Adam Gordon Live on Shally's Alley

All right, how's it going out there in talent acquisition land? How are all my talent gurus doing? You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is Friday, April 26th. Man, the year's going by fast. That is just crazy. I thought it was like April Fool's Day, it was just a few days ago. Now we're getting into May showers and all that fun stuff. But, um, glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. I've got some good news. I have new equipment. Well, it's not new, it's an old microphone that I used to use when I did my professional studio recordings for, um, the training that I used to do. But I've been able to kind of upgrade some other systems, so now I can be hands-free and no more weird headset with Weird hair. So here we go. Let's give this puppy a try. We welcome today a very special guest all the way from Scotland. Where in Scotland are you?

Glasgow.

Glasgow.

The, the, yeah, the coolest, coolest city in the UK outside London.

All right. I like that. I gotta go. I haven't been, you never invited me to come. I need to get over there. Adam and I met at— we met in Amsterdam, didn't we?

That's right. Yeah, Unleash. Sorry, not Unleash, uh, Sozu.

It was a while back. It was a long time ago. And at the time, Adam had just started a new company that took off and did some pretty amazing things. And since then, he's sold that company and started another company with a kind of interesting name. The name of your new company is Poetry HR. The last thing I associate with HR is poetry. So at some point you're gonna have to tell us how you came up with that. But this is pretty new. And the topic of discussion today is essentially recruiter enablement. I first heard of this job title from you. And when I was, you know, reading that, you sent me a job description. A sample job description and I'm reading that job description. I'm like, hold on a second. That's like actually half of what my last job was. So I think this job existed for a long time, but it was never called anything specific. And now there's, you know, I guess we're condensing into this thing called recruiter enablement or recruiting enablement or whatever. And I'm fascinated by it because I think it's something that has been sorely missed. For those of you that are listening and have no idea what I'm talking about, basically think of recruiter enablement as what we used to talk about when we talked about creating a center of excellence for recruiting. A place that holds all of your team's knowledge on landscape, marketplace, industry, company culture, your tools, your systems, your templates. But it's more than that. And as I was reading this description, I was like, hey, I want to do that. Like when I grow up someday, I want to be that job. And here you are starting a company doing that. So first of all, let's start out with how did you come up with Poetry HR? And then how did you have the idea to start a company to do just recruiter enablement?

Yeah. So going back a few steps, I've been heavily inspired by sales and marketing, and I started my career in recruitment in 1999, and throughout that time, I've really heavily studied what's going on in sales and marketing and what can we learn from that, what can we bring into Oh, looks like we have a selling time for money, a little bit of a glitch on the internet connection. Yeah, sorry about that. Um, my, my first company was really, really straightforward, selling our time for sourcing on, uh, uh, on, on LinkedIn, on the internet. It was a talent sourcing business. But the second one was very heavily inspired by sales and marketing. So Candidate ID was effectively Marketo for talent acquisition. We created the world's first genuine marketing automation technology for talent acquisition. And as we were learning about that subject, I was looking at other technologies in sales and marketing going, actually, why don't we have that in recruitment? Why don't we have that in recruitment? Anyway, I was very inspired by sales enablement. That's actually correct.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was very inspired by sales enablement. I didn't know very much about it, but in the 10 months I was at ISIMS, I spent a bit of time with the sales enablement team there, and I was really inspired by them, processes that they went into, and I was inspired by the technologies that they were using as well. So I got introduced to a technology called Highspot, and Highspot is effectively a one-stop shop for salespeople who want to understand What is the best cold call script? What's the best in-mail messaging? What's the best way to overcome objections? What's the best way to generate interest through social media posts? What's the best way to structure that demo meeting? What's the best— like, right from the cold call right through to closing the deal. And so if I'm a salesperson, I could go into a technology like Highspot and it'll give me a paint-by-numbers, this is how to structure your deal.

Yeah, it's the workflow, it's the process, it's the, the, the rules of the road, whatever you want to call it.

It's the map, it's the content assets and the calculators and the scripts and the props and the tools and the all-in-one place. So it's, it's— and, and as I was looking at this, I'm going, how do we enable recruiters? Do we, do we give them all the things that they need? And I'm thinking to myself, we don't. We probably don't. I reckon we give them the jobs, you know. That's what I did, uh, 200-hour research, focus groups, and interviewed, um, over 100 people last year for a YouTube channel on recruiter enablement, which, thank you very much for joining me recently on the channel. I've interviewed 160 people on that now, and, um, this was just like deep studying around the subject. And so, yeah, I mean, I decided in the same way that we created Candidate ID was Marketo for talent acquisition, what we're building now is Highspot for talent acquisition. We're building a product which, um, has got solu— it's got over 30 solutions in there. And we split recruiter enablement up into 4 areas, 4 solution groups. The first is marketing, recruitment marketing. The second is recruitment operations. The third is recruiter learning. And the fourth is a little bit general, but it's tools. So M-O-L-T, marketing operations learning tools. And that's the acronym I use, MOLT. M-O-L-T. And almost everything that we want to try and do to enable our recruiters to do a better job is in marketing, operations, learning, or tools somewhere. So, yeah, I mean, we really are repeating the process that we went through with Candidi ID, which was we're taking inspiration from an area of sales and marketing. We're really learning if the market wants it, contextualizing it for talent acquisition, and building it. And, um, probably the most fun thing that we're doing is we're building this with the market. So we're, we're not, we're not just making a guess that, oh, they would want it to do this, they'd want it to do that. We're literally saying, how, what, what do you want? And then we're building it.

