Rolling out new recruitment technology, GroupM style

Across their portfolio, GroupM recruits up to 2,500 new hires in a single year. Something needed to change, and fast, for recruiters to manage the process in the most time and cost effective way.

The solution? Jobvite, a recruiting platform designed for the social web, that saw the number of job applications shooting to about 100 for every vacancy.

Among other benefits, it earned GroupM Asia Pacific the gold-winning title of the best recruitment technology at the inaugural edition of the Asia Recruitment Awards, Singapore.

The spark behind the idea came when GroupM’s regional recruiters, who are based in Singapore but supporting hiring efforts over 14 markets, were bogged down by a lot of manual work.

The objective of Jobvite, thus, was to automate the recruitment process by bringing in all resumes digitally, while enabling recruiters to schedule interviews through the system, to cut down on the time spent per candidate.

The implementation also had its sights on improving the candidate experience - making sure they could access authentic, accurate and relevant information about the company and the role.

Collaboration was key, with the HR and talent acquisition team working closely with the IT team, which provided on-the-ground backend support, while HR worked on getting buy-in from agency leads, and ensuring employees and hiring managers attended the training sessions.

Jobvite's implementation saw a strong increase in hires, an increase in Facebook engagement (more than 300,000 total page likes), and significant recruitment savings.

Today, just a handful of jobs are hired outside of Jobvite, as more employees continue to activate their Jobvite accounts, pointing to the success of this recruitment technology.

Michael Wright, head of talent acquisition for GroupM APAC, called out the efforts of his team in the achievement.

"We've been very smart in investing in the right processes and systems to help us further and strengthen our recruitment efforts in Asia," he commented.

"But that said, I also need to recognise the efforts of our IT, HR and talent teams, who tirelessly helped roll out the systems in their individual markets - no easy feat in a region as diverse as Asia."

Besides this one, GroupM won five others awards on the night, including the Grand Winner's prize.

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The awards, judged by HR directors from companies across the Asia Pacific region, saw Cargill Asia Pacific Holdings taking home the silver, and Rohde & Schwarz's regional headquarters in Singapore bagging the bronze.

All awards in this category were presented by Timothy Lynch, regional HR director at The Boeing Company, also a jury member.

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