EP112: Join Talent - How They Define Recruiter Enablement

All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify and stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Sophie Power of Join Talent. Great to have you with us, Sophie.

Sophie: Hi, thank you so much, Lydia. Yes, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here, and thank you for inviting me.

Discovering a Love for Recruitment

Lydia: So Sophie, you definitely have a deep and extensive experience in Talent Acquisition. So, what's the pull factor for you in this field? Tell us a little bit about your journey in this space so far.

Sophie: Yes, sure. So, in terms of where I started in my career, I studied a degree in comparative literature, which was a very varied degree. I studied all sorts [of literature]. I often jokingly refer to it as a very expensive book club. But one of the things I really loved was sitting around and talking to people. I found out that I was really good at that bit. When thinking about careers and things like that, I didn’t have anything obvious that I wanted to get into, but I saw that a recruitment agency in my hometown was offering a summer job, working in their branch. So, I took it because I thought, "You know what? It gives me some good office experience," which I didn’t have at the time since my part-time work was in retail. It would give me an insight into the world of office work, and if nothing else, I’d hopefully make some connections at the local recruitment agency when I wanted to move back after graduation next year.

In the end, I found that I actually really loved it. I helped clients to find candidates for roles, did a bit of marketing for them, and did a lot of intern stuff as well. I make a mean cup of tea, what can I say? And yes, I really enjoyed it. So, after graduation and a little bit of traveling—because who doesn’t after uni?—I went to work full-time in recruiting. I quickly realized that in-house recruitment was something I really wanted to do. With that in mind, I moved via an RPO. Then, fully in-house within the space of about a year.

Actually, I moved in-house pretty quickly, which was great. I worked in large corporate organizations for about six years before moving into startups in 2017, well, very late 2016, actually. But yes, 2017 with gusto. And I’ve spent a long time living and working in the London tech scene. I worked for what are now pretty huge organizations. My first startup, GWI, now operates all over the globe and has hundreds of employees, but I was their very first recruiter and was employee number 35. I helped grow the business quite substantially. I’ve worked for some quite big names in the startup scene that have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of pounds in funding. It’s been pretty exciting, which is what drew me to join Join Talent, which is where I am.

Adapting Agency Skills for a Startup

Lydia: And the scaling bit for startups would have been quite the challenge for you. So, how did you adapt your skills coming from the agency setup and bring those skills into an organization that is scaling really fast? I mean, what are those skills that you found were transferable in this in this scenario?

Sophie: So, it's an interesting one. One of the things that I was probably less strong at an agency, if I'm being completely honest, was the sort of business development and sales side of things. It's not my strong suit. Truth be told, what I am really good at is working with people, engaging with people, understanding, you know, what's important to them, what they're looking for in a new role, and getting them to go through a recruitment process. Helping them, you know, understand whether this is the right role for them or not, and going on that journey with them—that is the part that I think is really important.

Especially when I moved into startups, I found it really came into its own. Because ultimately, you're trying to pitch, essentially, a role at a company that nobody's heard of, and they're currently working for a massive global organization. And sure, they're looking for a new role, but, you know, when you're trying to convince them to move into an industry that's really, you know, growing, there's still quite an element of risk there, isn't there? So, understanding what's interesting to them, understanding what motivates them, you know, all sorts of things—it's quite a holistic approach and it's really important for getting them to be excited and engaged, and want to work for your company.

I think people are more switched on to the world of startups and scale-ups now than perhaps they were when I started. But, you know, that's still very much the case for a lot of candidates that I speak to. And I think, to actually get back to answering the question, that bit about engaging with people and finding out what makes them tick, and taking a really people-centric approach—that is the part where I think I really excel in talent acquisition.

Lydia: So, your role at Join Talent is a TA partnerships director. What are some areas that you're looking into currently at Join Talent?

Sophie: Bit of everything.

Lydia: It’s a large setup, isn’t it? It’s a global company with good colleagues.

Sophie: Exactly. So, we were founded in the UK by Katrina Hutchinson O'Neill back in 2019. We operate in 19 countries and counting. We've got quite large hubs in the UK, Ireland, South Africa, and India. But we've also got teams as far-flung as Japan and Australia. We've got people in the US and all over mainland Europe as well. What I really admire about Join Talent, and I think one of the important things that drew me there, is that it's an embedded talent organization, or RPO, for lack of a better word, that has been founded by people who have worked in in-house recruitment. So, that is our background, that is our area of expertise.