I mean, like I said, this is a lot that exists. It's just not— it wasn't called that. But we have, you know, onboarding recruiters, training, all of these, all these pieces are out there, just not put together. And so I'm kind of guessing here, is that why poetry? Because it's like putting it all together in a way that is, you know, concise and has a story, or what? What's the poetry?

It's actually not, but that's a good— that is a good, um, that is— that, that would make sense. Poetry is because I've had a long, a long-held belief that Recruitment is an art form, and specifically it's an art form all about words. If you get your words right, people take the action you want them to take because they feel a certain way. If you get your words wrong, they don't. Like sourcing messaging, as you know, it's so important. The wording for your social media post, the wording for your job advert, the wording for how you respond to their question. It's all like, um, an art form, and some people are really great with words and some people are not. And you know, what we want is that every recruiter is great with words because they have the ability to go and collaborate with an environment with other people, and she has brought that messaging to go poet and his outreach, I can go and make use of that. I can copy that and I can be, you know, as a colleague of Shally's, I can be operating at the same high level as Shally is. So that's why poetry, because it's an art form all about words.

Okay, it's an art form about words. Got it. All right, that registers. But yeah, so I get it. I think I was on the right track with with the poetry.

Yeah.

But so let me ask you this. My, my challenge with this, my— what I'm having a hard time kind of wrapping my head around is who's responsible? Because let me explain why I'm asking that. You know, I'm a consultant. I've been doing this 28 years, and I had a consulting firm, worked for a consulting firm. Maybe working for a consulting firm in the future again, I get to talk to a lot of leaders at large and medium-sized companies that are building out or re-engineering teams. And something that keeps coming up over and over again is center of excellence or, you know, practice center or whatever you want to call it. But every time I've seen that try to be implemented, it's failed. And the reason it's failed is because there's no ownership.

Yeah.

It's almost like you have to have a, I don't wanna say dedicated employee. Maybe that is the solution. But if there isn't someone who has not just the responsibility of the oversight, but also of its continuity, it seems to just, if they build it, it exists for a year or 3 and then there's a change in leadership and boom, it's gone.

So, um, I want to respond to something you said a few minutes ago because it links to what you've just said. So I can, I can kind of talk about these things both at the same time.

I can rewind.

Yeah, um, yeah, no, that you, you said, you know, when I described the different sort of solutions that we are addressing, you said, you know, a lot of these things exist, the solutions for onboarding and the solutions for— well, yeah, but the problem is Because we've built like over 30 things into the one workspace, that is saving recruiters a huge amount of stress from what we call toggle tax, which is the amount of time going from one tab to another tab to another tab, going on to—

who's got the password? Who's got— wonder contact.

Yeah, one, one location for all of these different assets and how to get to all of your different tools and things from the one place, the one hub. Um, that's something that we, we believe is saving recruiters about an hour a day. Now, who's responsible? When, when I started researching this about a year ago, um, I think there was about 100 people in talent acquisition teams with an enablement job title. Today, I think there's about 300. So it's still not a huge number of people, but it's a— it is definitely a growing trend. Why is it a growing trend? Because every organization, um, in the world is under pressure to be more productive, to do more with less. We've got global economic challenges. There's like high inflation rates, there's cost of living crisis, and most companies are trying to establish how do we make our people more productive and successful. And that's why sales enablement exists, that's why, um, dev enablement exists, that's why there's other bigger functions than us in talent acquisition where this has been happening for a longer amount of time, you know. So we in talent acquisition tend to not be the first to create. They happen in bigger business for pain, and then we may follow some way down the line. But sales enablement is— I think I don't see very much difference between the tasks involved in sales and marketing versus in talent acquisition. And I think sales enablement, and that is a growing trend over the last 5, 6 years is, is something that really points to it, you know, why it should be happening in, in recruitment as well. As I said, a year ago there was maybe 100 people, now there's about 300. It, it includes facets of rec ops, it includes facets of recruitment, um, marketing, it includes facets of like what you described as center of excellence. Absolutely. We're which can include a lot of sourcing type things.

