Articles 
Another year is wrapping up. But before the curtains come down, 2021 brought us the event that we longed for and that highlighted the value of collaborative spirit to get successful results: #AvatureUpfront Digital.
On this occasion, we were able to leverage one of the lessons we mastered as a result of the pandemic: Bringing a virtual event to life where borders are no longer a determining factor. As a result, we had global attendance and speakers who shared their best insights from multiple locations.
And although we missed the face-to-face interaction, the significant value that comes with the opportunity to share practices among multiple organizations that pursue similar end goals, while building and enriching connections, is undeniable.
Engage and Retain Those Who Are Fearless of Change
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes. And perhaps that is what is advisable in certain scenarios. But when the storm begins to dissipate and we start witnessing the effects of change, what we need are strategic approaches. This relates to one of the topics under the spotlight at the conference: How to rethink our strategies for attracting and retaining talent.
“Candidates are moving around faster than ever, they are establishing their own rules […] The expectations of what they see from a company continue to change and evolve and we need to change and evolve, from a technology perspective, to support what we are looking for in the talent marketplace.”
Scott Barish, Senior Manager Talent Acquisition, Booz Allen Hamilton
Gone are the days when employees needed momentous reasons to consider making a 360° career change. Today it is enough just to be bored and craving new challenges. And organizations also need to diversify their employees’ skills to fill key gaps with the right persons.
Engage and retain is, perhaps, the greatest HR challenge of recent times. And this is something that Deutsche Telekom, a company with over 220,000 employees, understood well when they implemented their talent marketplace. With the scope that employees have “easy access to jobs and projects which are relevant and where they are engaged, via the capability of forming communities and networking on challenges,” their internal talent marketplace became a solution for fruitful exchange. Today, it enables employees to search for projects to work on by adding filters, such as time commitment or the length of an opportunity. But it also offers relevant resources and training content, while fostering the sense of belonging through an internal social media network powered by Avature DNA.
And they are not the only ones that have looked to the community as a tool for engagement. Epic showcased how they have leveraged Avature DNA to deliver an impactful pre-onboarding experience for new hires. Considering that 90 percent of new hires decide whether or not to stay at a new company within the first six months, Epic understood the benefits of facilitating a connection between new employees and the organization, as well as instilling a strong sense of belonging. It’s about “creating a powerful moment to increase engagement and retention.”
There is no magic formula to ensure that employees will continue to choose to work in the same organization. However, there are ways to boost a work culture that cares for the individuality and diversity of each member, interests in their well-being and professional growth, and encourages reinvention. After all, we all want to feel that the time we spend working is worth much more than a paycheck.
User and Candidate Experience to the Next Level
In the age of instant gratification, frustration is something we have to deal with when experiences are slower or demand more effort than one would expect. In the world of HR, this is no different. In fact, people increasingly look for experiences aligned with those they have as consumers. That’s why organizations need, more than ever, technology that champions easy adoption and allows them to be agile, overhauling processes and implementing new ideas for the benefit of all stakeholders, without neglecting the user experience.
This was one of the leading themes at #AvatureUpfront Digital 2021, which was echoed by many organizations, because the positive experience of all parties involved in the talent journey, from sourcing to performance management, is essential to attract and engage talent. Let’s review some insights from our customers:
Insight #1
Deutsche Bahn’s vision is to be the Earth’s most candidate-centric company, which is why the organization turned to Avature with the objective of leveraging AI to deliver the most seamless candidate experience possible. Working in true partnership, we have developed a matching algorithm, which provides candidates with job recommendations based on their resume, instead of them having to skim through all available openings on the Career Site. They just need to upload their CV (or complete it manually), and the system will do the rest.
Insight #2
Bacardi summarized the main components of creating a positive candidate experience: It should be useful, enjoyable and reflect the organizational culture. And although it sounds easy to say, it may be more complex than it seems. Taking advantage of Avature, they conducted a user experience survey to know their opinions and discovered that meeting expectations without compromising process integrity is not always possible. However, you can find a middle ground if the right tools are in place.
