Articles 
After two years of virtual editions, we finally met in person again in APAC for #AvatureUpfront APAC 2023. During the one-day event, the attendees participated in customer-led sessions, an interactive workshop and our Roadmap presentation.
There were also plenty of opportunities for reconnecting. The Avature community made the most of coffee breaks and the evening reception to exchange ideas with colleagues and members of the Avature organization, including our CEO, Dimitri Boylan.
In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights.
Overcoming Common Enterprise Recruiting Challenges
Although every organization faces unique challenges, many of the overarching themes of those challenges are shared. For this reason, our customer-led sessions are always packed with valuable insights and ideas that listeners can bring back to their own teams.
This year, three speakers discussed how their organizations leverage the Avature platform to overcome recruiting challenges to which many enterprises can relate:
a) Managing Hiring Complexity
For global healthcare organization Bupa, finding the right talent depended on enabling efficient decentralized recruitment across a diverse business. However, two challenges stood in their way:
- Each business unit (BU) had different requirements and used rigid systems to meet them, making it hard to manage candidate pipelines and access data and often leading to manual processes to compensate for the hard-to-use technology.
- The business had lost trust in a centralized recruiting team due to the difficulties in sharing information, the lack of transparency and the limited flexibility to meet the needs of each BU.
To tackle these challenges, the organization partnered with Avature and tapped into the platform’s signature configurability to deliver a holistic ATS solution that catered to the needs of individual BUs. The ambitious project involved six recruiting teams across three BUs and a tight timeframe.
Bupa went live with the MVP in September 2022 by following an MVP framework that prioritized the recruiting teams’ and hiring managers’ experiences and getting key stakeholders involved from day one. Though they will continue to incorporate Avature capabilities over the next 12-18 months, during this first stage, they implemented:
- Avature portals
- Dedicated workflows
- Integrations to enable data exchange
- Dashboards to enable reporting
- Training activities and communications to get everyone up to speed
Since launch, the recruiting teams are pleased with the configurability of the platform. As for hiring managers (HM), they can now handle their tasks with just a few clicks. And Bupa’s People Services Team is making the most of Avature’s automation, as the capability enables them to process contracts and obtain information for the organization’s core HR system much faster.
b) Securing Candidates Amidst a Talent Shortage
In a presentation that touched on two themes, Fletcher Building, the parent organization of over 30 brands throughout New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific, echoed Bupa’s message about the importance of prioritizing when dealing with decentralized recruiting.
When the organization’s two talent acquisition (TA) teams became seven, the HR systems area had to accommodate an increased number of platform enhancement requirements. In addition, Avature introduces new features every two weeks, which made it even more challenging for the team to keep up.
To go through the backlog, the HR systems and TA teams hold quarterly meetings where they vote and agree on the enhancements that should be prioritized. This model allows the HR systems team to work cohesively while ensuring the TA communities can utilize the functionalities they need on time.
According to ManpowerGroup, 77 percent of employers report difficulty filling roles – a 17-year high. So, when Fletcher Building started to see a significant drop in the application process during the pandemic, they knew something needed to change to maximize conversion and secure talent.
They realized their three-step application process required excessive information from candidates, leading to drop-off. Avature’s flexibility enabled Fletcher Building to configure a “quick apply” option requiring only name, contact details and legal fields. Thanks to this approach, the organization streamlined the application process and improved the candidate experience from the get-go.
As the next step in creating a candidate-first recruiting process, Fletcher Building implemented blind screening in Hiring Manager portals to ensure a bias-free recruiting experience. Now, candidate names are masked during the HM review and only become visible once they have been moved to the interview step. However, the portal does display references and background checks to support HMs’ decision-making.
c) Global Recruiting With a Local Focus
Before partnering with Avature, the market-leading wealth management and transfer agency software provider, Bravura Solutions, featured strongly localized recruitment processes, inconsistent practices between regions and heavy reliance on manual data and tracking. When the headcount demand increased and labor costs started to rise, they set out to transition from an APAC-centric to a global recruiting function.
The organization leveraged Avature’s configurability and automation to create a structured global process driving reliable data and reducing inefficient manual interventions while respecting regional standards of conduct. Simultaneously, deploying Avature provided them with operational speed and scalability to improve candidate management and reduce time to hire.
Understanding their ultimate objective of leveraging technology to support service delivery, the organization set its team members up for success through training sessions that reinforced user adoption.
Bravura Solutions is already seeing positive results, with a success story in India, where adopting the Avature platform was critical in uplifting the region’s TA function.
At a global scale, the organization now has one source of truth in recruiting and has increased accountability across all program and TA team members. In addition, Bravura Solutions has improved time to hire, reduced duplicated efforts and automated reporting.
