Reducing recruitment time for GE Energy

Challenges

Talent recruitment for the future

As a global company operating in a range of niche sectors, GE Energy needed to source and engage with passive candidates to feed future demand for staff. It also wanted to build its employer brand by delivering the best candidate experience. However, GE was growing so much that it was unable to hire staff fast enough to fill critical roles. To address the changing business needs, the organization needed a talent acquisition partner it could trust to flex and scale quickly.

While building a substantial talent pool for sustainable business growth was vital, the company also needed to understand and increase the sourcing channels for passive candidates. To build the business case for bringing in a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider, Cielo identified several key success indicators:

• Introducing an approach that would focus on quality over quantity of hires to make sure the business has the top talent for future growth. This would be particularly important when identifying and engaging with passive candidates with ideal skills.
• As the business was expanding rapidly, GE was keen to mitigate the risk of inadequate talent pools through access to market intelligence ahead of a move into new sectors or geographies.
• To provide a clear return on the company’s investment, it was key that a reduction in time to and cost per hire were clear.

Solutions

3 stages for talent acquisition success

GE Energy partnered with Cielo to manage talent recruitment, enhance the employer branding profile on and offline, develop a strategic workforce plan, and build a passive pipeline fueled by talent communities. These talent communities were also important for external benchmarking of internal talent pipelines and overall succession planning. To build these communities, Cielo implemented a three-phase approach:

• Phase 1 – Research: Before introducing any RPO strategy, the first stage focused on identifying the critical roles, highlighting gaps, and understanding what type of talent was needed and where it was located.
• Phase 2 – Engagement: Following the identification of these talent pools, segmented communities with similar skills and interests were formed. Targeted communications were then rolled out to each group, with two-way conversations encouraged to create community engagement.
• Phase Three – Conversion: By the final stage, GE Energy had a talent community that was regularly conversing through multiple, integrated communications channels. It was ready to tap into its talent pools to fill current and future critical
  roles quickly.

During each of these stages, a consistent employer branding message was (and continues to be) used through targeted communications channels, including social media. To improve the quality of hires, the company launched a recruitment academy that trains HR and hiring managers in hiring excellence.

Results

Bright outcomes for a bright future

Through the development of these talent communities and market intelligence, GE Energy now knows where candidates are coming from. Employer branding activity has created a clear, positive message that’s reaching both active and passive candidates on and offline. The social media channels used to communicate with the talent pools have also increased significantly:

• Facebook – from 854 “Likes” to 5,034
• Twitter – from 1,466 followers to 2,776
• YouTube – 15 videos focused on careers at GE Energy with 56,221 views
• LinkedIn – 70,358 people following the GE Energy company page; 5,640 members in the GE Energy Europe Careers group

It was a success: GE Energy was rated as the ninth best company in Europe using social media for recruitment by HR Top 100.

Time to hire also improved and, in some instances, went down to 43 days, a key success factor for hard-to-fill roles.

“We wanted a partner that could help us think differently – beyond just reducing cost and time to hire. Someone who could give us the competitive edge that will bring us the quality candidates we need in our niche markets. Cielo has done just that and we now see them as an extension of our business," said a Talent Acquisition leader at GE Energy.