Yeah, the libraries, the templates. Yeah. So I think what I'm hearing you say is the time has come. And although recruitment operations existed as a standalone job for a long time, you know, and some of these other components, it hasn't all been brought together into a single housing format where you can say, okay, from the day we onboard a new recruiter or sourcer to the day that they are let loose and fully productive, we actually have a home for where they go to get efficient, to get productive. We have a place for them to go to instead of 20 places and we have one person. So yeah, maybe the role of— maybe it is a dedicated job title. Fun fact, as a side note, when I started sourcing in 1996, that was not a job. I was a recruiter. That was my job title. It wasn't until 2 years later in 1998 that I started renaming, reframing what I did because it was no longer recruiting. I wanted to distinguish myself from recruiting because I was only doing the front half or two-thirds of the process. And I was doing that for other recruiters. So, you know, it just seemed awkward that a recruiter worked with a recruiter to recruit candidates, you know. And so, I went out and tried to find a job title for this role. First evolution of it was Cyber Sleuth. That did not go over well. I found out later on there was another profession that had some dark notes to it that, yeah, it wasn't good. But yeah, around 2000-ish, maybe '99, 2000, 2001, the term sorcerer came from a discussion that I had with a friend where we decided that what we do, which at this point there are maybe 10 of us, you know, what we do is very similar to in industry, the procurement of raw material. So if you work, if you are a car manufacturer, you need to buy steel and that is called sourcing. Sourcing of steel. So we're like, all right, well there's an established job title that already exists. We're sourcing talent, just like you source steel or you source sugar for your candy or paper for your book. And that's where it came. So when I first started, there was, you know, maybe 10 of us that did the job and none of us had the title. Soon after that, I was at the 100 mark. I started speaking all over the world, doing conferences and teaching about this and explaining why it needs to be a separate function. That's the road you have ahead of you right now. And eventually, it got to where I just woke up one day and on a whim, checked LinkedIn to see how many people had the job title sourcer. Keep in mind, when I started on LinkedIn in 2005, there wasn't any, right? There were people who had the title, but they were just weren't on LinkedIn yet. So I just wake up one day and go on LinkedIn and check it, and it was 150,000 people that had that job title. And now if you look, there's close to 1.5 million people in the world that have some form of sourcer or talent sourcing or talent scout or talent researcher, and they have that job title. So I get what you're saying. It's pretty amazing how something blooms or blossoms like that and becomes a job title. I mean, it's just, it's incredible. So, what you're saying is the time has come and this is the way to solve this problem is by having a dedicated function. That's what I'm hearing.

Yeah, I think that's correct. So, if I think about like some of the people I know and how they've ended up with a recruitment enablement kind of job And an example would be Hayley Ennis, who works at Sprout Social. Her job is senior project manager, talent enablement, something like that. Hayley started as a recruiter in there and was doing a lot of like side tasks, and because she was good at it, her boss started giving her more work. And eventually I'm, I'm only more— he would actually perform better if he was doing this school. And so guess what? They went, you're absolutely right. It was like pitching a business plan, and they went, yeah, that's, that's a good idea. Another example is Angelo Pancho, who works at Rockwell Automation. Same thing happened. He was working on projects at the side Uh, yeah, and he, he kept seeing more and more things, and then over a conversation with his boss, he pitched it and they went, yeah, it's a good idea, we need somebody to do this.

So somewhere along the line, somebody decided that a recruiter was going to stop carrying wrecks and start carrying other recruiters.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, um, I, I mean, I think it's very clear, it's very clear that if I've got a team of If I've got a team of 5 people filling jobs and, uh, I take one of those away from filling jobs and help them to do nothing but make the other 4 more productive, that unit of 5 is going to be more successful. So because they're no longer spending—

you know, this has been proven time and time again in a variety of settings. It's been proven in just-in-time manufacturing It's been proven in, um, recently in the last few years in military organizational theory and organizational structure with teams of teams, where you have teams of highly skilled operators that run autonomously to a certain degree and can make decisions in the field. There'll be one of the people in the team of 5 whose job it is to make the other 4 work better. You know, that literally is their job. It happens with intelligence gathering or operations as well. In the way that they manage information gathering with all the different sources. I've studied this a lot and I created the sourcing pod structure specifically on that where you have someone who is in charge of organizing and keeping the, the workflow, but they're not anybody's boss. They're just the person you go to for workflow. So yeah, I totally get it. Are you gonna tell me that someday people are gonna go to school to study recruiter enablement and they're not gonna ever have been a recruiter? That's just gonna be their job without having been a recruiter? Is that even possible?

I don't know, that's a great question. I mean, I think it's very possible, yeah. I mean, I like—

It took me 25 years to do that, right? 20 years ago, if you said somebody's gonna be a sourcer without having been a recruiter, I would've said, what? No, no way. You have to be a recruiter first. But nowadays I see people whose career started in sourcing and continues in there. So they didn't have a job in recruiting before that. So maybe not now, but 20 years from now or 15 or 10 years from now, somebody will start in recruitment operations and work their way into recruiter enablement without having carried a rec.

