Talent Acquisition Leaders are learning from Sales Leaders
Sales organizations, the lifeblood of any organization, have always driven innovation within a company. More recently, their most impactful innovation has been sales enablement which has experienced over 300% increase in adoption over the last five years.
The core objective of Sales enablement is to provide the sales organization with knowledge and insights that helps sales people sell more effectively. And the benefits realized from distributing sales knowledge and insights across the sales force are substantial, specifically accelerated productivity including a reduction in ramp up times by up to 25%.
Enablement for Talent Acquisition Teams
Talent Acquisition is a function that desperately needs enablement programs. With up to 55% of recruiters not having a background in the roles that are asked to hire for, there is a huge knowledge gap that needs to be filled.
In addition, there is significant attrition in the talent function. In growth times, there can be churn of over 30% and in less buoyant times, talent teams are often first to be let go, both scenarios leading to enormous knowledge flight.
When recruiters leave they take with them all the knowledge they have built up in becoming expert in how to hire for your company. And for those in the talent team who are left behind, they are often expected to recreate the knowledge and expertise that has just left the organization adding new pressures and stress to an already busy team and reduces productivity.
But, when organizations have a single source of recruiting truth that describes how best to hire for each role within an organization, that is easily accessible and shareable, that provides intelligence and knowledge in the flow of work, that is kept up to date and dynamically changes as market conditions change, then knowledge gaps can be filled, and knowledge flight can be prevented. All this leads to greater productivity with in the talent team, more success, more satisfaction and greater morale.
The benefits of Recruitment Enablement for individuals
The benefits in having a central repository of recruiting best practice are impactful:
- Ramp up time for new recruiters is decreased, increasing their time to productivity.
- Preparation time for experienced recruiters to take on unfamiliar roles or locations is reduced, empowering them to be productive sooner too.
- Greater productivity means an accelerated time to hire.
The benefit of Recruitment Enablement for Talent Leaders
With recruitment enablement, Talent leaders can now implement flexible or adaptable talent teams, as individual recruiters can transition more easily across role types, allowing a talent team to shift focus according to business priorities, technical recruiters can become sales recruiters, and vice versa.
Flexible talent teams allows Talent Leaders to achieve more with less headcount and offers individual recruiters the opportunity to upskill into new and different roles enhancing job satisfaction.
The Era of Recruitment Enablement has begun
Failure to consider and implement recruitment enablement programs will only result in the status quo or worse. Talent Acquisition is a hugely strategic function and investments today in tools and technologies to support this function have largely focused on process and not on people. Process efficiency will not move the needle on how successful your Talent Acquisition team will be. The most strategic Talent Leaders now understand that unless the people responsible for hiring are empowered with the knowledge that enables them to understand how best to hire for you, it won’t matter what ATS, or Jobsboard or AI tool you use.
We believe that the foundation of recruitment enablement programs will be Recruiter Playbooks. Recruiter playbooks will explain how to hire for your company. For each role type, it will explain what sourcing strategies to use, how to recognise a profile of hire that matches your need, market maps of companies to target, hiring patterns of your competitors that can uncover new untapped talent pools, market insights on the demand and availability within the market to support your conversations with hiring managers, and dynamic alerts of impactful events within the market that you can react to – layoffs, funding announcements, new entrants, mergers etc.
Providing a central source of playbooks that cover your roles across locations, accessible by everyone, available in the flow of work, and constantly being updated and refreshed, will provide your talent team with the knowledge and insights to do their job more effectively, increasing their productivity, and making them more successful and strategic.
The era of recruitment enablement has begun.
