Next-gen recruitment processes deliver results for Grifols

To continue helping patients with life-threatening conditions by providing innovative plasma-derived medicines, global healthcare company Grifols sought a strategic partner with the capability to improve and scale its talent acquisition process, selecting Cielo in 2016. Since then, the partnership has delivered a best-in-class, centralized talent acquisition function focusing on speed, scale and experience.

Solutions

Grifols and Cielo tackled their turnover and time to fill challenges in several ways:

• Cutting the number of steps in the recruitment process in half – from eight to four. This decreased fallout at the top of the candidate funnel.
• Reviewing the interview process to ensure recruiters and hiring managers were successfully screening for key traits that’d 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 had a significant financial impact. 

Recruitment process, rebooted

With an emphasis on candidate experience, the team has made great strides in ensuring that front-end recruitment practices are optimized to attract and engage a diverse talent pool. Using a diversity and 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 equally attract male, female and minority candidates.

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 reengineered the process to proactively hire for each critical role. With the labor market, low unemployment and countless job opportunities, building talent pools of potential candidates to just have them sit in systems unengaged isn’t an option.

The team understood the key was 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.

Transforming with technology

Organizations with high-volume roles often add lots of tech and automation to screen and narrow the 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 instead of 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.

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 took it a step further: allowing the TA strategy to improve both ad spend and hiring outcomes.

This helped the team 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. A dashboard then connects the programmatic advertising data (CRM) back to 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 real recommendations for improving business results

Results

A long-term partnership success story

“Partnerships are built on mutual trust. The relationship that Grifols and Cielo have established since the beginning of our partnership has been the bedrock of our success. With shared accountability, the Grifols and Cielo team operate as one function. Our union has allowed our recruitment efforts to bring value to patients who have life-threatening illnesses and give them the opportunity to live better lives,” said Director of Talent Acquisition for Biomat USA, Inc., a Grifols company.

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

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.