It’s the first episode of the newly named Hiring Enablement Podcast, and in this bonus episode, we have an exciting announcement to make!
We’re joined by Solutions Driven CEO, Gavin Speirs, to speak about Solutions Driven’s new concept: Hiring Enablement.
In this podcast, Gavin talks to host Claire Murray about the advent of sales enablement and the parallels between that and the recruitment industry’s need for hiring enablement. Like sales 20 years ago, hiring managers are doing more with less time every day and are struggling to keep on top of the rapidly changing hiring market.
Gavin explains how hiring teams no longer just need transactional relationships with their recruitment partners: they need a true partnership that guarantees the right hire, first time, every time, backed by indepth processes, resources, and intelligence.
We also look at Recruitment Process Intelligence – the processes that Solutions Driven use to make hires and how this works in synergy with Hiring Enablement to get the results companies need in this tough business world.
And most of all how this isn’t a hiring revolution – it’s a hiring evolution that responds to current business needs and will continue to grow and evolve as hiring continues to change.
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Transcription
Claire Murray: Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Hiring Enablement Podcast. Today, we’re joined by Solutions Driven’s CEO, Gavin Speirs. Gavin, how are you doing today?
Claire Murray: So, Gavin, I’ve asked you to come on the newly named Hiring Enablement Podcast. We’ll get to that later today because we have a very important announcement to make. I’ll let you take the lead.
Gavin Speirs: Thank you, Claire. First of all, I am delighted to be part of today’s podcast. I’ve spent the last 15 months thinking about various things on how we position Solutions Driven. In the last 3 or 4 months, we’ve really focused on launching what we’re about to announce today. I’m delighted to share that. Today’s podcast is launching our strategy that supports Hiring Organization moving forward.
We’re calling it Hiring Enablement. I’d like to tell you more about what it is and why we created it. In simple terms, Hiring Enablement is a revolutionary recruitment approach that delivers 97% right first-time hires for our clients. It’s a strategy we’ve developed for our team to deliver more effective and efficient recruitment processes and outcomes for our clients. At the same time, it provides the hiring teams we work with the right resources, tools, technology, playbooks, and insights to continually improve their hiring process as well.
Claire Murray: Fabulous, efficient, and effective. I think that’s what everyone’s looking for. This is very exciting. Can you tell me a bit about the background of how you came to the idea of hiring enablement?
Gavin Speirs: No issue at all. I mean, there have been a few strands to the thinking on this one. I’m known internally for spending too much time and money buying random domain names. In January 2022, we bought more random domain names, and sometimes the ideas are good. Sometimes they’re not. Fortunately, 15 months ago, we thought there was something in hiring enablement and decided to use that as an idea. Behind that, though, we spend a lot of time talking to clients and looking at why they buy from companies like Solutions Driven.
Gavin Speirs: We can get into the micro level where organizations mention capacity issues, technology gaps, or struggles to find talent in specific locations. But when we analyze it on a higher level, we identified three global hiring challenges. Many organizations, even if they don’t realize it, suffer from one or two, or even all three of these challenges.
Gavin Speirs: Let’s talk about those three challenges and why hiring enablement as a philosophy and strategy made sense for Solutions Driven. The first one is hiring insanity. This means organizations using the same hiring process for years and expecting different results.
Hiring as a function has changed significantly in the last few years, with different candidate expectations and increased expectations from hiring managers. The way we attract talent has evolved. Yet, many organizations still rely on the same job descriptions, ads, and questions, without understanding why they’re losing talent to competitors. It’s a bit of hiring insanity, doing the same thing and hoping for different results. When we’ve tested this with clients, some have realized that they’re stuck in this hiring insanity loop.
Gavin Speirs: That’s just one of the challenges.
Gavin Speirs: It’s just the same as we’ve always done. We need to look at different views. So, the first one is hiring insanity. The second one is hiring execution. Can the organization always hire the talent they want when they want it? The answer is often no, and that’s where organizations struggle. The third challenge is hiring inequality. Many organizations want to hire more diverse talent but struggle to integrate it into their process and remove biases.
