Customer Stories 
Summary
Tired of the lack of transparency and coordination inherent in individual tracking systems and spreadsheets, software company Autodesk sought a recruitment technology solution that would serve as a high-performing alternative. After choosing Avature CRM, Autodesk managed to achieve their goal of full implementation in just 90 days, and have continued to reap the benefits – from more effective candidate sourcing and tracking to nurturing of candidate relationships and more.
About Autodesk:
If you’ve ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you’ve experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with their software. With tools like AutoCAD®, Revit®, Maya®, 3ds Max®, Fusion 360TM, and SketchBook® software, the company allows their customers to make anything.
Challenges Before Avature:
Efficiently Sourcing & Tracking Candidates
Recruiters and talent scouts at Autodesk had to rely on entirely manual methods of collecting lead information and tracking candidate status throughout the hiring journey.
Sharing Leads & Building a Global Candidate Database
Every recruiter and talent scout at Autodesk was managing their own personal candidate lists. Not only were these lists all organized in different ways, but none of them were shared.
Nurturing Relationships
Without a CRM in place, Autodesk recruiters had to personally remember to communicate with all candidates in order to strengthen and build candidate relationships with the brand.
Event Marketing and Lead Tracking
Following on-campus events, Autodesk recruiters were manually emailing hundreds of attendees thanking them for their attendance. In addition, very few pre or post-event marketing email campaigns were executed due to the resources required.
Solutions:
Sourcing & Tracking Candidates
By employing various tools available to import people into Avature, Autodesk has quickly facilitated the parsing and addition of profiles into their database. Some of these methods include sending candidates to the system via email, importing candidates from LinkedIn or any other website with the click of the button, and inviting leads to sign-up through interest-specific talent communities. To track these newly-added profiles, Autodesk developed an extremely simple and easy to track workflow that allows recruiters to closely monitor candidates throughout the duration of the hiring journey. This means, for example, that where a lead is, whether they’ve been screened, and how they’ve been rated/ranked are all now easily trackable with Avature CRM.
“Speed is the most important metric in our business. And a tool like this can help us shorten our time to fill — that’s critical to our ability to deliver."
Scotty Morrison, Director of Global Sales & Services Talent Acquisition.
Sharing Leads & Building a Global Candidate Database
Now, with Avature, Autodesk’s global teams can share candidates, collaborate on talent pipelines and retain that valuable data that was once stored in a spreadsheet. Autodesk collected more than 5,000 new qualified leads in the six months since adopting Avature – for a grand total of 11,000 candidates in their global database as of early 2017. This was made easier by the ability to configure workflows specific to different geographical locations, taking into considerations the different privacy laws. For example, candidates outside of the USA must double opt-in to be considered a qualified lead.
Nurturing Relationships
Through smart automation and customized messaging, Autodesk can now more easily engage candidates. With the use of the custom field “Top Target,” recruiters can pull lists of hot candidates and trigger automated emails in order to nurture high-priority leads.
“Recruiting is about creating relationships and nurturing leads, and now we have the tools to do that better than ever before."
Rick Aldridge, Sr. Manager of Global Talent Acquisition Operations
Automated Event Marketing and Lead Tracking
Today, Autodesk is sending quarterly updates, relevant industry articles, and recruiting event marketing materials and communications via Avature email templates. By implementing these automated marketing communications both before and after events, Autodesk has seen a great improvement in its ability to market events and then track attendees, as well as engage potential candidates via periodic follow-ups.
“After a university recruiting info session, we typically had 100+ people to manually send a thank you email to. With Avature, not only have we been able to automate a branded thank you message, but we can easily identify event-specific attendees for future messages and campaigns…and that’s amazing."
Rick Aldridge, Sr. Manager of Global Talent Acquisition Operations
Results:
Only six months after going live, the company experienced several improvements in terms of collecting leads, managing and retaining individual talent pipelines, marketing recruiting events, and communicating regularly with their talent community.
While all of these benefits bear mentioning, the rapid and successful implementation of Avature is perhaps equally inspiring. Autodesk says that this was made possible due to their close working relationship with the Avature adoption and implementation consulting team, as well as the collaboration and support supplied by Talent Function.
“Setting up Avature landing pages, email templates and workflows was so easy. Ninety-five percent of the assumptions we made based on the feedback from the Avature implementation team and TalentFunction has remained in place. And the 5 percent that didn’t work as expected has been easy to change."
Rick Aldridge, Sr. Manager of Global Talent Acquisition Operations
The Future:
For future adopters of Avature, Autodesk recommends spending time upfront to thoughtfully consider current business processes and future objectives without the fear of being over ambitious. According to Aldridge, “If we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have bought the solutions we did. We definitely found ways to get to everything we wanted to create.”
When it comes to next steps, Autodesk plans to delve deeper into the platform’s built-in reporting capacity in order to better evaluate their data processes. Currently, Autodesk is working with an Avature Adoption Specialist on developing customized reports and dashboards, as well as refining how the company can better use Avature for recruiting events and talent brand communications. Aldridge concludes, “We are so excited about the future of recruiting and shaping what’s next at Autodesk with Avature.”