We understand the client's perspective because we've been the client. I have been a client of RPOs in the past, and I have been an in-house recruiter. So, when I'm speaking to potential Join Talent clients about their challenges, I'm drawing on my own experience and what I know from when I worked there or wherever I worked.

So, my role at Talent is quite varied. Currently, I'm parachuting into the internal talent team, which is really busy at the moment, and that's a fantastic sign for the industry. I've been doing a lot of recruiting in APAC at the moment, particularly helping the team bring great people in. But it's super varied. One day I'll be at a recruitment conference, talking to people day in, and day out about all things Join Talent. Then the next day, I'm running an AMA session online about career journeys and talent acquisition—I did that last week, which has flown by. Today, I've been screening people to work in India and Japan, and later in the week, I might be recruiting people in the UK and US, before finishing off the week by writing up some articles and blogs for LinkedIn and recording this podcast. So, it's a varied role.

Defining Recruiter Enablement in a Rapidly Growing Field

Lydia: You're right. It’s varied indeed and must never be a dull day for you. Looking at some of the areas that you're quite passionate about, I understand is recruiter enablement. How do you define this sort of thing?

Sophie: Great question. Everybody defines it slightly differently. So, recruiter enablement, I think, is quite an interesting topic. It's definitely a growing one, and I think it's a really important one. It is something that most good talent acquisition people will have engaged with at some point, whether they realize it or not. At the start of the year, before I joined my current organization, I was fortunate enough to work with a chap called Adam Gordon, who is an entrepreneur in the UK in the recruitment industry, and he is currently working on a company called Poetry The Recruiter Enablement Workspace.

He defines it as a practice that's centered around four specific pillars: marketing, promotions, learning, and technology. Other people take a slightly more zoomed-out view, while others take a much more granular view.

But largely speaking, I look at it as you have in a sales organization. Sales are essential to a business making money. So, you have sales enablement, marketing, sales enablement, revenue operations—whatever you want to call it—but you have a team, or a person, depending on your company size, who is focused on giving the salespeople everything they need to go out and sell and bring money in for the company.

However, to take it a step back, if you have recruiters in your organization, they're the ones hiring your salespeople. If they don't have all of the tools they need to deliver those salespeople, it doesn't matter how good your sales enablement is. Because if they're not equipped to hire great salespeople, for example, then you're never going to be able to sell anything. A bad hire can cost the company thousands of pounds. So, it is absolutely in a business's interest to look at equipping your recruiters with all the tools they need to succeed—something that we take really seriously at Join Talent.

We've got the incredible Lee Harding working for us as our Director of Talent Enablement and Analytics, and his sole focus is making sure that we have everything we need to put our recruiters onto client sites. They are fully equipped, they are ready to go from day one, they've been trained, they've got all the software they need, and they have all the support they need ongoing, so they can drop into our clients and hit the ground running immediately.

That is what recruiter enablement does for your organization. It saves you time, gets your recruiters operating quicker, and means that you can be as effective as possible with your team. So, as you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about it.

Lydia: Yes, definitely. I can see how you lean forward to tell me more about that.

Sophie: If anyone's hearing this on audio, they're not seeing me leaning in and waving my hands at the camera.

Lydia: It is a video. So enablement, is it an onboarding process that takes that form, is it organic, on the job? What does that look like? Do you think it can take any form?

Sophie: Yes, it can take any form.

So, on the most basic level, it's making sure you've got good templates and good practices in place for your job descriptions. You've got a fixed process for your hiring process. You've got managers that are trained in how to interview so that they're not just going, "Yes, and why do you want to work here?" They're getting excited, and they're engaging the candidates, and the candidates are coming out of the interview buzzing and really eager to join. It's making sure that there's a smooth handover between recruiting and HR so that onboarding goes well, and pre-boarding goes well because if you get that wrong, the candidate might not even join.

It sets up the promise of your employer's value proposition. It sets up the promise of your employer brand that you're going out to market with. I do think it's a really important piece, but it can look really different. It doesn't have to be a fancy piece of software. It doesn't have to be a whole army of people behind the scenes. Everybody might have their own individual practice, but then, recruiter enablement brings that together and makes sure everybody who's got a slightly different but fantastic way of working can talk to each other and get everything aligned.

How Poor Recruiter Enablement Leads to Wasted Effort, Even With Great Hires

Lydia: Sophie, apart from hiring a bad hire costing an organization in terms of money, what else might be the cost of not prioritizing enablement strategies for recruiters?

