Enablo: Scaling up and Securing International Candidates

Enablo’s mission is to digitise the world of work and enable new work experiences that are accessible to everyone, anywhere.

As a fast growing company, Enablo has staff in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, New Zealand, and scattered throughout the USA.

Enablo supports customers with the most critical foundations of employee experience and cultural change. Enablo have been responsible for supporting hundreds of organisations transform their culture and the way they work, focusing on connection, communication, collaboration, cooperation and coordination. Enablo partners with Workplace from Meta, Asana and Google Workspace. 

2020 changed the world of work forever. Digital workplace design, employee experience, organisational culture and the digital tools that enable these, became the top of the agenda for all organisations.

Xref spoke with Bec Sparkes, Talent Acquisition Specialist at Enablo about scaling up and hiring the best candidates quickly and easily with Xref.

Tell us about hiring at Enablo. What are the key areas that you focus on? 

Bec: I joined in September last year, and we were sitting at 27 employees; we're now sitting at 45. We have huge plans to get to 100, by the end of this year. 

It’s going to be quite a big year for us in terms of hiring. We’re looking for engineering roles such as full-stack developers. 

We’re also looking to grow our experience team - Experience Managers, Implementation Managers and such. 

You've got your Customer Success team; Managers and Directors for each of these levels as well. 

We have a sales team: We’re looking for Sales/Business Development Representatives (SDR/BDR), mid market and enterprise Account Executives or Sales Executives. And of course Marketing. 

Tell us more about the hiring landscape. What are the challenges that you faced in the last few years? What is the candidate market looking like right now for you? 

Bec: Everyone's been talking about The Great Resignation. That's a key player in everyone's world at the moment. 

But for us, challenges at the moment would definitely be the talent shortage and its competitiveness. 

People are moving really fast. Just finding the right people and competing with all the other companies out there that are offering great things as well. 

I like to think that we move pretty fast, especially now that we have Xref on board because it makes things so quick. The turnaround has been great. 

Have you considered hiring overseas? Or do you just keep your hiring to Australia and New Zealand?

Bec: Yes, we've got a US team and we're doing a fair bit within the US market. We currently have 13 employees in the US. And that has grown. We've had five new starters, just in the last three weeks over in the US. 

We've got another one starting on Monday. We’re focusing our hiring efforts on Australia, New Zealand and the US at this stage.

From an industry standpoint, what are the challenges specific to your industry that you faced in terms of hiring?

Bec: In terms of industry, our candidates don't have to come from software or anything like that (though any experience in that space does help).. On the tech side of things, it can be a challenge to find the right skills. Candidates need to have certain skills - developers need to have a certain background for example Node.js & React.js. 

In terms of the experience needed for Customer Success roles, we're not limiting it to experience in the tech industry. Our Experience Managers come from communications, marketing, change management, or HR backgrounds for example, or they've been in Experience Manager type roles in other organisations like ours. 

So there's no set path that they have to follow to be able to be hired. We're pretty flexible and open. 

[For non-technical roles] our interview process is a collaborative effort and focuses more on personal attributes, in terms of:

• our shared values and passion for creating the ultimate employee experience online
• our culture of playfulness, but working with serious intent
• our collaborative way of working out loud

Before you used Xref, how did you collect references?

Bec: The dinosaur way! I've only used Xref for about four months, but what did I do before?! Before I would need to coordinate a time to speak with a candidate’s line manager and have to do it over the phone. It's a very slow, manual process. Obviously, it takes a lot of time. 

With the time zones at the moment - I'm working on Australian Standard Time, Australian Daylight Time, New Zealand Time, and three different time zones in the US. I can't even imagine doing recruitment for the US without using Xref. Without it, my hours would be insane.

Xref has helped me significantly with overseas hiring. 

There’s only a small window that I have with the crossover between the US working hours, and I should use that time to interview candidates. If I had to do manual references and line up times to talk too, I would be using that short window of crossover to do references, rather than actually continuing to hire. 

During the last two years, especially with the shift to remote hiring, are there any specific features of Xref that you’ve found beneficial? 

Bec: Definitely, the ability to manage work across different time zones, and across multiple countries - it’s amazing. 

But also the transparency. I can see which references have been sent, whether a candidate has entered details. It helps to keep up to date. Real-time progress updates and notifications are crucial. 

We get a lot of responses, especially from the US, outside of business hours. I can wake up in the morning and know someone has completed a reference check overnight, so I can jump straight onto that and keep that candidate moving forward. 

The turnaround for our professional references is currently sitting at 14 hours. The best part is not having to play phone tag and trying to organise a call. Because we’re scaling up at the moment, it’s important to us to beat our competitors in hiring. We really want things to move quickly and make sure we're not losing people because we haven't been able to reach their reference. 

The template builder has also been awesome. To have a tool that allows for the ability to quickly generate questions relevant to that role, based on certain competencies is helpful. It supports the elimination of reference bias. You've always got to be aware of that in terms of interviewing, but the template builder really helps to make sure that's not coming into play in a reference. 

Overall, the simplicity of Xref, in general, has been beneficial. It's so user friendly and easy. It's an easy process to explain to a candidate when I'm talking them through the referencing process and that helps them reiterate the process to their hiring manager or line manager. It's just super simple.

What can you share about the impact Xref has made on your hiring process?

Bec: Xref has positively impacted the candidate experience, and the best thing about it is that it just made our hiring so much faster, and we’re really able to keep up. We can get offers out quicker, or get onboarding started faster. I think the biggest impact is the time it's saving. 

I can't speak highly enough of Xref. It makes things so simple and so efficient. 

I can do so many other things in that time that I save. Being able to shoot off a reference and let that happen in the background and then continue to work is just amazing. 

If you could summarise Xref in one sentence, what would you say?

While we're scaling up, we're trying to hire fast,

Xref has been a game-changer in terms of facilitating our growth.