5 steps for upskilling recruiters with recruiter enablement

3 mins, 39 secs read time

As talent acquisition teams are increasingly being seen as a strategic function, recruiter enablement is emerging as a new role within these teams. Especially as many organizations have gone through a reduction in force, they’re also looking at upskilling recruiters as a cost saving measure. Having resources dedicated to the enablement of your TA team, can allow for faster onboarding as well as increased productivity.

At Greenhouse Open, at the Javits Center, Hannah Spellmeyer, former Director of Talent Acquisition and current angel investor and advisor to BrightHire, and Teddy Chestnut, Co-founder of BrightHire led a session that detailed how to implement a recruiter training program.

We gathered five steps from their conversation that will help you build a training program for your recruiting team.

Step 1: Build your business case for TA enablement

Hannah Spellmeyer stressed the importance of upskilling recruiters during a time when the market is historically unstable – it’s more important than ever to retain the team you do have (even if reduced) and also ensure that they are recruiting the right people. She advises to spend time gathering feedback from your TA team, your hiring managers and your candidates to see where opportunities might be within your current processes.

Hannah mentioned, “You can’t make a training on everything, but I guarantee if you sort of zoom out a little bit you will start to see some trends.” Take a look at common practices that will not be able to scale as your organization grows, for instance senior leaders helping to close offers. Can you train your TA team to be able to close these instead?

Step 2: Rely on your data

Once you have established how your recruiting function is currently operating, use data to dig into what is creating these trends. Teddy shared a story of how one company looked into the amount of time spent by recruiter per-candidate in recruiter screens and found that the most time was being spent with candidates who ultimately were rejected. They found ways to cut down on this and were able to scale the team in a more efficient way.

Step 3: Define your core trainings

When you are thinking about what to offer in your recruiter training, think about what your core offerings will be. For instance, Hannah advises that trainings on your tech stack, how to sell your company (candidate motivation), and how to lead an interview debrief should all be included in your core onboarding trainings. These onboarding sessions can be launched whenever you have a group of new TA team members starting and can also be used as refreshers if needed.

Step 4: How do you make your training interesting?

How do you make training interesting so that your recruiters are engaged and retain the information? Hannah suggests utilizing your best talent to lead your trainings. Instead of leading every training yourself, identify the team members who are good at the topic for a session and have them lead the training. This engages the team and gives your more tenured team members a chance to grow and develop. In addition, consider using other leaders from throughout the organization to lead trainings on things like equity or how to close a specific role.

One other tactic to engage your recruiting team in your training program is to empower them to lead their own training journey. As Teddy shares, “the way to flip that is to put the trainee in control, put the recruiter in control.” Let your recruiters share with you what they think they need training in and then allow them to help create the team’s training programs.

Hannah added, “You’ll find that when you use people on your team as trainers, the rest of your recruiting team kind of roots for them.”

Step 5: Prep your team before you launch your new training

Be sure to schedule the training well in advance and avoid busy weeks. Hannah suggests assigning prework and stating clear learning objectives. Then, always do a runthrough and look at any slides or content before launching live.

Any recruiting team has the ability to launch a new training program and these tips can help you hit the ground running.

Interested in more retention tactics for talent teams? Read this blog to learn how to build an effective employee recognition program for recruiters.

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