Sanofi brings efficiency and scale to its talent acquisition in Asia

Challenges

Total transformation & tight timelines

In 2018, global life sciences company Sanofi partnered with Cielo to build a standardized RPO team to cover nine countries across South East Asia and Hong Kong/Taiwan. This change would help Sanofi recruit roles across a range of specialties, including marketing, finance, medical sales, shared services, and chemical technicians.

At the first stage of launching the new recruitment process globally, Sanofi wanted to transform its decentralized recruitment model that had forced the company to rely on multiple recruitment solution providers and staffing agencies. This dynamic put pressure on human resources to meet the talent needs of a growing business in a highly competitive market. But transforming the model and achieving consistency across nine diverse countries with different talent acquisition functions would prove to be challenging. Adding to the complexity was a short 12-week window for Cielo and Sanofi to implement the new strategy.

Solutions

Building excitement for bright improvements

To make sure the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partnership would be open, collaborative, and effective, Cielo invested time in understanding the details of each country’s current talent acquisition function. This included conducting interviews with key business leaders and hiring managers to understand their expectations from TA.  

The Sanofi TA team, with support from Cielo’s Implementation & Experience Design team, deployed various initiatives, including:

• Workday optimization
• Applications management
• Campaign management
• Candidate sourcing
• Interview scheduling
• Offer documentation and administration
• Onboarding support
• Reporting

Sanofi and Cielo worked closely to build awareness and excitement about the new processes with key stakeholders.

Blazing a new path, together

Cielo established a consultative team of life sciences talent acquisition partners in all nine countries, consisting of Cielo recruiters, some new hires, and Sanofi TA team members. The team also deployed a shared delivery support team of talent sourcers, administrators, and reporting analysts to enable an efficient and scalable, high-tech, and high-touch delivery experience to hiring managers and candidates.

The entire team underwent the intensive “Certified to Serve” training, delivered jointly by Sanofi and Cielo, which focuses on immersing the recruiters in the culture, business, processes, success drivers, and possible roadblocks to change that existed within Sanofi. This ensures that the team can represent the organization in the market effectively. It also helped to establish trust among key regional stakeholders that the Cielo team can act like a true extension of Sanofi. 

Other steps taken included:

• Deployed Cielo TalentCloud, Cielo’s exclusive candidate relationship management platform, to enhance engagement and candidate experience
• Introduced market maps and competitive intelligence to the hiring departments for critical roles, aiming for a more targeted approach and setting clearer expectations around talent availability
• Established the foundation for a strong governance and reporting cadence to steer the process effectively and track key metrics
• Partnered with Sanofi HR teams on the recruitment drive for interns at various business schools
• Aligned the TA teams to the regional and functional clusters within Sanofi with strong cluster leads, driving engagement with the business leveraging strong local market knowledge and experience

Results

Standardized processes that shine

Over the first year, the program has delivered bright results for Sanofi:

• Reduced agency hiring from 10% to less than 2%, resulting in considerable cost avoidance
• Increased referrals as a source of hiring from less than 20% to more than 30%
• Improved candidate satisfaction rate to 80% quarter over quarter regionally
• Reduced time to fill by an average of 5%
• Raised hiring manager satisfaction from 65% to 94%
• Bolstered the sales teams with more than 130 hires in 2018
• Delivered multiple senior appointments directly, without the support of an external recruitment agency
• Executed the project to build a team of Digital Transformation professionals for Sanofi’s sales function in Malaysia
• Supported the shared services business in Malaysia to ramp up and transition critical processes from China, Japan, and Korea. This required finding talent with the right language capabilities in a tight time frame.