High-volume hiring for expansion of Philippines industrial tech leader

Challenges

Expansion requiring high-volume hiring

A leading global industrial technology organization wanted to significantly expand its Philippines operations to support business growth in North America.

With a large presence in Manila, the organization selected Iloilo City for the location of its new operations – it’s a metropolitan area about 400 miles south of Manila with a population of 1 million. The building of the new center commenced in July 2020 with a planned opening in January 2021. The center would have capacity for 2,000+ employees and the organization planned to recruit 1,000+ hires in 2021.

Previously, the company used an in-house talent acquisition team based in Manila to support all Philippines recruitment. When considering the multiple challenges presented by the high volumes now required, alongside the limited timeframes for setting up support for a new location and the impact of COVID-19, leaders realized additional support was necessary to successfully fulfil these high-volume hiring needs.

Cielo’s delivery center in Manila had provided previous research support and market-mapping expertise while the organization was considering Philippines locations. The company’s Global Talent Acquisition Leader was impressed with Cielo’s capabilities during a visit in early 2020. Subsequently, the leader approached Cielo to discuss a potential solution that could provide:

• End-to-end recruitment for the high-volume hiring for the new center in Iloilo City
• Exceptional candidate attraction, experience and engagement through a complex assessment process
• Flexible and scalable resource support locally in Iloilo City and in Manila
• Utilization of additional technology where appropriate to supplement the existing applicant tracking system (ATS) and provide advanced reporting, forecasting and pipeline management capabilities.

Solutions

Process automation and enhanced candidate experience

Cielo designed and implemented an innovative solution to augment the client’s existing ATS with a custom built “high touch, frequent touch” candidate relationship management (CRM) workflow in the Cielo TalentCloud tech platform. This CRM would help enhance candidate attraction efforts and lead the candidate through the complex assessment steps.

The Cielo TalentCloud augmentation allowed for significant process automation and candidate self-service capabilities alongside a highly structured and comprehensive engagement strategy to ensure exceptional candidate experience. The Cielo TalentCloud process was designed to dovetail with the company’s existing ATS processes to minimize duplication and to ensure structured provision of data which allowed advanced pipeline management, forecasting and daily operational dashboard reporting to be readily available.

Flexible team structure meets changing demands

The Cielo team consisted of local recruiters and coordinators based in Iloilo and representing our client’s brand, who would move onsite once the facility was open. They were supported by specialists in staff augmentation in Manila who would provide remote sourcing and administrative support and manage the candidate’s engagement through the complex virtual assessment process. This team structure enables incredible flexibility to meet changing demand as well as capability to meet the changing mix of virtual and face-to-face recruitment needs as the center grows and COVID-19 restrictions change.

The team members utilized their extensive knowledge of the Philippines and Iloilo marketplace to create and implement a highly targeted sponsored social media and recruitment marketing plan. This dovetailed with the client’s Iloilo’s center launch PR activities and enabled us to generate a healthy pipeline of candidates to be readily available for hiring manager interviews as soon as they were onsite locally.

Results

Cielo designed, tested and successfully implemented the entire solution within 8 weeks of the initial discussions around the organization’s needs. Over 1,000 applications were generated by the targeted campaign prior to launch with over 50 offers accepted in the first month itself, exceeding the targets set by the client.

The “high touch, frequent touch” engagement design has doubled the percentage of candidates successfully completing the assessment phase compared to the client’s earlier benchmarks. Most candidates utilized the automation and self-service capabilities within Cielo TalentCloud for booking interviews.

The Iloilo Center successfully opened in January 2021 with the induction course fill rate exceeding targets and new courses typically being filled six weeks in advance of start date. Given the success of this program, the center’s growth was accelerated and the target figures for the remainder of the year were significantly increased.