Sophie: Cost of time. So even if they're making great hires, they might be working so much harder than they need to be.

For example, thinking about all of the documentation that goes into one recruitment process end-to-end, you've got intake meetings, which are absolutely essential. You've got to get them right. So much of the recruitment process, if you sit and actually map out every individual action, happens before you even advertise the role, before you start speaking to people. If you don't get those bits right before you even go to market, you're not going to have a good time, to put it bluntly.

So, a lot of it for me comes in at that early stage—making sure you're getting your intake meetings right, making sure that you're connected with the people looking at workforce planning and things like that. In its simplest form, it can be making sure you've got the right documentation in the right place, and everybody's using the same template as well. One organization I went into was a fantastic company and I loved working there. But, I realized everybody was working off different documents. Every team had its own thing, which meant that the bar was a little bit different in each team. I didn’t know it at the time because the term recruiter enablement hadn't been coined yet, and I didn’t know what I was doing was recruiter enablement. But basically, I just went and standardized everything and it made things so much easier because we were all singing from the same sheet. Everybody was recruiting to the same standard.

Also, it means if somebody goes off sick, or they've got to go and do a nursery pickup, but the candidate’s coming in to interview, or they’re booked to do an interview online in the modern world, somebody else can sub in because they've got everything they need to jump in and support. It enables so much collaboration as well.

Lydia: Speaking of collaboration, you want to get a buy-in. Let's say this is a program in which you have to invest time and money and training is involved. There is a certain onboarding process, I would assume that goes into this.

So how do you go about getting that kind of buy-in from senior management, for instance, to invest in these enablement programs, as you may call it?

Sophie: I probably use the term "enablement practice" and it's an ongoing thing. In terms of buy-in, I mean, measure, test, tweak is probably what I do. So, where are you at now? Where would you like to be? Okay, well, let's keep trying, reiterating, taking a very kind of product-focused approach—sort of product management-focused approach to how you're looking at it. Then, as you go, you will start seeing incremental improvements, whether that is reducing your time to hire, reducing your cost per hire, getting more candidates moving through stages, or even, dare I say, interviewing fewer people at the earlier stages, which means you're running a more efficient process, which gives your teams more time back.

It is very easy to tie a share cost to each of that person's time. So, there was a jokey meme online that went around a couple of months ago of somebody who managed to hack their Google Calendar to show the cost of each person's time for every meeting they're doing. Now, if you're running a bad briefing meeting, which means that you're not talking to the right people because you haven’t got the right information to start with, then you're putting 10 people through a process when, actually, if you had a good briefing, you'd only put five. You're doubling the cost of interviewing for that round because people are spending time that they don't have.

So, I think if you're trying to get buy-in from the business, that is a really good way of doing it. You've got to talk the language of the business, and it's money. The closer you are to the money, the better. It's all well and good talking about how it affects the recruiter, but the business is paying the recruiter to do a job. If you go to the business and say, "Well, actually, it's costing us a fortune in company time interviewing because we haven't got this tool which is going to help make us more efficient," it's a pretty easy discussion then.

Building a Committed and Motivated Startup Team With Authenticity

Lydia: Going back to your previous experience in startups, especially those that are scaling really fast, I imagine it to be pretty aggressive to work in that environment and build processes and just look into efficiencies, right?

So in your opinion, how do startups, or maybe new companies, position themselves as a good place to work, or a place where you would see yourself growing, and you would see a future with this company, especially when they're new in a highly competitive industry?

Sophie: I think it's an interesting one. There's balance. So, I would say you want to screen out as many people as you screen in. You do that by being really honest about what you are as a company. Are you super focused on having intensive face-to-face team time and being in an office five days a week? Be honest about that. Is this job going to be really intense for the next 18 months? Then you'll get the chance to build a team, and things will start to level out and scale up as we grow. Be honest about that. Are you offering a huge amount of equity because you truly believe this will be the next big thing, but right now it's a huge risk? People who are bought into it will take that journey—be honest about that.

By being honest and authentic about what you're actually offering as a business, you attract the right people. So, the last company I worked for, Zinc, had nine people when I joined, and they were nearly 50 when I finished last summer. I was the only recruiter that entire time, and also the only HR person. So, it was a very busy role, but we succeeded and had a really high offer acceptance rate, and also very high probation pass rates. It’s really nice seeing my hires gain promotions now.

