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How Deloitte Belgium Achieves Recruitment and Business Alignment
Providing world-class professional services for clients across a wide range of industries, Deloitte combines innovation and insight to solve some of the toughest business problems. People – very talented people – are at the heart of Deloitte’s operations and its leadership in the consultancy services landscape is intrinsically tied to the talent they hire.
Recently, Maarten Verleyen, Systems and Analytics Manager at Deloitte Belgium, met our CEO, Dimitri Boylan, to discuss the core role the talent acquisition function plays as trusted advisors within the organization. With an emphasis on aligning recruitment strategies with business objectives, technology, innovation, stakeholder experiences and today’s changing job market were some of the highlights of this insightful conversation. Let’s dive in.
Driving Recruiting Innovation
For Deloitte Belgium to continue being one of the heavyweights in the consultancy and professional services space, talent acquisition innovation is a necessity. This means having effective processes in place and ensuring that the candidates who go through the recruiting journey have a slick, memorable experience that convinces them to choose Deloitte over its competitors.
Verleyen’s role is to make sure that happens by deploying the right technology to support that innovation. Unlike many organizations where talent acquisition is mostly operations-oriented, Verleyen explained that Deloitte Belgium’s recruiters and hiring managers proactively bring ideas and proposals to optimize workflows and elevate the experiences delivered.
Thanks to his technical knowledge and experience in recruitment, Verleyen distills these suggestions and provides guidance to turn them into transformative actions through technology.
We want to make sure that we can get the information from all of the different stakeholders because all of them have their different journeys or experiences. And we want to make sure that we can optimize them and keep evolving them and making them better.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Designing Superior Experiences
One of the hottest topics of conversation between Verleyen and Boylan was stakeholder experience. Verleyen shared some powerful insights into enhancing those experiences and facilitating a better process.
When it comes to the candidate experience, Deloitte Belgium has a sounding board in place to collect feedback from recent candidates about the recruiting process. They also send surveys and questionnaires at different moments of the hiring journey to keep an even closer eye on the candidate net promoter score (CNPS).
Verleyen explained how these first-hand insights shed light on parts of the process that could be adjusted to deliver an even better candidate experience.
We contacted people that were candidates relatively recently at Deloitte and asked them what their experience was, what could have been better, what could have been different, what they were expecting, what weren’t expecting that was really positive or less positive. We can use that to further optimize our processes or our technology.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Moving on to the hiring manager experience, Verleyen said that they are also working hard to enhance the experience of this important stakeholder group. After all, hiring managers are the driving force behind each requisition.
To achieve this, recruiters work closely with hiring managers to align expectations. Because hiring managers are not recruiters, Deloitte Belgium offers dedicated training in the formal aspects of evaluating a candidate. Importantly, and in line with today’s candidate-driven market, hiring managers are also trained to promote Deloitte as an attractive potential employer.
So we do have specific training for all of our hiring managers, making sure that they know what type of questions to ask, how to be able to sell Deloitte as well to our candidates because, in a candidate-driven market, it’s not always the the the company that is in the lead. It’s often the candidate that has the choice of different companies.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Guided by a continuous improvement mindset, stakeholders’ experiences at Deloitte Belgium are not static. So, when the pandemic brought face-to-face interviews to a standstill, the company quickly moved to virtual interviews and its hiring managers easily adapted to the shift.
While convenient, Verleyen explained that they also see value in meeting a candidate face-to-face. Because of this, the organization encourages in-person interviews with hiring managers when possible and seizes the opportunity to better understand if the candidate would be a good fit and to convince them that Deloitte Belgium is the right place for them
The Intersection of Talent and Business
It’s safe to say that Deloitte is who they hire. With clients looking for consultancy on emerging business trends and rapid technological advancements, Deloitte Belgium is constantly on the lookout for professionals whose expertise and skills can help them thrive in such a dynamic context.
In this sense, Verleyen and Boylan discussed the importance of closely matching recruitment objectives with business needs, consolidating the role of recruiters as trusted advisors. This alignment goes far beyond one-off conversations between recruiters and hiring managers to understand how many new hires are needed.
Instead, recruiters tap into their job market knowledge to actively advise hiring managers on the likelihood of finding and securing certain profiles and craft a hiring plan together based on what’s needed, what’s possible, expected timelines and even potential alternatives.
The recruiter plays a very critical role because we don’t consider our recruiters to be just like the operational recruiters, but they’re really considered to be trusted advisers to our business, making sure that they can actually advise the hiring managers on the type of profile that they’re looking for, because maybe from their experience in the market, they know that that type of profile doesn’t exist or is very hard to find or it is very expensive. And so they can advise as well in terms of alternative profiles or trying to look from another angle to find the ideal candidate that would fit the business needs.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Precisely because of the speed at which Deloitte Belgium needs to deliver new professional services to remain competitive, these conversations between recruiting and business occur frequently throughout the year, solidifying the partnership between the two areas.
