Partnerships | Poetry demo with Wilson

Adam Gordon:
I’m Adam. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been in recruiting since 1999. I’m the founder of Poetry. I’ve been building technology companies for about the last 10 years.

I was co-founder of a business called Candidate.ID, which is now part of iCIMS CXM. Before that, I founded a talent sourcing business called Social Media Search, which we sold to a London-listed executive search firm called Norman Broadbent PLC.

I live in Scotland. Alicia, give us a quick introduction to you.

Alicia O’Brien:
Sure. Hi everyone, I’m Alicia O’Brien, joining from Tampa, Florida. I’m with Wilson, an integrated talent solutions provider.

I’ve been with Wilson for about 15 years in the recruitment outsourcing space, and over the last 5–10 years I’ve spent a lot of time working with different technology partners to understand how they can genuinely influence the recruiting landscape that we all operate in. Happy to be here.

Stephen McGrath:
My name is Stephen McGrath. I lead Product Experience at Poetry, which essentially means I spend a lot of time listening to customers, people like Alicia and others in the industry, to understand what our product needs to do and then help make that happen.

Before joining Poetry, I worked as a recruiter until around five or six years ago. Then I basically followed Adam’s career path and tagged along for the ride. I’ve also worked closely with Alicia for the last five years, so this feels a bit like a family gathering today.

Adam Gordon:
Stephen always skips the interesting parts. He was actually a cage fighter who won 30 fights and only lost two. He’s also in a band, and after falling off a cliff he’s now half metal. We’ll save the “Life of Steve McGrath” webinar for another time.

Recruiter Enablement & The Complexity of Recruiting

Adam Gordon:
Today we’re going to talk about the complexity of the recruiter role, recruiter enablement, and how organisations can help recruiters become more productive and successful by giving them the tools and resources they actually need.

I’ll also do a short demo of Poetry and then we’ll discuss the recently announced partnership between Poetry and Wilson, including what it means for both organisations and their customers.

A few years ago, I became very aware that salespeople are incredibly well served by technology. They have access to content, assets, intelligence, calculators, scripts and everything else they need throughout the sales cycle.

Recruiters, meanwhile, often don’t.

Recruiting isn’t exactly sales, but there’s a huge overlap in the types of tasks involved. Recruiters need market intelligence, talent intelligence, competitor intelligence, sourcing assets like Boolean strings and outreach messaging, recruitment marketing content like job adverts and social posts, operational materials such as interview questions and job descriptions, and much more.

In 2023, I spent six months running focus groups and interviewing TA and RPO leaders through a YouTube series called Recruiter Enablement. Alicia was one of the guests. The whole purpose was to deeply understand the problem and explore how we could better support recruiters.

Alicia, from your perspective as someone leading large recruiting teams globally, what are the key challenges you’re trying to solve when it comes to enabling recruiters?

Alicia O’Brien:
For me, it’s twofold.

First, it’s about helping recruiters become more productive. Second, it’s about maintaining a consistent candidate and brand experience.

Recruiters have a huge number of details to manage. There are relationships, negotiations, market changes, hiring manager expectations, brand guidelines and more. If there’s a way to simplify the things that should already be standardised and approved, while still giving recruiters flexibility where needed, that’s the ideal scenario.

Adam Gordon:
And in Wilson’s case, it’s even more complex because your teams represent so many different brands around the world.

Alicia O’Brien:
Exactly. We’re responsible for representing our clients properly — their tone of voice, their communication style, their candidate experience.

From a candidate’s perspective, they shouldn’t really know whether they’re speaking to someone directly employed by the client or someone from Wilson. We’re meant to feel like an extension of that organisation.

That becomes especially difficult when recruiters move between projects or clients and have to absorb entirely different brand requirements quickly.

The Recruiter Experience Today

Adam Gordon:
I get the sense that a lot of TA teams essentially give recruiters an ATS, a LinkedIn account, and then throw them in at the deep end for everything else. Have you seen that?

Alicia O’Brien:
Absolutely.

Usually there’s a SharePoint or Google Drive filled with documents with dates in front of them and everyone just hopes they’re using the latest version. Recruiters are left trying to figure out which interview guide, intake template or candidate pack is actually current.

Things go out of date very quickly.

Stephen McGrath:
That matches my experience too.

I worked in large recruitment organisations before joining Poetry and I remember situations where I’d work for one company on a Friday and then be aligned to an entirely different client by Monday. Trying to get up to speed quickly was incredibly difficult.

