Articles 
For three days, the Park Plaza London Riverbank was abuzz with excitement as the Avature community gathered to exchange experiences, strategies and best practices during the #AvatureUpfront EU 2023 conference. HR leaders, business analysts and technical professionals got together to discuss talent, digital transformation and the powerful role of technology.
Customers took the stage to share their Avature journeys, showing attendees how our technology has become an undeniable ally to organizations looking to attract and retain the most qualified talent. They also witnessed firsthand what’s coming down the pipeline at Avature.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
Looking For Inspiration in Nature
#AvatureUpfront EU 2023 kicked off with Dimitri Boylan’s insightful reflection that attendees should look to nature for inspiration when it comes to driving continuous improvement and safeguarding organizational longevity. After all, the prevailing assumption coming out of Stanford is that 50 percent of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years because they did not evolve.
When it comes to evolution, organizations are still miles behind nature’s efficiency, flexibility and scalability. To imitate nature in this sense, they need a specific force to drive them: entrepreneurship. Boylan encouraged each member of the audience to become catalysts of change within their organizations, safe in the knowledge that they can count on the power of the Avature platform and our support to make the vision a reality.
Enhancing Engagement Throughout the Talent Lifecycle
Drawing upon Dimitri’s biological analogy, much like the human body’s fundamental ability to regulate and distribute oxygen through thousands of cells that make up the circulatory system, every stakeholder plays a vital role in the talent acquisition process. So engaging them accordingly and ensuring seamless collaboration can result in a win-win scenario for everyone involved.
Henkel, L’Oréal and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) all took to the stage to share their insights on this hot topic.
Henkel, the multinational adhesive and consumer goods company, shared how they’ve found a strategic partner in Avature on their road to talent engagement success. In the face of talent scarcity and rising expectations, Avature CRM has enabled them to nurture candidate relationships, such as with silver medallists, strengthen their employer brand, streamline the application process and empower recruiters.
In just two years, they went from a sketch of concept to a successful global implementation and have now deployed Avature in all of the 79 countries in which they operate, enhancing stakeholder engagement as a result. Candidates can now sign up for the Henkel talent community via an easy registration process and benefit from personalized communication campaigns designed to highlight upcoming events and relevant opportunities.
Equipped with intuitive, best-in-class tools, the day-to-day lives of sourcers and recruiters have significantly improved. Avature has enabled them to build talent pools ahead of business demand and AI-powered functionality facilitates their proactive sourcing strategy and supports their DEI initiatives. This has reduced the cost and time of finding the most qualified talent, freeing them up for more strategic tasks. Henkel ensured engagement and adoption by internal stakeholders through comprehensive change management, including dedicated communication channels, Q&A and interactive training sessions, videos and regional ambassadors.
Adoption was also a pivotal topic of L’Oréal’s presentation. A recent internal audit found untapped potential and a low mastery of Avature amongst users. In fact, almost 400,000 candidates had not received a response after applying in 2022, only 31 percent of recruiters declared using pipelines in Avature and low usage meant their recruiting data was not accurate.
Leveraging gamification to drive adoption, the TA leadership team developed the “Level Up!” initiative to tackle these issues directly, which set all recruiting teams on the road to mastering the eight gold standards of Avature in just three months. Jakub Stopa, TA Digital Project Manager, and Lucie Duthel, Global Project Manager, took the audience on an adventure, outlining the three quests of the program:
- Quest 1: Organize your jobs, track the process and notify candidates.
- Quest 2: No CVs via email and all feedback recorded in Avature.
- Quest 3: Create the funnel, organize potential candidates, and track and engage with top talent.
A clear framework, supported by some friendly competition, is proving to be a highly engaging strategy for L’Oréal’s recruiters. By developing a program that would capture their attention and drive tangible process improvement, TA leadership is enhancing candidate experience, compliance practices and, ultimately, ROI as the broader team gets more from Avature.
Conscious of the impact effective onboarding can have in reducing time to productivity and driving long-term retention, CPS shared how they have overhauled onboarding with Avature to drive engagement with new hires as well as their team.
Coming from a legacy system, bound to manual Excel sheets and endless back-and-forth emails, Michael Silcock, HR Manager, Sheila Carrier, HR Officer, and David Kuivala, HR Admin, explained how they’ve implemented an automated workflow that allows for streamlined communications, strengthened security and reduced administrative burden for the team. Avature automation has also cut down the time it takes to process new hires from 65 to 45 days.
The Benefits of a Consolidated Tech Stack
Addressing tech sprawl was another common topic at this year’s conference, with Enel, Deloitte Belgium and IKEA sharing inspiring stories of how the configurable Avature platform has facilitated the consolidation process in their talent acquisition tech stacks, driving many benefits for all stakeholders.
Enel, the innovative energy giant, was facing many inefficiencies in its TA processes. Before adopting a legacy ATS in 2018, they lacked a global recruiting platform, with all countries using local tools or no tools at all. Antonio Gallo, Deputy of the Head of People Digital Factory, shared the challenges of attempting to unify the external and internal recruiting process with Enel’s legacy technology over the past five years.
