When you are recruiting for hundreds of jobs at a time, an outsourced service must look highly attractive. Sodexho, the food and management services company, thought so three years ago when it contracted out the recruitment of all junior management positions in the UK.
But the company recently brought everything back in-house. “The partnership was just not working for us. No one from Sodexho was managing the partnership or the process from an HR point of view, “ explains Tamsin O’Bryen, resourcing manager in the company. “It was managed by purchasing, so the whole issue of talent was not on the agenda. We had a real problem communicating effectively with applicants and we were unable to keep track of talented individuals. Actually, it felt a bit like our partner could cope with recruiting in the home counties, but struggled when working for our many regional offices.”
Ms O’Bryen joined Sodexho last November, when the average hiring time was more than 50 days. At that time, there were sometimes no applicants for advertised posts. “When I joined there were five business lines following six different recruitment models, sharing nothing between them and often bypassing the recruitment partner. My task was to bring everything together on a shared system that would also improve our branding and ensure consistent communications about who we are and what we are about through our recruitment process. The agenda in the business is now about talent.”
After a rigorous selection process Sodexho finally chose Jobpartners at the end of December last year to implement its ActiveRecruiter platform. “Most of the e-recruitment software out there is pretty similar in what it does, to be honest,” says Ms O’Bryen. “But for us, it was a question of cultural fit. We do anything to keep our clients happy and Jobpartners seemed to understand that. They also had experience of working with multisite, multi-operation companies such as Boots and Superdrug. We had met all the team – the technical people who we would be working with directly, not just the sales team – and Jobpartners could also fit our extremely challenging time scale.”
It took Jobpartners just three months to implement its software and the Sodexho recruitment website launched on April 2. Now, if you are interested in jobs at Sodexho you simply register on its recruitment site, fill out a simple profile and upload your CV. It takes four screens to complete.
Ms O’Bryen manages a team of five who are all trained on the Jobpartners system. When they receive a recruitment requisition they can quickly produce a job profile, create screening questions and upload it to the database. “We still have to do ads in local papers manually,” admits Ms O’Bryen, “although we are working on this. But the third party and the paper ads all direct people to the recruitment website to apply.”
Although the system has only been running for three months, Ms O’Bryen claims she can already see a measurable difference. “It really cuts down the admin process. The screening questions eliminate people applying for the wrong job and the system matches the job profile against each applicant’s profile.” Applications are never excluded, but it is much easier for hiring managers to see which applicants are best suited for the advertised post. From July, the system will also use artificial intelligence to extract candidate information from uploaded CVs and incorporate this into the matching process .
Another feature that Ms O’Bryen appreciates is the “favourites list” which allows her team build up a “talent pool”. “Every time a role comes up the first thing you do is a search in your favourites to see if there are any strong candidates,” she says. “When you have a talent pool you are not on the back foot all the time with recruitment.”
Preliminary figures suggest that the Jobpartners system may have already cut average recruitment times by more than 10 days and increased applications by 30 per cent. According to Jobpartners, on average its clients experience about50 per cent savings on their recruitment costs within the first year of using ActiveRecruiter.
But Ms O’Bryen is keen to stress how the system is particularly strengthening Sodexho’s employer brand, too. “Many organisations have poor communication with applicants,” she says, “but this system makes it a lot easier to communicate consistently, effectively and individually. The applicants we are getting now have a good experience of the application process and a good perception of the business. We expect Sodexho to be seen as an employer of choice.”
