Articles 
That’s a wrap for #AvatureUpfront Digital China 2022! Kicking off with an empowering Masterclass, the Conference continued with presentations from Siemens Healthineers, Philips, BCG Platinion and Cisco and closed with a roadmap of Avature’s developments.
This year, the way to the Conference was not easy, with Covid forcing us to move to a digital format. But all’s well that ends well, and the event was another successful proof of our community and team’s resilience. Join us to recap the main lessons that will inspire our road moving forward.
1- Breaking Barriers in Talent Acquisition
Facing a Complex Landscape with Proactive Sourcing
A highly competitive job market, passive candidates waiting to be contacted by talent hunters and significant salary increase expectations.
Although many companies around the world may be familiar with this scenario, for healthcare organizations in China, the talent acquisition landscape looks even tougher. Research found that over 50 percent of candidates are passive; they anticipate a salary increase of between 20-30 percent per year, and competition extends beyond the local market with many global companies looking for talent within China.
To navigate this complex scenario, the leading medtech organization Siemens Healthineers has decided to revamp its tried and tested proactive sourcing strategy, with a focus on delivering a high-touch experience:
- Analyzing talent demands based on location and skills/background required for different positions
- Running early searches, extended also to other industries and occupations
- Reaching out to candidates to understand their job-seeking expectations
- Following up and inviting them to join the organization’s talent community
- Interviewing and hiring once a suitable position opens up
But Siemens Healthineers’ proactivity is not limited to early searches. On the contrary, it runs through the entire sourcing strategy, reaching performance assessment too. From pipelines’ health to bottlenecks to the number of candidates in each step, the organization relies on Avature to keep a close eye on how well its proactive sourcing efforts are paying off.
Thanks to Avature’s built-in reporting functionalities, Siemens Healthineers is able to report on any element in their data model, enabling the constant evaluation and —better yet— optimization of the proactive approach to ensure its success.
Arriving at the cinema early gets you better seats, a rationale also applicable to talent acquisition. But leveraging technology that sheds light on progress, bottlenecks, quality of processes, costs and effectiveness… That’s the kind of plot twist that continue to inspire us to reimagine talent acquisition.
Context Matters: TA Localization with Philips
In order to have a greater strategic impact, the local talent acquisition team at Philips has started supporting the business with its hiring needs in a more region-specific, dynamic and proactive way. Despite operating within a larger global organization, the team realized they needed to adapt their hiring practices to the local context.
So, when faced with the need to hire 40 engineers, they decided that hiring all of them as full-time employees was not feasible in the timeframe. Instead, they suggested a more dynamic approach, relying on a mixture of contingent workers to fill the need faster.
In this new approach, Philips’ local TA team has started collaborating with hiring managers at earlier stages of the recruiting process, taking a more consultative approach. Rather than working together when the time comes to fill a specific requisition, recruiters now discuss future talent needs with hiring managers well in advance to develop a plan that facilitates finding the right candidate. Another example of their close partnership is competitive intelligence, joining forces to map and target high-value talent in other companies that could be a good fit for Philips.
Regarding employer brand, part of optimizing recruiting efforts in the local context involves contacting a pool of candidates already familiar with Philips. To increase awareness, the organization’s TA team has been running recruitment marketing campaigns and training recruiters on the most effective ways to target and engage with candidates.
2- Digitally Transforming HR and Ways of Working
The consultancy firm BCG Platinion empowers its customers to achieve digital transformation by harmonizing technology and human elements, championing a shift to what they have coined the bionic company.
For BCG, forward-thinking organizations that will outperform competitors must incorporate today’s most disruptive technologies in everything they do, including recruiting and talent management. Rethinking their communication practices is a must too, and they should hop on social media to establish digital, high-touch relationships with talent.
While the most evident benefit of leveraging technology in human resources is optimizing processes and saving time, digitalization also translates into more personalized candidate and employee experiences. But most importantly, it powers an entirely new approach to talent that legacy systems don’t allow for.
In this approach, the focus is no longer on the traditional concept of job but rather on the qualities, abilities and behaviors required to perform it. After transitioning to this skills-based strategy, organizations need visibility of the skills within them and the ability to (re)deploy them to new projects, positions or tasks at the right time. Easier said than done… unless you implement the right technology.
Becoming a Bionic Company
As a trailblazer in the field, BCG Platinion has already made the shift to a bionic company, using Avature technology to advance its HR practices and how they work when searching for talent and connecting with candidates.
HR specialists can leave manual tasks to Avature’s AI and automation to focus on establishing and nurturing relationships with talent through more modern channels, such as WeChat. And thanks to Avature’s signature flexibility, the organization can rest assured that the platform can quickly transition to meet new program needs as required in the future.
With its AI-powered skill management tools, Avature makes it easier to build agile programs that promote, relocate and rotate internal talent to fill business-critical opportunities. In addition, the system can highlight internal areas that can be improved with training, upskilling and reskilling to constantly support talent specialists as they navigate the new skills-based paradigm.
Of course, the data that underpins this transformation is paramount. And for any HR organization looking to deliver more effective talent programs and better demonstrate their value internally, a data-driven approach is critical.
Speaking of the devil…
3- Driving Business Impact with Data
“Data really powers everything that we do” is a quote from Jeff Weiner, ex-CEO at LinkedIn, that truly resonates with Cisco’s local talent acquisition team.
Cisco’s team chose Avature ATS due to its single-platform approach to data. After smoothly migrating a decade-old database, the team now uses the instance to manage hiring from end to end, seeing every activity and data point reflected in the system in real time and readily available for analysis.
But Cisco takes the power of data and Avature ATS a couple of steps further. The team has turned the solution into a big data center that drives market intelligence around the organization’s competitiveness in the job market and how this impacts time to hire and recruiting costs.
Harnessing automatic reports, screening forms and advanced analytics, the team is able to gain insights into the organization’s talent challenges, conduct strategic conversations with the business department and advise on potential solutions.
The results speak for themselves. So far, Cisco’s regional TA team has reduced offer decline, improved the average time to fill, made predictions, analyzed risks and created long-term plans. All thanks to leveraging data to influence and propel decisions and, of course, to adopting a system flexible yet powerful enough to bring forth its users’ initiatives.
The Constant of Innovation
Our local team closed #AvatureUpfront Digital China 2022 by presenting the Avature Roadmap. Among the analytics, talent management, content management, user experience and communication capabilities discussed, these are the solutions and features that stood out:
- Our revamped Campus Recruiting solution, customized based on our users’ local needs and providing end-to-end functionalities to conquer the next generation of talent.
- Our brand-new Learning solution, designed to help employees find everything they need to continue to develop their career paths.
- Our Portal Content Editor and Theme Builder for Landing Pages, to make content changes to Avature portals and themes for landing pages via a centralized, easy-to-use UI.
- More drip campaign functionalities and new WhatsApp and Zoom integrations, to continue unlocking communication and engagement use cases.
Innovation has marked Avature’s past and will continue to guide our future. As shown by the stories they shared at the Conference, innovation is also a fundamental value to our customers. Despite the challenges that the present of work faces companies with —and that the future will probably bring along as well—, we are proud to see that our partnership remains one of the key enablers of their inspiring achievements.