I mean, I think that is happening. I think that's definitely happening. And actually I'm just checking. Somebody's LinkedIn before I actually out somebody as having done this. But I don't—

I don't, uh, they may not have started in that. Yeah, okay.

I don't think— yeah, yeah, I'm not sure that, um, I'm not sure if Nick Thompson ever, ever was a recruiter. No, I think he— I think he— I think he might have been, actually. Yeah, no, he was. I'm wrong. Uh, it was a long time back. There, there are— no, there's definitely people who have gone— who have gone straight into RecOps. And enablement includes— like, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about, uh, 6 months ago, and I said, here's 64 things, uh, that you can— recruiter enablement tactics that you can easily just apply yourself. Do these things. I mean, that shows how many things are involved in this. You know, a recruiter has— I think the recruitment workflow— I, I saw, I saw the steps involved for BT, British Telecommunications. A few years ago, and there was like 72 steps involved in recruiting, and many of them there is an enablement response to, to make it, to make it a more productive thing, right? Yeah. I mean, another example of, um, I mean, another example of like what we're trying to solve here is there was a There was a— one of the focus groups I did last year where there was a talent acquisition manager joined the call, and she said that that day she'd identified 3 of her recruiters had posted the same job advert in 3 different countries, and they'd all written them themselves. That one of them was— one of them was good, one of them was okay, and one of them was bad. But I mean, like, 3 people writing the same job advert on the same day doesn't seem like a very productive— No, it doesn't.

Right. That's where streamlining and process optimization and all those things can be a part of recruiter enablement. So yeah, I totally get it. And I think so, Angela is saying that it's best, doesn't mean it's required, but it's best to have a background in recruiting. So they know the entire recruitment cycle, the technologies, the hiring manager, the candidate mindset. But let me tell you, Angelo, while you are correct, I would also add that I know lots of recruiters who have been recruiters in full life cycle for many years and have no clue what the technology is. So just because they were a recruiter doesn't mean they know the technology or just because they were a recruiter doesn't mean that they necessarily know the operations or even the law. I ask this question a lot of recruiters when I'm meeting with them or interviewing them, working with them as a consultant. I ask how familiar are they with the 7 different regulatory bodies that are able to levy fines and in one case actually imprison people based on errors and omissions in recruitment. And most people can only name one. Not 7. So it's a lot more than that. So I totally agree with Angela. I think having the background is good, but I think also defining the job is better. So the background and then the job so that you can understand really what, you know, the job description of this, the structure, so you can understand what's all involved. A lot of companies don't have a workflow. They just don't. They don't have a process. Every recruiter does their own thing. They have an ATS or a CRM and an ATS, but there's no rule that says this is how you open a rec. This is what, you know, none of that is written down anywhere. So, gone are the days of like the employee handbook being the reference, right? So, I guess this is that. This is the recruiter handbook, right?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I, you know, I also agree with Angela. I think it probably is best to have a background in recruiting.

Agreed.

Again, at the same time, one of the guys that I learned sales enablement from at ISIMS, he didn't have a background in sales enablement before doing that job. He had a background in business operations, and he was a problem solver, and he asked questions, and he listened, and he came up with good answers. And incidentally, I really believe that people with a sourcing background are excellent for recruiter enablement because they, they look under every rock. If that doesn't work, they try that. If that doesn't work, they try that. They're constantly looking for better ways of doing things, and they've got the right curious mindset, um, to do this type of thing. In fact, you and I have had this conversation, I think, before around like the concept of prompt engineering and, uh, why sourcers are good for that as well, because You know, while it's not the same, some people say it's the new Boolean. It's not the same as Boolean, but it is about iterating, trying different things, seeing what works, having patience. And, you know, I think that, I think, I think the whole recruiter enablement, um, subject is something that talent sourcers are, are very well set up for in terms of mindset.

How different, uh, is this mindset between— and I'm only asking you this because you live in a tiny little island on the other side of the pond— how different is it between the nations? You know, here in America, in the United States, we think everybody does things the same way we do, but you don't have to go very far, i.e., Canada or Mexico, to quickly realize that recruiting is done quite differently. Not just because of laws and regulations, but culture and everything else. And if you go all the way to the other side of the world, it might feel like an English-speaking country, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, but things are very different there, aren't they? So how big is the mindset difference? Are other nations more likely to adopt this? Or less likely, or is there a different resistance? Tell me about that.

Yeah, I mean, look, I've got a— I'm probably not going to go through my hierarchy of countries, but there is a big difference in, like, sophistication from one.

Yes.

Yeah, there is a very big difference in levels of sophistication from one country to another. And I think that up at the top is the UK, the Netherlands, and parts of the United States.

Yep.

I think beneath that there are the Scandinavian countries are kind of close by, Australia is kind of close by. There's a big, big gap. I'm really sorry, France, but you're quite far behind. Germany, you're quite far behind. Italy and Spain, you're like nowhere near.

Is that an advantage or a disadvantage? Are these organizations going to maybe like leapfrog over some of the learning pains that we went through?

