The scale of recruitment at multinational professional services company Accenture is impressive by any measure. With around 770,000 people working for the business around the globe, Tom Sayer, global recruiting director of assessments, skills, and experience at the business, says they’re hiring around 150,000 employees every year with applicants approaching the firm numbering in their millions.
The concept of 360-degree recruitment for the business ties in directly with the ethos of the business itself. The company is pursuing the idea of 360-degree values, so that wherever and however someone engages with the business, there is always a measurable and positive impact.
Sayers’ work is to extend this idea to new recruits and job applicants, and for good reason. As many organisations know, recruitment is often the first point of contact—and sometimes the only experience—someone may have with a business. That experience can determine whether they become future customers or advocates for the business, so from that perspective, getting the experience right the first time is immensely important.
Assuming his role a few years ago, Sayer wanted to be sure the business was listening to the experience of everyone affected by the recruitment process. Naturally, it was important to capture and consider the experience of applicants and candidates, but to truly reflect on the process and the experience, it would also be necessary to consider the experience of managers and the recruitment team as well. With so many people involved, it would not be possible to listen to everyone, but Sayer was determined to find a way to collect and aggregate the sentiments felt around the process and use this to identify and deliver positive change.
It wasn’t that the company did not measure impact in recruitment, but the feedback taken occurred at the end of the recruitment experience, creating a final net promoter score (NPS) which really was only based on what the candidate could remember of the experience when asked two weeks or so after the process. Such information, while not entirely useless, did not offer a true insight into what was happening or being experienced.
To address this, the business put together an approach that would engage with candidates and applicants at diverse points along their journey with the company. Pulse surveys were introduced at diverse stages in the recruitment process like following the first application, following an interview, and so on. Data gathered from these built up a much more detailed illustration of the applicant’s experience with the business, based on near immediate experience rather than reflective thoughts based on distant memories.
Pulling together all this feedback, the business created a series of graphs which in Sayers’ words provided a “treasure trove” of information. On one hand, the company now had a clear general overview of the recruitment process, but at the same time, they had the potential for drilling down into specific points of the recruitment experience at an impressive level of detail.
Determined to capture the experience from all perspectives, the business also rolled out pulse surveys among hiring managers, carried out on a quarterly basis. This insight too has been important for the business as it gives details of the difficulties and challenging aspects of the recruitment process for the business. As Sayer notes, the data offered information into the processes and the technology used by staff, which in turn indicated areas for training and investment.
The new approach to recording experience around recruitment gave the organisation a starting point for their own journey in improving the experience for everyone. It became clear what the process was like for both candidates and recruiters involved. It also indicated which elements of hiring had the biggest impact on each cohort of those involved. The function of the hiring process, for example, had biggest impact for recruiters themselves, while interestingly, the data also showed that while they thought the application experience was too long and drawn out for candidates, this proved not to be the case. The scores for this part of the process were high enough for the business not to have to worry too much about how long it was taking to bring people into the organisation.
A combination of these insights led the business to create a series of training resources for hiring managers across the business. Given the scale of recruitment across the worldwide organisation, being able to prove impact of intervention would clearly pay back handsomely in terms of cost, resources, and most importantly, in terms of the experience for candidates and hiring managers alike.
Taking lessons from the collected data, Sayer’s team worked with SocialTalent to create training resources for hiring managers. Furthermore, in recognition of the time constraints on these people, the training was broken down into manageable pieces so they could be slotted into the recruiter’s schedule. As Sayer notes, there’s a considerable difference between expecting someone to find days to take 30 hours of training compared with being able to dedicate 20 minutes of online training alongside work over a period of months.
Having commenced down the road of measuring experience, the training interventions delivered to recruiters were also measured and evaluated. Further pulse surveys demonstrated that the company’s recruiters were indeed learning useful new skills and approaches through the training–approaches which they could implement in their day-to-day working lives and which would improve their performance and their own experience of bringing in new people into the company.
As Sayers says, “We are fighting for new talent so we are constantly looking for how these insights can help us differentiate ourself in the market.” However, the task and the methodology pursued by the business has gone further than that. Just as the scale of hiring is impressive, changes made to the process have been made globally, affecting the work of around 50,000 managers. It’s not just the attraction and retention of external candidates that has improved, but so too has the experience and work of Accenture’s own managers as they secure the talent the business needs to go forward.
Sourced from: HRO Today