Despite making progress, the team was still facing significant barriers, including compliance issues, poor user experience, a lack of automation and no dashboards to visualize performance and progress. It was time to address the pain points.
With Avature as a partner, Enel planned a complete overhaul of its process and went live in over 30 countries in just seven months. They activated a common blueprint for all regions with specialized local adaptations, calling it a glocal approach.
Gallo shared some of their key achievements with attendees, including the stabilization of their TA processes and the development of tailored and consistent workflows aligned with each user’s journey. Their Avature-powered career site now attracts over 470k visits and 25k applications per month and their entire system is now more robust from an audit standpoint.
In the competitive professional services market, you really are who you hire. And Deloitte Belgium took to the stage to share how they recently overhauled their talent acquisition process, leaving behind out-of-date tools that were preventing them from reaching their high-volume hiring targets and aspirations. With an inflow of 25,000 applicants, 15,000 interviews and 1,500 hires a year, they needed technology that would help them to quickly identify and convert the most qualified candidates.
Having transitioned their recruiting process from 15 disparate solutions to a consolidated process within Avature, Maarten Verleyen, TA Systems & Analytics Team Lead, and Siel Van Breugel, Senior TA Systems & Analytics Expert, shared the benefits they’ve seen so far from simplifying their tech stack. As trusted advisors to the business, Avature’s reporting capabilities grant them access to real-time data for enhanced decision-making and service delivery.
Avature is enabling a personalized approach to sourcing at scale, helping Deloitte Belgium’s team of eight dedicated sourcers connect with the best talent in the market, keeping over 1,000 candidates warm at any given time.
Their Avature-powered internal mobility strategy is also helping to align employees with business needs in an agile manner. They’ve run over 350 career counseling days and 20 percent of their workforce have undertaken an internal move. Looking to the future, they are hoping to consolidate their onboarding process onto the Avature platform too.
Just like Deloitte Belgium, IKEA, the biggest furniture company in the world, shared how Avature is helping the organization with both internal and external recruitment. In the past two years, the TA team has made 93,000 hires, of which 22,000 are internal.
Achieving a localized experience in over 32 countries is a huge challenge, but consolidating the global recruiting process on the Avature platform has enabled the organization to do so effectively and at scale. They received around 1.6M resumes last year and hire between 4,000-5,000 people every month.
Steve Page, Ikea’s Global VP of Digital Product Management, also shared how IKEA is embracing technology to stay ahead of the curve and ensure its recruiting processes align with more demanding generations today. In his words, “Appreciate the past but create for the future.”
Going Above and Beyond Innovation
Kelly OCG is the staffing and recruiting organization of choice for 90 percent of the Fortune 100. And an innovation mindset that keeps them on the cutting edge is the secret to their success. Boris Redmann, Avature IT Product Owner at Kelly, shared three powerful examples that demonstrate how they are spearheading the use of Avature’s platform as a service to continuously improve their talent strategies.
Focusing first on how they leverage our technology to drive revenue and better service their own clients, Redmann unveiled the Avature-powered Talent Community Apply Portal, a talent-centric career site that Kelly can customize to reflect the individual brand identities of their own customers. This bespoke solution allows candidates to explore opportunities across their portfolio of clients while interacting with recruiters in one place, making communication easier and more impactful.
Switching gears and focusing on their internal talent processes, Redmann shared how the team had identified an opportunity to overhaul their Hiring Manager Portal, making it more intuitive and expanding its scope to include the management of contractors. Next up, he shared how they had expanded their use of the Avature platform to replace a legacy performance management solution that was hard to use and had a detrimental impact on retention. In stark contrast, Avature Performance Management has transformed the process, adapting to Kelly’s specific requirements, delivering an optimized employee experience and helping the organization retain the top talent it worked so hard to hire.
These three key innovations stand as a testament to the fruitful collaboration Kelly and Avature have cultivated over the years, delivering a competitive advantage in the direct sourcing market.
Looking Ahead
The conference agenda was also packed with Avature-led sessions, announcing exciting new developments. Boylan introduced our most recent solution, Avature HR Case Management, which helps HR teams resolve workforce issues through engagement and cooperation. We also presented LinkedIn CRM Connect, a new integration that helps talent professionals simplify the recruiting workflow, save time building talent pipelines and nurture candidate relationships with up-to-date insights from LinkedIn.
Attendees packed out the presentations and workshops in our Technical Track and Power User Academy, where our experts shared updates on AI, agile data exchange and integration capabilities, and the latest tips and tricks to supercharge employer branding and sourcing efforts. We also showcased the highly anticipated Avature Portal Apps Builder.
Every year, #AvatureUpfront provides a common ground for HR leaders and out-of-the-box thinkers to get together and drive innovation in a market that never stops changing. Inspired by nature’s extraordinary ability to adapt and evolve, attendees departed from London feeling encouraged to act as the catalysts for change within their own organizations and armed with the knowledge and tools to revolutionize their HR strategies.
See you next year!