No, no.

To enablement, or are they going to go through the same growing pains?

No, they'll go through the same growing pains. They might, they might be able to do a bit faster because they've got other countries to follow, but at the same time, I— it's very clear that, um, there's, there's very little difference between the UK and parts of the USA. And I— when I say parts of the USA, it's the East Coast, the West Coast, Chicago, and bits of Texas.

And sometimes by industry. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's, it's my— it's a big space.

So yeah, my, my, um, like, I'm not spending time talking to people in Kentucky. So, you know, there's certain places where I'm not— I'm— my, my customer base, my, my market is pretty much enterprise, international enterprise companies. There is no difference between the UK and the USA on that. It's pretty much exactly the same, same processes. And it's very, very regular where I could be in a meeting with customers of mine or prospects of mine, and there's people from both sides of the Atlantic in the meeting.

In some agreement, not at odds with each other.

No, not at odds with each other at all. No, absolutely not. And they're in the same team. They are in the same team. Just one of them happens to be in the UK and one of them is in the States and one of them is maybe in the Netherlands or something like that, as has happened very recently. In fact, one in a couple of Germany as well. But yeah, there's limited difference in international companies. Interestingly, the ATS that they're on signifies where they're likely to be with this subject. In two ways. If they've got a really good ATS, they've probably already got a SharePoint site and they've already tried to do some things. And they've, you know, they're the ones that are more likely to have— if they're on iSims or Smart Recruiters or something like that, they're probably more likely to have made some efforts in this area. If they're on Workday or SuccessFactors or Oracle they probably know that they need to do more in this space because, you know, if they don't have a best-of-breed ATS, they probably got the kind of feature-starved, and therefore, you know, they need more ways to enable their recruiters. Also, if they're in tech or healthcare as an industry, they're probably further ahead than other industries Because they have the need, just that, just the, the need, right?

That the demand knows.

Exactly, exactly. In-demand talent, harder to hire, really hard to hire marketplaces for the last 10 years. You know, it might be a bit hard, a bit easier to hire software engineers than it was 2 years ago, but it's still not easy. It's not easy in tech or healthcare to hire people. So I think that they have had to look for more better solutions, you know, right across from sourcing through to assessing people and gamifying stuff. And, you know, they've had to, they've had to, they've had to innovate faster than other industries.

So let me, let me pull a couple of threads that I, that I'm curious about. Um, just kind of, you know, my, you know, you and I have had many, uh, heated, positively heated discussions about you know, different pieces of this because when you're— when Candid ID first started, I told you I was heavily involved with a product that did exactly that, you know, 5 or 6 years before that. It was built with Drupal.

Yeah, you said—

I remember. I remember doing this because I couldn't wait for somebody actually to do it in recruiting. And we didn't quite see eye to eye in some spaces because I had come at it from a different way. So you know that I like to kind of pull Socratically, right? Not in a defensive or dangerous way, but just very Socratically. I get marketing, totally. Recruitment marketing, very well established. Recruitment operations, very well established. It starts to fall apart with me on learning. I've made millions of dollars teaching recruiters how to source and teaching recruiters how to recruit. But it is a very difficult business because most companies don't have a dedicated budget. And in many cases, they don't even consider— they have no problem sending salespeople to a training conference every 6 months, but they don't want to send recruiters to a webinar that costs $40. So, if learning is part of recruiter enablement, how are we going to overcome the fact that essentially, recruiting and talent acquisition hates learning. I mean, they, they don't, they don't want to do it. They don't want to pay for it. Um, it's— that's going to be a gap, isn't it? How do we deal with that?

Yeah, it's a, it's a very, very good point. So I'll tell you what we've tried to do. So I believe that— and a lot of people are gonna, are gonna like— a lot of real, like, experts in particular areas of recruitment are going to hate what I'm saying here. There are— it is difficult to turn more than like 10% of recruiters in the world into brilliant talent sourcers or good recruitment marketers or good assessors. Yeah, or that type of thing, right?

And there's something, you know, you're a soccer fan, right? You know that a team isn't made up of, you know, 11 strikers.

Yeah, but the thing is, with— I think the difference— the soccer analogy, to me, the soccer analogy doesn't quite work because in the context of a team of 50 people who are all recruiters and they've all— they're all doing like a 360-degree recruitment job, which is still the case in a lot of companies, those people need to be good sourcers and they need to be good recruitment marketers and they need to be good at a lot of different things. But when you— you can train them and train them and train them. They're not—

either play behind midfield or in front of midfield, you know, it's— you play to your strengths.

Well, my— I think my— where I'm getting to here is if you can put things— if you can literally spoon-feed people with Boolean strings and with messaging and with X-ray, you know, I get what you're saying.

If you can build it for them then exactly need to become specialized in marketing or tools utilization because it's— it's— yeah, I got you.

