Talent Acquisition for a fast moving Retail Business

HR Tech Partnership

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Background

The Head of Talent Acquisition of a fast-moving retail business knew he could provide a fast and effective recruitment service if he could improve the various processes his team was engaged in – source talent from various sources, process CV’s quickly to ensure a good shortlist, ensure business leaders were unbiased when they interviewed etc. In a tight market, they often lost good candidates as they were slow to respond.

Challenge

The Head of Talent Acquisition liked the idea of participating in the Hub to see if he could use an AI based solution which could help him address several of his issues. A big challenge for him was the ‘cost’. The industry (and his business) was under tremendous pressures around margins. Could he afford to spend his valuable budget on experimenting with a digital solution when it could be used in other areas? Or was it perhaps wiser to minimise his risk by experimenting with a product without any long term commitment to an expensive roll-out?

Six month programme

The Hub had a discussion with the entire Talent Acquisition team and realised there were four major areas of improvements which could make a big difference to the resourcing process

It sourced a single, easy to use AI based Talent Acquisition solution with intelligent chatbots to enable a stronger candidate experience

The Hub programme initiated a monthly session with the Talent Acquisition team. The first monthly session(of the six- month programme) was spent in educating the team about the product and its capability

The second and third month were spent planning the pilot. This included co-opting the IT team and finalising the communication plan

As part of the digital learning, the team was exposed to a Virtual Reality based solution for candidate on-boarding

Month four and five were spent carrying out the pilot. During this time the team also met up with two other corporates participating in the Hub. This enabled them to get exposed to other start-ups and enhanced their understanding of how AI based solutions now existed across almost all aspects of the employee lifecycle

The last month of the six- month programme consisted of a review of the pilot and lessons learned around what could be done differently

Outcome

Participating in the Hub allowed the entire Talent Acquisition team to pilot a specific AI based solution and get exposure and learning around Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the Resourcing area. They were surprised to know that in the previous year there were more than 3000 digital start-ups globally in the area of recruitment alone. The AI based solution surpassed all their expectations and they could see an immediate impact on ‘time to fill’ as well as ‘cost of hire’. Looking at the results, the Head of Talent Acquisition felt informed and excited about mapping out a broader plan around digital transformation.