We do try to make sure that we stay aligned with our business on their needs consistently across the year because the business needs do change quite often in terms of the type of profile that they need because we offer a whole line of services to our clients, but also clients request change. The business has to adapt its strategy. And then of course we as the recruitment team also have to adapt our strategy. So we try to stay very closely aligned, making sure that we can find the right profiles at the right time.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Verleyen added that extending the alignment to talent management is also important. Doing so uplifts the company’s value proposition, improves authenticity and helps build a cohesive talent journey.
We also need to make sure that all of our other talent management and benefits processes are in line so that whenever we come to the moment that we are offering a candidate a job, they’re also convinced exactly that they’re good.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Following up on Deloitte Belgium’s need to keep up with demand, Boylan asked Verleyen whether they try to anticipate what skills categories or professions will be needed down the road. Verleyen explained that while forecasting is not something they’re actively doing within the recruiting department yet, the business side of the organization is, and the alignment that’s grown between the two areas gives them access to these valuable insights.
However, the talent acquisition team recently started leveraging information enabled by the existing technology stack to support their strategic conversations with hiring managers. The data comes from multiple sources, including their existing database, LinkedIn Insights and market and competitive research conducted by recruiters and sourcers, who work in pairs to fill each opening.
And of course, before they go together to the business, they do their research. So we look, first of all, in our own database, but we also look into LinkedIn insights, etc., making sure that we get a bit of an idea of the market for those types of profiles. So from my perspective, the recruiter and the sourcer that are going to the business are quite well aligned or quite well versed in the type of profile that we’re looking for.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Deloitte Belgium’s decision to pair recruiters with sourcers is not a coincidence. As the organization prepares for an undefined future (as contradictory as it may seem), Verleyen highlighted the increasingly important role of the candidate relationship management (CRM) system. You don’t really know what types of profiles you’ll be pursuing in a few months, let alone years, and having a way of building and maintaining a relationship with everyone you meet over time makes it significantly easier to reconnect when an opportunity comes up.
Lead management or CRM has become so much more important because we see so many people and since the requests of the business or the needs of the business change so often, sometimes we see very good candidates that are not really a fit right now, but they might be very good candidates in the future. So our lead management has become so much more important to keep all of those interesting profiles warm, as we say, and make sure that we can pick them up as soon as we feel that the business has a need for them.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Referring to talent pools specifically, Boylan echoed Verleyen’s message around the strategic importance of being able to resurface valuable candidates that perhaps weren’t a good fit at a time but can be exactly what you’re looking for under new circumstances.
I would say the ability to develop talent pools and meet demand with the resources that they’ve already developed relationships with has been critical to most of the very successful recruiting programs over the last five to eight years.”
Dimitri Boylan
Founder and CEO, Avature
The Road Ahead
It’s practically impossible to think about the future without touching on AI. Harnessing its potential is critical for Deloitte Belgium to stay at the forefront of innovation. However, Verleyen shared the importance of being prudent, contemplating potential risks such as data privacy, and ultimately seeing beyond the hype.
What I tell my stakeholders is that we should be investing in AI as much as possible, but that we should be very wary or let’s say critical of what the exact AI elements are that a vendor is selling us or that we can implement. And of course, it also comes with its challenges in terms of data privacy. So we are careful about it, but we also don’t want to miss the train. So it’s something that we’re really interested in, that we’re investing more and more in trying to see how it can further optimize our processes, how it can help our recruiters as well. But we’re we’re not jumping the gun.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
Boylan added how, from his conversations with decision-makers at leading enterprises, a measured approach to AI deployment seems to be the norm for navigating the AI trend. At the end of the day, it’s all about maintaining the delicate balance between being proactive and responsible.
We’re absolutely in a hype cycle right now. And I think that sometimes that can be difficult to explain to stakeholders who suddenly get on the Internet and use ChatGPT and then come back to you and say, well, why isn’t this machine just doing all of this for me? I think that across our customer base, mostly it’s I would describe it as sort of an aggressive but measured approach to AI.”
Dimitri Boylan
Founder and CEO, Avature
As for what else lies ahead, Deloitte Belgium recently deployed Avature, ATS and CRM, leaving behind a rigid, on-premise system that was no longer fit for purpose. Now, the organization is ready to continue empowering its talent acquisition teams to build an even more agile, responsive and innovative service that helps them attract and hire the critical talent the business needs.
We just made the move to our new ATS and CRM and we came from a tool that was very outdated. It was an on-premise solution. It didn’t have a lot of functionalities or flexibility, and now we do. So that opens up a world of opportunity for me as well to investigate. I love the enthusiasm that I’ve been getting from the recruiters and from the hiring managers in terms of the fact that we’re offering new things, the fact that they can see more, have more insights, etc. They keep coming up with new ideas, with new requests. So that gives me a lot to do, a lot to think about. And I’m very excited to just see how far can we push this, how far can we go, what can we do.”
Maarten Verleyen
Systems and Analytics Manager, Deloitte Belgium