The Power of the One-Platform Approach
Before launching Avature, multi-industry conglomerate Jardine Matheson Holding Limited’s TA operations were spread throughout multiple systems, often resulting in manual, inefficient processes and low productivity. After an end-to-end assessment, they decided to consolidate recruitment, marketing and data analysis in one platform and develop integrations to ensure seamless data transference between the new platform and an existing multi-vendor ecosystem.
This comprehensive HR tech transformation powered five objectives:
- Align talent strategies with Jardines’ business priorities
- Position the organization as an employer of choice in a competitive talent market
- Create and drive a seamless recruiting process
- Improve candidate sourcing, talent assessment and selection
- Implement an Applicant Tracking System
Why Avature?
After thoroughly reviewing the top ATS solutions in the market, Jardines shortlisted five vendors. They assessed them under key criteria, including overall recruitment functionalities, candidate and customer experience, usability, longer-term group activities perspective, integration capabilities, technical support, technology and future roadmap.
Avature received the highest score across all criteria and was selected as the ATS vendor due to its global customer base, which reassured Jardines that we could understand and support their evolving needs.
After a seven-month implementation journey, Jardines launched its new ATS and “new recruitment experience” in 2021, enabling:
- Seamless integration of the Hiring Manager Portal with the organization’s HRIS to streamline requisition creation and management.
- Integration with Jardines’ career site and major job boards to enable application submission through the ATS.
- A candidate portal that provides candidates with a streamlined application experience.
- An integrated workflow with Recruitment Agency Portal to monitor agencies’ performance, enhance communication and centralize candidates’ information.
- A Talent Community and quarterly email campaigns to keep nurtured talent pipelines for future recruitment.
- A one-stop events portal to enable promotion, online admission, on-site attendee management and real-time data.
So far, six group organizations have migrated to Avature, with more coming on board throughout 2023. According to a user, Avature is “one platform which enhances productivity with systematic workflow while allowing flexibility to cater for change in recruitment needs.”
Secrets to Avature Implementation Success
With a legacy ATS that could no longer keep up with lululemon’s growth, a team of six set out to implement Avature ATS in 22 regions. But as the retail giant’s presenter explained, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was their Avature system.
Luckily, they were able to turn their implementation challenges into actionable tips that they shared with the conference audience:
- Size does matter. With so much configurability enabled by Avature, it’s hard to anticipate the actual size of the implementation you’re undertaking. As such, lululemon’s advice to those looking to implement or revamp a system is to overestimate both human resources and time and account for unforeseen circumstances.
- Knowledge is power. Chances are your internal teams are unfamiliar with the new system you’re deploying. lululemon’s recommendation is to hire people with Avature experience and knowledge of the industry’s best practices. Someone who has already done the job can unload part of the workload from the team, support training and help anticipate issues.
- Have a sustainment plan. The Avature platform is constantly evolving. To keep up with the updates and, most importantly, make the most of them, you can tap into System Admin Meetups, the Avature Resource Center (ARC), the training campus and, of course, the Avature conferences held in APAC, China, the US and Europe.
- The more diverse, the better. A diverse team can be crucial when designing a strategy that attracts new and diverse candidates, especially during journey mapping. lululemon found that, regardless of system-related knowledge, the particularities within its team were instrumental in shaping a recruitment process that met the needs and wants of today’s candidates.
- Pause and plan. lululemon recommends keeping dialogue open when planning, gathering feedback and prioritizing based on impact. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the backlog. Additionally, things change rapidly. However, having a plan will ensure you can act efficiently and focus first on the enhancements that have a more significant impact.
Avature’s Road(map) to the Future
The local team hosted the much-anticipated Roadmap presentation. From enhancements to our Content Management System (CMS) toolkit, improvements to our cross-platform AI and innovations around skills, the team walked the attendees through the newest functionalities while highlighting their strategic value.
Our team shared some exciting upcoming news: Avature 10 is hitting the Avature platform in the coming months! Described as “one of the most significant updates that we have ever made to our platform’s architecture,” this new version is designed to increase users’ autonomy, drive agility and unlock countless possibilities.
Marking our comeback to the in-person format, #AvatureUpfront APAC 2023 was a blast! Attendees were thrilled to reunite and took away actionable insights to strengthen their talent strategies. We are already looking forward to next year’s edition, where we hope to hear how our customers are making the most of Avature 10.
“Presenting live and getting together with customers and Avaturians was absolutely fantastic! We heard great stories, with real authenticity beyond the presentations and conversations. Our customers highlighted the networking and significant value of every talk.”
Adam Walker
Regional Sales Director, APAC