Something like Poetry would have helped massively.

What we’ve found with customers is that it doesn’t really matter how mature they are operationally. Some have nothing organised at all, while others are extremely process-driven and structured. Poetry can help at both ends of that spectrum, just in different ways.

What Recruiters Actually Need

Adam Gordon:
Alicia, beyond job ads and interview questions, what are some of the other assets recruiters need to do their jobs properly?

Alicia O’Brien:
A huge one is communication support.

Things like outreach messaging, social content and guidance around which channels to use. Also structured interview frameworks tailored to specific roles rather than generic forms used across an entire organisation.

Consistency matters. Otherwise recruiters are all working from their own individual toolkits.

Poetry Product Demo

Adam Gordon:
Let me quickly show how Poetry addresses some of these challenges.

At a high level, recruiters log into a central workspace containing solutions across the recruiting lifecycle:

• Kick-off meeting preparation
• Market and talent intelligence
• Boolean sourcing strings
• Outreach messaging
• Recruitment marketing assets
• Job adverts
• Interview questions
• Knowledge bases
• Competitor insights
• Talent market intelligence
• Sourcing assets
• Outreach messaging
• Recruitment marketing content
• Job adverts
• Interview questions
• Job descriptions
• Hiring manager preparation materials
• Competitor intelligence
• Employer comparisons
• Diversity insights
• Remote work trends
• Commutable talent hotspots
• Skills overlap analysis

However, about 90% of usage comes through what we call Playbooks.

A recruiter selects the type of role, the location and other details, then Poetry automatically builds a complete recruitment pack in around 20 seconds.

That includes:

All of the assets influence each other and are controlled centrally through templates and admin settings to ensure consistency and compliance.

For example, recruiters can instantly generate competitor comparison cards showing compensation, culture, work-life balance, career development and more between organisations.

The entire idea is to reduce tech fatigue. Recruiters don’t want to log into five or six different systems to do their work.

Why Wilson Partnered with Poetry

Alicia O’Brien:
One of the things I love most about Poetry is that everything exists in one place.

There’s a lot of noise in HR tech right now. What stood out to us was that Poetry genuinely helps recruiters get up to speed quickly while maintaining a white-glove service experience for our clients.

If a recruiter joins a new project tomorrow, they can immediately access the correct resources, branding, messaging and guidance without hunting around multiple systems.

We’ve talked for a long time about the “two hours saved per recruiter per day” statistic, and in practice we’ve found that to be very real. More importantly though, it frees recruiters up to spend more time with hiring managers and candidates instead of searching for documents.

Customer Outcomes

Stephen McGrath:
Different customers use Poetry differently depending on their needs.

Some use it heavily for sourcing research and advanced Boolean search creation. Others use it to standardise outreach messaging or improve recruiter consistency.

Ultimately though, it leads to real hiring outcomes. It helps recruiters move faster while remaining compliant, on-brand and context-aware.

Measuring ROI

Adam Gordon:
Originally, we positioned Poetry heavily around productivity and time savings.

What we’ve increasingly realised is that customers also value the consistency, compliance and governance aspects just as highly. They want recruiters producing on-brand content consistently, without relying on shadow AI tools or inconsistent messaging.

Alicia O’Brien:
Exactly.

I oversee marketing and brand at Wilson now as well, and one thing I’ve noticed is that I rarely get escalations anymore around incorrect branding or messaging because recruiters have access to the right assets from the beginning.

About Wilson

Adam Gordon:
Before we finish, Alicia, tell everyone a little more about Wilson.

Alicia O’Brien:
Wilson is a global integrated talent solutions provider with large operations across the Americas, LATAM, Africa and EMEA, with additional presence in APAC.

Our core focus is helping organisations solve hiring problems — whether that means full recruitment outsourcing, source-and-screen services, talent intelligence or specific segments of the TA lifecycle.

Most of our solutions are human-led and technology-enabled, and partnerships like this are an important part of how we continue evolving.

Closing Remarks

Adam Gordon:
Wilson is genuinely one of the most tech-savvy RPO organisations out there, and that’s due in no small part to Alicia and her team.

Thank you everyone for joining us today.

Alicia O’Brien:
You can learn more about Wilson at Wilson or connect with us on LinkedIn.

Adam Gordon:
And you can learn more about Poetry at Poetry HR.

Until the end of May there’s still a 14-day free trial available on the website. From 1 June, Poetry will no longer offer that free trial and pricing will also increase.

Thanks again everyone, and hopefully we’ll see you soon.