Claire Murray: It’s interesting because many people don’t know where to start with diversity and equality in their organizations.
Gavin Speirs: We believe most problems fall into one of these three categories: hiring insanity, hiring execution, and hiring inequality. We’re leading with this because these are the challenges organizations face.
Gavin Speirs: Internally, Solutions Driven introduced sales enablement as a strategy and it has been effective. We realized that there are similarities between the sales process and the hiring process. We want to make hiring enablement equally effective and support our hiring teams to feel more enabled.
Claire Murray: It’s like crafting a message and knowing your audience. Hiring enablement helps people know what good looks like in terms of hiring.
Gavin Speirs: Hiring enablement is not just about technology. It’s a strategy that makes the hiring process more efficient and effective. We’re excited to see where we can take it.
Claire Murray: How have clients reacted to the idea of hiring enablement? Has the reception been positive?
Gavin Speirs: Yes, the reception has been positive. It changes the conversation and adds value to our customers. We want them to be in a better place after working with us.
Gavin Speirs: Enablement as a strategy makes clients feel that we not only deliver for them but add value. It changes the conversations we have with customers and shows them that we can influence and enable them more as a partner. However, we still prioritize delivering hires and haven’t changed who we are as a company overnight. We’re just shifting our messaging and conversations to focus more on enabling clients to be more effective in hiring.
Gavin Speirs: I believe every client, except maybe a few, underestimates how much hiring has changed in the last 4 years. Many hiring managers are unaware of the extent of these changes. So, for me, gaining insights and value around the hiring process is crucial, and I think our clients will embrace it as important.
Claire Murray: That’s interesting. In fact, we had a call this week with a client who mentioned the limitations of existing salary benchmarking tools. By the time she receives the data, it’s already outdated due to the fast-paced changes in hiring. Market intelligence struggles to keep up, and even hiring managers find it challenging to stay updated.
Gavin Speirs: Linking it back to sales enablement, the way successful salespeople operated 2 or 3 years ago is different from what they need to do now. Sales enablement philosophy constantly evolves based on what success looks like in that function. The same is true for hiring enablement. I’m confident that the definition of success in the hiring process will change in the coming years. We want our clients to know that this is an evolving approach that adapts to their needs. We aim to stay at the forefront of talent space.
Gavin Speirs: We want to ensure our hiring teams feel empowered and enabled, but ultimately, our credibility lies in delivering the hires our clients need.
Claire Murray: Absolutely, it’s all about delivering.
Gavin Speirs: My last point is linking it back to RPI For those who have followed us for a couple of years, we’ve talked a lot about driven process intelligence, and we’re not losing that. It remains our internal methodology. This move to hiring enablement and the focus on it is an evolution in our thinking. However, we were clear when looking at our own positioning and customer needs.
Gavin Speirs: RPI is how we do things internally; it’s how we deliver to our customers. Hiring enablement, on the other hand, is more about what we do and why we’re doing it. Our main objective is to solve the three problems I mentioned earlier.
Claire Murray: Fantastic! Well, Gavin, as I said before, this sounds super exciting. It’s going to change recruitment and how our team hires and interacts with clients. We’re all looking forward to seeing how this unfolds in the future. Thank you for sharing all about it today.
Gavin Speirs: No, delighted, Claire. Internally, we’re really excited about this. Sometimes when you land on something that makes a lot of sense, you may question if it’s really that easy or if something is missing. But as our internal team has looked into this over the past 3 or 4 months, and even longer, it has made a lot of sense. What has really confirmed it in my mind is the feedback we’ve received from clients in the last couple of months. Positioning ourselves as an organization that supports clients with this is powerful. We look forward to supporting clients in the future.
Claire Murray: Definitely. If anyone wants to learn more about hiring enablement, what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, they can visit our website at solutionsdriven.com. All the information is there.
Gavin Speirs: Bye-bye.
Claire Murray: Cool.