Insight #3
In the case of Unisuper, the user experience was a key deciding factor in choosing Avature: They sought a seamless experience for their leaders and all TA stakeholders, as well as for their candidates. That requires not only a pleasant and convenient solution but also a comprehensive platform that would provide them with valuable data, save productive time and reduce the likelihood of manual errors.
Insight #4
At Siemens, they were looking to keep the experience to the core. In the last year alone they had 32,000 new hires, so making recruiting a lean and agile process became a must. That’s why they opted for Avature’s Video Interview platform, which ensures a consistent, flexible and fully branded experience while providing a professional environment in which candidates feel comfortable. Moreover, they implemented the TA Experience survey to gain actionable feedback.
Information Is Power: The Impact of Making Data-Driven Decisions
This was perhaps the hottest topic of the conference. We talked about technology, AI and automation… but all with the ultimate goal of devising strategies and making decisions based on data and results. And how do you get that accurate information? Let’s see some success stories.
One Global Best-in-Class Platform
Prior to implementing Avature, CBRE relied on multiple tools for their recruiting needs, which had limited reporting capabilities and delivered duplicate data, due to the lack of integration between them. They needed a single, modern platform that provides accurate data and empowers its users across the world.
With Avature’s cutting-edge reporting capabilities at hand, it has become much easier for CBRE to make proactive and assertive decisions at the right time. Just to mention an example, access to real-time data has granted hiring managers (HMs) greater visibility of the recruiting process.
So, what were the results of counting on a solution that empowers data-driven decision-making? Real-time analytics are now available in just one click, and they reveal impressive results. As well as driving huge cost savings on licensing, Avature has delivered efficiencies in CBRE’s process. For example, they reduced manual consolidation effort by 90 percent.
Partnership to Get the Right Results
With the goal of tracking the candidate journey in detail, Bain & Company decided to redesign their workflows. They wanted a greater level of granularity into the recruitment process so that they could really understand at a glance what was happening at the different stages.
Thanks to Avature’s signature flexibility, Bain was able to overhaul their recruiting workflow, adding more detailed steps that would allow for greater visibility of what was happening to candidates at different stages. They collaborated with the Avature team to brainstorm ideas for bringing their ambition to life. As a result, they have been able to obtain metrics such as the steps pass-through rate, and present them in a visually appealing way to stakeholder groups thanks to Avature’s dashboards.
Armed with this real-time data, Bain can make informed business decisions and adjustments when needed, for example, if they have a bottleneck at a particular step in the process.
“If recruiters need to take a look at how they are doing on a search, they can just log in to the backend to visualize all this information in one space.”
Allie Roberts, Senior Analyst, Bain & Company
Since we mentioned teamwork, we remind you of the invitation from Megan Deville at Laitram, Myria Peek at Delta Air Lines, Jim Schnyder at Recruiting Advisors and Amy Swanson at USI Insurance to join the System Admin club. To quote Jim, as “you don’t know what you don’t know,” networking is powerful for sharing knowledge.
Final Thoughts: The Best Is Yet to Come
As well as engaging presentations from some of our customers, Avature Product Marketing experts and Dimitri Boylan, Avature CEO took to the stage to showcase some of the latest and greatest features that will soon hit the platform in our Roadmap presentation.
They covered a lot of ground, but the highlights included AI-powered recommendations and candidate and skills matching, a new integration with WhatsApp that opens up a new channel to engage with talent, and profile enrichment tools that will ensure that your database is always up-to-date.
The conference may be over, but… the show must go on. Why? Because there is still a lot more to develop, implement and display. Only in 2021, at Avature we introduced over 550 new features and we are foreseeing an equally auspicious new year.
And since Deutsche Bahn and Bain’s experiences show us that the best way to develop the right solutions is by working hand in hand, now that we are more than 1000 employees, we have many more hands—and heads—to co-create.
We say goodbye, for now, remembering the word that resonated most from the Xerox presentation: Empower. Yourself, your HM, your team. That’s the goal of Avature.