we improve it? How do we get less quantity but higher quality into the top end, that will impact candidate experience, it will also impact recruiter capacity which also impacts candidate experience.

Again, this is another key role within Recruiter Enablement. It’s using the data to drive intelligence that enable your recruiters to be even better at their jobs and making them more efficient.

In the end, if you’re really serious about improving your candidate experience, it starts with improving your recruiter experience. Enabling them is a start.

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