Next-gen Technology & Candidate-centric Processes Deliver Recruitment Results for Grifols

Grifols is a global healthcare company dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people around the world by producing plasma-derived medicines. With over 21,000 employees, their people truly transform lives and make a difference every day. To continue to deliver on their mission of helping patients with life-threatening conditions, Grifols sought a strategic partner with the capability to improve and scale their talent acquisition process, selecting Cielo in 2016. In the years since, the partnership has delivered a best-in-class, centralized talent acquisition function focusing on speed, scale and experience.

Grifols came to Cielo with a decentralized talent acquisition process, in which hiring responsibilities resided within each of their 180 donation centers. The new structure Cielo created delivers a streamlined function that ensures a consistent process and experience for both hiring managers and candidates. With this new centralized process, Grifols has had the ability to expand existing centers and add net-new locations to their network through acquisition and organic growth.

During the three-year partnership, the team has delivered a redesigned talent acquisition strategy centered around experience and efficiency. Results include:

	Cut Time to Offer by Almost 14 Days By building trust and credibility with hiring managers		Improved Time to Fill by 35 Days With continuous sourcing and proactive talent pipelining
	Increased Candidate Satisfaction by 37% Improving Grifols employer and consumer brand		Decreased Attrition by 11% Impacting productivity and profitability at donation centers

Scaling to Match Business Demand

D&I Tool to Expand Talent Pools

With an emphasis on candidate experience, the team has made great strides in ensuring that the front-end recruitment practices are optimized to attract and engage a diverse talent pool. Using a diversity & inclusion-focused technology tool, Grifols and Cielo have been able to review and restructure job descriptions to remove unconscious bias. Sophisticated algorithms powered by machine learning allowed the team to review and update language to more equally attract male, female and minority candidates.

Proactive “Req-less Recruiting”

The high business demand and turnover for many of the key roles at Grifols’ plasma donation centers require the company to maintain a consistent flow of applicants. Rather than a reactive recruitment process with an “evergreen req,” the team utilized historic turnover data for each role and re-engineered the process to proactively hire for each critical role before the need arose. With the labor market, low unemployment and countless job opportunities, building talent pools of potential candidates only to then have them sit in systems un-engaged is not an option. The team understood the key was in using data to predict the demand and hire qualified talent immediately, knowing there would always be a role to fill. This concept of “req-less” recruiting has allowed Grifols to dominate in their hiring markets and provide a better experience for candidates.

AI driving programmatic advertising on channels delivering lower Turnover employees

Reducing Turnover to Boost Efficiency

Grifols operates in a highly regulated industry, with oversight from both the FDA and OFCCP. This can lead to astronomical attrition costs connected to their training and onboarding process. Donation Center Technicians, Plasma Processors, and Phlebotomists require 60 to 90 days of training before they can operate and provide services. Before the partnership with Cielo, Grifols was experiencing a 48% annual turnover rate and a time to fill of almost 60 days. That meant roles went unfilled for up to two months, and trainers were wasting their time on employees who would leave before the training was complete or soon after. This impacted productivity and, ultimately, profitability.

Cielo and Grifols tackled this challenge in several ways. The team reduced the number of steps in the recruitment process from 8 to 4 to decrease fallout at the top of the candidate funnel. They also reviewed the interview process to ensure recruiters and hiring managers were successfully screening for key traits that would indicate the candidate would be successful in their roles at the plasma donation centers. These strategies improved application completion rates, cut the time to fill by 35 days, and decreased attrition by 11%. With each point of attrition directly affecting each center’s profitability, this process has made a significant financial impact.

Recruiters as Talent Advisors

Organizations with high-volume roles often add in lots of tech and automation to screen and narrow their candidate pool. The Grifols and Cielo team have utilized technology in a way that enables recruiters to improve the critical high-touch elements of the recruiting process versus removing them. The business-critical roles at donation centers share many commonalities in required skills. In response, recruiters act as talent advisors, listening to candidate cues – everything from their conversation style to their past work experience – to help guide talent to the role that will allow them to contribute and find value in their work. This talent advising has increased overall engagement by matching new employees with the roles that best fit their skills.

Big Data for Business Results

Technology still plays an integral role in the talent acquisition strategy by providing ways to improve the experience and outcomes. As programmatic advertising has increasingly made its way from consumer marketing into the recruiting space, the Grifols and Cielo team have taken it a step further. They allow the strategy to improve not only ad spend but also hiring outcomes. This has allowed the team to accelerate beyond the standard practice of job board posting and social media ads. Artificial intelligence optimizes ad spend and channels based on performance and candidate funnel goals. From there, a dashboard connects the programmatic advertising data (CRM) back to the candidate source and turnover stats (HRIS) to understand not only which advertising channels attracted the most candidates but which channels brought in employees with lower turnover. With a continued focus in reducing attrition, this process has become a meaningful way to connect Big Data from multiple systems to provide tangible recommendations for improving business results.

Predictive analytics to PROACTIVELY fill roles in advance of vacancies