Exactly. So, so, so one of the things that I've, I've been really trying to do is I'm not trying to— I'm not trying to educate them so that they become amazing sourcers or amazing recruitment marketers. I'm trying to give them like 80% of the things handed to them on a plate. And if we can do that, uh, This is meta.

I think the light bulb just went on. This is really meta. You're not recruiter enablement or talent enablement or whatever, talent acquisition enablement is not going to be the learning and development department. It's gonna be the department that teaches how learning and development is done for recruiting. So in other words, you don't have to be the teacher. You just have to teach people how to learn.

Well, we kind of, in a lot of cases, we just skip the learning and try and give them the answer.

If possible, right? But then, you have to make it easy for them. So, for example, if I gave you a copy of my book, you can pick up my book and you can read it front to back. And the next day, become a recruiter and a sourcer and do the job. But you're not going to be one of the top 10%. However, it requires one thing. It requires that you read it.

Yeah.

And the problem that I see is that companies buy training. They send them to— they send their recruiters to a training boot camp or whatever, and they don't read the book.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's say, let's say, let's say there's 10 recruiters in a team and they've all read your— they've all been on your training. They've not read the book, they understand what a Boolean string is, but actually, are they ever going to practice it? No, they're not.

So if some are— one of them might.

Okay, like maybe 3 of them might. 3 of the 10 might. 7 will never do it.

Yep.

So what are they— are they never going to do Boolean strings or sourcing?

First of all, do they have to? Because that's the first question.

Well, yeah, that's, that is a— that's another question, absolutely. But, um, on the— so trying to provide them with DIY solutions rather than training them how to do it. That's one of the things that we're doing. The other thing is, okay, I like that we're not trying to be Social Talent.

Click to enable.

Yeah, exactly. We're not, we're not, we're not trying to be Social Talent or Talent Sandbox. We're certainly not in the area of like, uh, performance skills. No, absolutely not. And that, that's, that sort of stuff is great. We have created one solution for Here's how to use Workday. Here's how to use your CRM. Here's how we do assessment. Here's how we do advertising. Here's how we do— here's our recruitment KPIs. And but this is all about specifically with your team. So here's how, here's how to use the CRM. Here's how to, um, how our company does diversity. Here's how our company does Inclusive hiring, you know, and but it's all templated. It's like, here's the 22 cards, your team fills in the 22 cards. Yeah, so that anybody new—

sales, like, uh, by the way folks, it's sales, that's called battle cards if you're not familiar with that.

So here's the— yeah, and here's the— here's how you— yeah, exactly. It's like, here's all the— here's all the— so So that like in an RPO context, for example, I'm moving from one account onto another account. When I move on to that second account, I don't need 3 weeks to learn it all. I need about an hour to go through these cards and I'm going, right, okay, I know, I now know most of the things I need to get on with my job on this account. Or if I'm a contractor moving into a TA team, you know, I can pick it up really quickly because I've got that learning within my enablement system. Um, but it's definitely— it's not, it's not to do with— it's certainly not about the learn— the type of, yeah, talent sandbox.

Or I think I'm— let me rephrase. So it's not about the material for learning, it's not about the training, it's not about the development, it's about knowing where to get the stuff that you need in order to do your job. So if I were to essentially summarize kind of the recruiter enablement role that you're envisioning, the main goal is to make sure that the recruitment team has everything they need to be able to find and hire the best possible candidates for their company. And the recruiter enablement acts as a support system for the system of recruiting, providing them with the resources, the tools, the guidance, and also the direction of where to find it. So, you know, there may be 100 hours of recorded video of people doing things and showing other people how to do things. They might have even bought training and it's all in a library somewhere, but people don't know how to get to it. So part of the job isn't just— it isn't creating those trainings. It's putting them somewhere in a way that it can be found when you need it at the time that you need it. Like just-in-time availability of required resources. Is that more like it?

Yeah, I mean, I, I— yes, I'm sorry, I might have said something slightly confusing in terms of— I think it definitely— recruiter enablement definitely includes all of that performance learning and training stuff. It does include making sure that people understand how to do everything. What we've built within our product in Poetry, that's not about that, but that would be a—

that's what I get it now.

Yeah, exactly. There would be a launcher in there there would be a launcher within Poetry to open up Talent Sandbox or to open up Social Talent or to open up charlistackle.com or whatever it might be. So it's definitely a hub for your learning and the practice of recruiter enablement. And that job may well include training people. Absolutely.

Or acquiring the training or organizing existing training.

Yes, exactly. Making sure that the right experts are brought in to do it. Um, yeah, and, and just to go back to like, I think I said this earlier, but one of the things that Recruiter Enablement, we're trying to really eliminate is the number of times that people are on Teams or on Slack going, can anybody tell me how I can find, you know, whatever it is? Because they should all be— they should be able to find it in the one place. It should be easy for them to access, you know. Recruiter Enablement, one goal of Recruiter Enablement is definitely make it Reducing the time to find the things to get your tasks done.

