Pressure to increase the talent pipeline

“This year, it’s been the year of the ‘great resignation’ and as a result we have had more difficulty with refilling our talent pipelines, a problem which was particularly acute in our Development organization,” explained Gabor Talan, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at HERE. “The business is growing significantly because of a raft of new products and services that are available.

“At the same time, our Talent Acquisition team was not equipped with the right amount of people to battle and conquer this new situation that we found ourselves in. When COVID hit, the world changed so rapidly. There was pressure from the business to increase our talent pipeline and to introduce people to the business faster.”

In the past, HERE has experimented with how it recruits by encouraging team members within the business to use LinkedIn to engage potential talent and talk to them about the company. This move has had such positive results in the past, it was time to mobilise the business and take recruitment up a notch. With LinkedIn supporting HERE from all directions.

THE SOLUTION

Engage the business to source talent

“We have been working with LinkedIn Recruiter for a long time,” continued Gabor. In the past, the business has experimented and has asked people within the company to help source talent. That’s because when someone within the business reaches out to a potential candidate, the likelihood of that candidate responding is higher than if a recruiter had sent a message.

“Our recruiters are good at telling stories but if you see a message from someone who you can relate to, who wants to jump on a call with you, the odds are you are going to pay more attention.”

Gabor added: “We learned this a couple of years ago. The problem was, we were limited with our Recruiter Seats, and we wanted to make this process organic.”

Enterprising solution

In 2021, HERE and LinkedIn made a big shift. LinkedIn approached HERE with the offer of an Enterprise license, giving the organisation access to unlimited Recruiter Seats. It was the solution that HERE needed and it would enable the business to engage more employees to work alongside the Talent Acquisition team and help source skilled professionals.

“As soon as we were told that we could have unlimited licenses, it was like a light bulb moment,” said Gabor. “This was the model we’d been trying to push. We could now extend our talent acquisition function, turning the business into an extension of our department.”

Just follow the recipe

HERE created an internal Talent Champion programme. It was positioned as an opportunity for the business to “Win Together”, which is one of HERE’s five values; be bold, be true, learn fast, win together, and give back.

Acquiring talent was not only a talent acquisition problem, it was a business problem. Gabor continued: “Traditional recruitment doesn’t work anymore. There are so many competitive pressures.

“We worked with some key executive sponsors like CJ King in the development department to introduce and champion the Talent Champion programme.”

Employees received specific training and they were given templates and advice on how to approach potential candidates. Importantly, they did not have to search for the talent. The Talent Acquisition team gave employees the “ingredients” and all they had to do was “follow the recipe”.

“We populated project folders with candidates who we thought would be a good fit and asked the Talent Champions to reach out. They used the templates we had given them and if they got a positive response, they would jump on a call and then pass that candidate on to Talent Acquisition.”

Building block of the future

There were some initial “growing pains” with the programme. Some people in the business were not used to reaching out but they soon discovered the significant value in the programme and were fully supportive. In fact, the Talent Champions – more than 140 of them in CJ’s department alone – soon got to appreciate just what kind of impact their involvement was having. For instance, if a Talent Champion reaches out to a potential candidate, the average response rate is 40 per cent, compared to 25 per cent if a recruiter reaches out. Furthermore, the ratio of people going through to panel interview stage is also higher.

Gabor described the way that talent is being engaged as “more authentic” and honest. Now, HERE has more than 200 Talent Champions working with a team of 40 recruiters and HERE has signed a two-year contract with LinkedIn to use Enterprise. The collaboration has been a great success.

Gabor continued: “We had a hiring blitz. We wanted to interview 32 people in two days and to do that we had to send 2,500 messages in four days. We would certainly not have accomplished that had it not been for the Talent Champions participation.

“If you want to be successful, you have to engage the business. The model we have adopted allows us to do that because it has flexibility.

“We knew that creating Talent Champions was a good idea and our engagement rates have confirmed that.”

Gabor concluded: “We do use other platforms, but LinkedIn is our number one tool. LinkedIn has matured as a platform in terms of what you can do with it and project capabilities, and it has become our number one go to.

“Now, the Talent Champions programme and LinkedIn are part of what we are calling Agile Recruitment 3.0 – Talent Champions is one of our building blocks. We want to perfect it so that we can be even more of an assistance to the business in the future.”