I still follow them on LinkedIn. If any of them are watching this, and I’m like, "Look at you!" But yes, we did that by being really clear about what we were and who we were. Like, you will have fun, we're a great bunch of people. Here are all the things we do to support your well-being, and here are all the things we do to make sure that you're set up for success, but just to be really honest—there are high expectations. It’s a busy role but your time outside of work is your own, but it's pretty hectic in work.

There will be people for whom that doesn’t appeal, and that’s absolutely fine. So, I think when you're thinking about articulating that as a startup, you've got to be really honest about what you are, what you can offer, what the benefits are, and also be comfortable with the fact that not everyone is going to want to work for you and be cool with that as the founder. As a super early-stage employee, you’re closer to the founders, so you're going to be more bought in. Naturally, as you expand, people get further and further away from that epicenter or nucleus of the company. So, people will be a little bit less bought in. You've got to think about what's in it for them. You're going to find people who say, "No, that sounds like hell," and that's absolutely fine. You have to be comfortable with that. You will attract people who are super bought in, absolutely love working there, and think it's the career opportunity of their life. So yes, I think that authenticity piece is really important.

Networking Outside Traditional Channels Can Lead to Recruitment Success

Lydia: And speaking of those people who have accepted the offer and maybe just gone through the whole process with you, what are your most memorable or favorite recruitment stories, Sophie?

Sophie: My favorite recruitment story? Oh, that's a good one. I’ve got a couple. In terms of favorite recruitment stories, probably this one from about 10 years ago. So, I had to recruit for quite an interesting product management role—a junior product manager. In theory, it should have been quite easy, right? But they had to be interested in some really niche things related to the product they’d be working on. It was an analytics product in market research, so we wanted someone with broad experience who’d be willing to take on this junior role.

We were struggling to find the right person. We kept coming up against candidates who were more like pure-play software product managers, which wasn’t quite what we needed. I was scratching my head a bit. I think my favorite thing about that role is that I ended up filling it by meeting someone in a pub! That sounds bad because, we’re all against those kinds of things, right? But I didn’t meet her at the time of hiring. I’d actually met her about a year before. We got chatting, but we never talked about recruitment at all—I don’t even think she knew what I did for a living.

Anyway, fast forward to 2017, I had posted on social media saying, "Hey, this is a really cool role at my company. If anybody’s interested in getting into product management, here it is. It’s based in London. I really love working here; it’s super fun. If you want to know more about it, let me know." And this person I’d met in the pub a year earlier, who I hadn’t spoken to about recruitment, reached out and said, "Oh yeah, that actually sounds exactly like what I’m looking for at the moment."

We had a call, and I was like, "I’ve found her!" I ran to the hiring manager and said, "Great news, I found the perfect candidate!"

Lydia: This was how long since you posted, or what was the time-to-fill of this vacancy?

Sophie: I think that role had been open at that point for about eight weeks. So, two months. It'd been a while, and we were like, we'd interviewed people and met some brilliant people, but they weren't right for the role. If we're not happy with our current batch of interviews, we need to go back to the drawing board. Basically, it is where we reevaluate this role and what we're not getting right here. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. This person interviewed for the role and they absolutely nailed it. They hired it. They're still working on product management today and doing a brilliant job. But, on their first day, they showed up a bit really, because they said, “Oh, how do you know Sophie, by the way?, How did you find the role?” She's like, “I met Sophie in a pub, like a year ago. Did she not say? No, she did not.”

Lydia: Well, it worked out in the end.

Sophie: She did a fantastic job. It was her first product management role, and she took a whole new intelligence product market. So, she did a pretty good job. But, I did cringe a bit when she said that was, “Oh, that's not going to sound good.”

Lydia: That's lovely. Thanks so much for sharing. And thanks Sophie for wonderful insights today. This has been great and again, for your time and for sharing all your thoughts on especially recruiter enablement.

So for those who are listening in, especially those who may have placed before or maybe want to connect again, drop us your contact details, and someone can pick up a conversation with you later.

Sophie: Yes, absolutely. The best way to get in touch with me, Lydia is through LinkedIn.

I'm Sophie Power and working at Join Talent, so super easy to find on LinkedIn. It is actually the best way to get in touch with me, to be honest. You’re welcome to drop me a connection if anybody wants to chat further.

Lydia: Great. Thanks again, Sophie. We have been in conversation with Sophie Power of Join Talent. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.