Yep. Speed, efficiency. Okay. So, thanks for pulling that thread with me. The other one, as I mentioned, there were two. The other thread that I want to pull on a little bit is tools. And let me explain why that's a loose thread for me. Almost every organization that I've worked with has a tool stack, technology stack that is in some way, shape, or form at conflict with itself. Either overlapping functions and tools or gaps that both or all the tools don't meet or tools that are acquired for purpose A but then are utilized for purpose B or they're acquired and they're not utilized. So everything from the very decision of what tools to buy is I think outside of the realm of enablement because I think enablement from what I learned in the Peace Corps when I was trained by the best to use appropriate technology to help a community in need that couldn't afford, you know, the technology, right? So, we call that appropriate technology. The biggest lesson, the biggest takeaway from that is use what you have. So, I think recruiter enablement is about What do you have? Let's use that versus let's go buy a bunch of stuff. So when it comes to tools, doesn't it fall apart a little bit because most companies are just not, let's just face it, they're not utilizing the tools they have. I've never met an organization with a LinkedIn recruiter account that has full utilization or even half utilization.

Yeah, absolutely.

And look, the single most used tool and the single most expensive tool in our, in our arsenal, and yet it's drastically misused and underutilized.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And I, I agree. And I think that your applicant tracking system, you know, companies don't use the functionality that's within that. There's loads of things that don't get used. Same with your CRM.

Um, so they, they ATS doesn't have contact management, they buy a CRM. The CRM doesn't have recruitment marketing, so they buy recruitment marketing. The recruitment marketing doesn't have background checking, so they buy background checking. That background checking doesn't have reporting, so they buy reporting. The reporting doesn't have visualization, so they buy visualization. And so now you have 7 tools and you gotta export data from one to the other using CSV files because they don't talk to each other. How is that improvement?

Yeah. Um, no, there's a lot, there's a lot of, there's a lot, there's a lot of, a lot of— I've got a lot of comments on this. So the first thing is that I think it depends on the size of the team. And often, like, a lot of those platform type decisions around technology, that'll sit with, um, it— if you're, if your team is told you are using Workday, Oracle, or SuccessFactors, right? You've got to— that's the CFO.

That's what you're going to use. Now here's how to use it.

Yeah, that's the CFO's decision. And so, um, the, the— there is, there is sometimes a RecOps team, and that RecOps team's job is definitely platform technologies. It includes how to optimize the ATS that we're using, what are the gaps, and what else do we need that is like team-wide. Um, and so I think and all of the data decisions and things like that, that all sits with RecOps. Now the difference is RecOps typically is interfacing with ex— like other teams within the business, with finance, with information technology, with, you know, other, other teams. And their job is to make sure that recruitment is, um, playing nicely with all the other data, like um, like people that need data in the organization. Enablement sometimes sits within recruitment operations. It sometimes is a stepchild, um, sometimes it is their task, and sometimes it is— there's people within rec ops who focus on enablement. Now, enablement—

So the recruiter says, the recruiter says, "Hey, I've never worked on this position before. We've never hired for a data scientist. This is our first one. How do I go about finding them or where do I go?" Like the recruiter enablement person then says, "Okay, the best tools that we have for that are these three." It could, could be, yes.

Um, it could be that they're advising—

here's a formula for finding these, or that kind of thing.

It could be the recruiter, it could be the person in recruiter enablement is advising on the right tools for specific recs. It will also be the recruiter enablement person's responsibility to evaluate what are we lacking in terms of tools and what is out there that we could go and buy. It might also be that person's job to evaluate what are all the repetitive tasks that recruiters are doing that they don't enjoy doing, the administrative things that are just— it's got to be done over and over. And is there a solution within our existing tech stack, or is it okay, or, or should we go and buy something?

Got it.

Um, I think so in terms of tools What we've done is we've got 30, we've got 30 solutions within the one workspace in Poetry. And, um, some of those are tools where, where recruitment teams don't have access to them. We've created them fresh, um, because we know that there's things that recruiters are doing they don't want to be doing, and there's a tech solution for it.

Really? No, don't say that.

Some others, some others are versions of tools which already exist. Yeah, the benefit is we're bringing it into one workspace. So if a team— there is a, there is a clear trend in every corporate function to reduce the tech stack, reduce the number of things in the tech stack. Now some of that does come with getting technology which does lots of things good enough, and actually the whole best of breed for 30 different solutions. Yeah, that's not something a company or an individual wants anymore. So if they're buying our product, they still might not use it for all of the things that we offer. Yeah, because they might want best of breed for, I don't know, um, diversity-related like content or something like that. So they might want to retain Textio for something like that, but good enough for 30 things in the one place, we think is a very, very big win because the amount of time that it's saving people from toggling around all the different things.

