Recruitment Enablement is the activities, systems, processes, and information that support and promote knowledge-based recruitment interactions with candidates and internal stakeholders.
It is a new focus that is gradually being adopted in the recruitment space having first been coined in 2018. However, enablement has already been widely accepted and embedded in revenue-generating functions like sales and has been shown to deliver significant benefits to individuals and companies.
Enablement is all about improving the performance of your workforce by minimizing repetitive work, cutting lead times to access the right content, informing them of best practices, and driving decision-making with the latest insights.
In recruitment, this ultimately creates both improved candidate and recruiter experience, accelerates time to hire and quality of hire, and improves the overall performance and productivity of the function.
For me, Recruitment enablement is split into two key streams:
Internal enablement
Building the internal infrastructure and systems to allow you to deliver the right content to candidates when required and be as streamlined as possible when executing recruitment.
External enablement
Accessing the right knowledge and insights to support knowledge-based recruitment interactions both with candidates and prospects as well as with internal stakeholders, particularly those outside the recruitment function.
Digging into these in some more detail there are some key areas of focus within each.
Internal enablement is all about alignment and communication. This can come in a variety of forms:
Function Alignment
Creating the systems, activities and processes that align the recruitment function with hiring managers, HR, comp and ben, marketing, and beyond helps close feedback loops, mitigate the risk of inefficient processes and miscommunication, and helps drive internal synergies between functions.
Content Alignment
Creating an infrastructure that contains company collateral and assets that can be consistently used to provide additional information and context to candidates or answer questions can drive time savings and improve candidate experience.
Strategy Alignment
Having your front-line recruitment function aligned and informed of company strategy allows them to proactively prepare for hiring projects and feed talent data and insights back to the business.
This talent data feeds nicely on to External enablement which is focused on access to the right contextual knowledge and insights that drives knowledge-led recruitment engagements. The key is in extracting knowledge and insights rather than just data by combining multiple sources and applying context and intelligence.
This knowledge and insights can come in many forms but the following three are central to success:
1. Market Analysis
Having access to contextual knowledge on the talent market for various roles, skillsets, and technologies is essential in helping recruiters make decisions and act effectively. Understanding the competitive landscape, market trends, and market dynamics can set expectations, inform strategies and expose opportunities and challenges for hiring projects.
2. Company Patterns
Understanding the patterns of certain companies both your own as well as key competitors gives greater clarity to recruiters. This can help recruiters develop more holistic profiles of hire, assess company competitiveness, inform engagement strategies, and beyond.
3. Market Signals
It is important for recruiters to be able to access insights that allow them to project forward as well as understand the past and current situation. Market signals can provide leading indicators for recruiters about how the market will develop whether that is through informing on market activity, new entrants, market layoffs, growth and attrition, key market events etc.
While recruitment enablement is at the early stages of adoption; it is coming.
Those companies that can establish the activities, systems, processes, and information for both internal and external enablement will succeed. We are entering an age of knowledge-led recruitment and enablement will be the key.
Written by Sean Galligan.
Sources:
The Who, What, How, When and Why of Sales Enablement (gartner.com)
What Is Sales Enablement And Why Does It Matter? 3 Experts Weigh In (forbes.com)
Definition of Sales Enablement – Gartner Information Technology Glossary
