How LiveHire Helped Optimise the Vodafone TA Process

Fixing a broken process

Vodafone is a world leading mobile telecommunications company, with Vodafone Australia operating the brand domestically. Attracting and developing talent is at the heart of Vodafone’s success.

The roadblock to this commitment, however, was Vodafone’s small recruitment team’s legacy Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that created inefficiencies across the entire hiring process. By replacing it with LiveHire’s modern recruitment software, Vodafone has established the foundation for an exceptional recruitment experience.

The heart of this transformation saw Vodafone eliminate manual processes and optimise hiring team collaboration. LiveHire’s all-in-one recruitment marketing and applicant tracking solution allows Vodafone’s hiring team to source, engage and hire well-fitted candidates from one, single platform.

LiveHire helps Vodafone put candidates first

Vodafone is not alone in its need to evolve from a legacy ATS to a modern Talent Acquisition (TA) platform. In a market where talent is scarce and candidates are more informed and more vocal than ever, it is key to anticipate their needs and exceed expectations.

LiveHire empowers Vodafone to deliver a meaningful experience to every candidate. In the past, candidate data was held in disparate systems. With LiveHire, hiring teams have a real-time, 360 view of each candidate from a variety of sources. Leveraging both these insights and LiveHire’s unique 2-way communication system, empowers Vodafone to deliver instant, personal, and relevant candidate experiences.

How we got there – A detailed look at LiveHire’s impact

The longer a process takes, the more disenfranchised candidates become. They start to feel unimportant and undervalued, especially if there is a lapse in communication with the recruiter or hiring manager.

Time-to-hire is one of the most high impact and visible metrics in talent acquisition and candidate experience. It is also a key indicator of business success, showing ability to execute on strategy by filling roles is dependant on the talent in each role.

When a vacancy occurs, pressure is acutely felt by both hiring managers who juggle multiple workloads and recruiters who have to source talent in a candidate short market. LiveHire alleviates this pressure by creating a Talent Community, an ongoing source of talent for the organisation. Using the Talent Community approach Vodafone only needs 7 days to hire well-fitted talent.

To understand the extent of the impact, it is helpful to explain the difference between the traditional, reactive TA approach versus LiveHire’s modern, proactive approach.

The recruitment process starts when the Hiring Manager needs to hire someone into a specific role. At that point, recruiters are trying to source well-matched candidates, by activating passive candidates that may or may not be interested, sifting through the mountain of candidates that are coming through job boards – or paying hefty recruitment agency fees.

LiveHire’s proactive approach is to start building your talent pipeline before the hiring need arises.

The technology-enabled Talent Community combines the forces of Social, Mobile and Cloud to search internal and external sources in one easy to use platform.

Recruiters are no longer beholden to a particular job board. They are able to attract talent from your LiveHire-powered career site, Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Recruiters use Artificial Intelligence to identify well-fitted candidates from the Talent Community and are able to send targeted communications via SMS and email.

It’s more efficient for recruiters and creates a consumer grade experience for candidates.This approach highlights the power of recruiters building a warm pool of engaged talent before the hiring need arises. And this is the secret to delivering high quality hires, at speed.

‘Do more with less’. This statement is now a modern organisational mantra.

By adopting a proactive TA approach, recruitment teams can deliver more with less, using two key levers: savings on the top-line (the direct cost of job boards, agencies, etc.) and optimising below-the-line (e.g. vacancy rates, the cost of recruiter and managers time).

LiveHire enabled Vodafone to streamline the end-to-end hiring process and deliver a 34% decrease in average cost-per-hire and a 59% increase for hires from the Talent Community. As a result, Vodafone reduced dependency (and spend) on jobs boards and social networks, and gave time back to recruiters to focus on building Talent Pools and managing internal mobility.

When examining the 34% cost-per-hire saving, a little over half is attributed to time savings on low value activities. As a result, recruiters and hiring managers now spend more time with fewer, but higher-quality candidates. And this creates meaningful and engaging experiences for everyone – candidates, hiring managers and recruiters.

Chart 3 – Optimisation of the sourcing channel mix

Pre-LiveHire, almost 60% of all hires came through impersonal, reactive candidate engagement sourcing channels, such as job boards. Proactive channels – like Talent Pools, referrals, and internals – were not a strong focus. Six months post LiveHire implementation, Vodafone has flipped their sourcing mix from reactive to proactive channels which are superior in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Proactive hiring now sees 23% of hires sourced from Talent Pools via the private LiveHire-enabled Talent Community. Further to this, Vodafone has boosted internal mobility with 22% of hires now sourced from internal channels. In a tight labour market, high quality candidates are often scarce and every interaction (no matter how small) needs to be optimised. Vodafone has accomplished this by focusing on proactive channels, meaning less dependency on costly job boards and more time for recruiters to engage well-fitted talent.

Chart 4 – Greater gender diversity

Biases can occur from the recruiter, hiring manager or the candidate, with gender bias being particularly present throughout the hiring process.

According to WGEA1, “multiple studies have demonstrated that when women apply for jobs, they receive fewer interview invitations than equally qualified men” and “face tougher evaluation of their credentials during the initial recruitment stage”. Additionally, research from Harvard Business Review shows that women are less likely to apply for a role unless they believe they can fulfil all the advertised criteria.

LiveHire helps solve this in two ways:
1. Candidates can express interest in and engage with an organisation before a vacancy arises. So they can find out more about the organisation first, rather than judging whether they are qualified to do a certain role.

2. LiveHire’s AI capability supports the screening and tagging of candidates into multiple Talent Pool streams, based on the skills and experiences of the candidates, irrespective of gender.

Reducing these two barriers to entry mean that women feel confident in applying to an organisation and recruiters are supported by technology that will find and suggest well-fitted candidates across multiple roles. This creates a positive compounding effect for women, which can be seen with Vodafone’s positive shift from 44% to 50% of hires now being female.

Chart 5 – Improved candidate shortlist quality

To deliver an optimised, proactive hiring function, a key efficiency metric for TA leaders is Shortlist-to-Hire-Conversion. Shortlist-to-Hire-Conversion is determined by looking at each sourcing channel and calculating the average number of shortlisted candidates required to make one successful hire. The better the shortlist quality, the more efficient the recruitment function.

At Vodafone, these results speak volumes. For jobs filled from the Talent Community, the hiring manager will only need to review 3 candidates to find a good match. For roles filled via external job boards managers will need to review an average of 50 candidates and for social networks they will need to review an average of 20 candidates, before they find one they want to offer.

So why is there such a difference? The proactive approach to TA drives talent pipelines with engaged, pre-qualified, and well-fitted candidates that not only match the role criteria, but are also aligned with Vodafone’s purpose, culture and values. Leveraging this proactive approach, recruiters know they can present 3 well-fitted candidates and predict that the hiring manager will happily choose one. This optimisation delivers fast results which builds HR’s trust and credibility with hiring managers. This optimisation delivers fast results, which enables HR to build greater credibility with hiring managers and spend more time engaging with candidates, which in turn delivers an outstanding candidate experience.