Yeah, that's a time waster right there. So, um, we've got a few minutes left and there was a very big question I wanted to ask you, which is we've now, you know, this, this is going to go out to a lot of people. Many of them probably have no idea about this kind of movement going on. So now they're going to be— we've just whet their appetite. They— we gave them an appetizer, or even worse, we let them smell the sizzling food, but that they can't— they can't have any of it. So if someone is going to start doing this today, yeah, what are the top 3? Let's limit it to that. What are the top 3 pitfalls to avoid? What are the top 3 goof-ups that are going to trip them up to look out for? You know, what are the top 3 things that they should be on the lookout so that they don't go down the wrong path?

You know, I, I've interviewed 160 people for my Recruiter Enablement YouTube channel, and I always ask them questions like that, and I get so many great responses back. The one that I've learned, which I think is by far the most important one— I mean, I've got one and I've got 300.

Okay, let's do one.

I'd like to do that. I'm going to do the one, right? The one is do not put things in place because you think it's a great idea from your experience as a recruiter.

Yes.

Every single recruiter looks at the world in a different way. and it's really important to ask people. You might say to them, 'Hey, I've had a problem with this when I was a recruiter, you know, what do you think about it? I find— I used to find this quite difficult when I was a recruiter. What about you? What do you think?' Get them to tell you what their challenges are. Do it in focus groups, go one-to-one to the individuals, get them to tell you what needs to be better, and then focus on that. Don't try and— don't set out a big plan of 50 things you're going to go and try and make better without getting the recruiters to tell you what they want. At least include them. If you're going to do some of your own things, that's fine, but at least include their perspectives on it. And something that was a problem for you might not be a problem for the rest of the people in the team. Yeah, something that you thought was good Everybody else might hate it.

Here's the thing, what you just said is important because every single recruiter is right and every single recruiter is wrong. And so, if you do what they all want, you'll be pulling the ship in every single direction, which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by General Omar Bradley. It's time we steer by the light of the stars, not by the light of every passing ship. Best guess. So in other words, figure out what the correct path is, set your compass to that point, and steer that way instead of trying to steer by the advice of everyone that's like, oh, let's go over here, let's go over there, let's go over here. So yeah, that's— I think that's a really critical, um, and very insightful answer to the how not to screw this up.

Alongside that, I mean, I would say alongside that, the other one of course is you do need to understand what is the, uh, what is the chief people officer's vision for the future of your, uh, business function. So if their vision is, um, you know, something's going to be different in 2 years' time and you're spending all of your time optimizing the status quo, you're kind of putting yourself, you know, you're attaching yourself to the old way of doing things, right? Um, so that change, that's just exactly— I mean, if for example, you know, you're, you're a chief people officer and therefore you're a VP of talent acquisition, are planning to move to a business partnering model or they're planning to move to a 360-degree model, or they're planning to move all the TA to Mexico, or, you know, whatever it is, you really want to try and understand what is in the plans so that what you're optimizing for aligns with what they visualize, you know, for the future. I think that will do your career a lot of good.

Yeah, you've inspired me to write an article. I'll let you know if I end up doing that. We are out of time and every one of my guests is equally punished by the severity of this last request, which is first, who should be our next guest?

Right. Who should be your next guest is This is entirely self-serving, and it should be Holland McHugh, and the subject should be Recruiter Enablement. Why? Because Holland has done it from inside at Delta Airlines and at Red Hat and at Smart Recruiters. She's, she's dedicated very much from the, like, talent attraction kind of angle. But more recently, more holistically as well. So I will ask—

doesn't mean she's going to want to be on my show, so maybe put in a good word for me. Um, but I would definitely ask. That's good. That's great. That's great. So I, I got that check. The second part of this is, what do you want our listeners to think about over the weekend? Not, not— I'm not trying to get preachy and tell them what to think, but what question to ask themselves.

I think, I think anybody listening to this should ask themselves, if you're a recruiter or you're a recruiting leader, you should be thinking about, are recruiters in your team doing things that they probably shouldn't be doing because they are repetitive administrative tasks that they actually— or that they don't necessarily have. I'm going to start again. I'm going to start again with my answer to this question. Are your recruiters collaborating effectively on things like outreach messaging and email copy and objection handling messages and things like that? If not, you don't have to use poetry for this. Poetry is like the supercharged way of doing this, but you could use a SharePoint for it, or you could use a Google site for it.

So are they collaborating effectively? Find out. Ask yourself that. Okay.

And if the answer is, if you've got people sitting next to each other who are repeating the same tasks that each other's doing, that's a bad use of their time.

Driving over the same threads. Okay, well, this has been fabulous, enlightening, very entertaining, and has even led to a possible blog post. So, uh, thank you so much for, you know, giving us an hour of your time in your evening. I'm sure it's past dinner time over there, or as you would say, supper time.

I'm going— I'm actually just— I'm actually leaving the house right now. Very, very unusual for me to go out Friday night, but I'm actually going out for— with some friends for dinner, like, right now.

Cheers. All right, then I will leave you to it. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We will see you on here in Shelly's Alley next week. We have Carl Cuts Mode as our guest. Until then, be kind