Customer Stories 
Summary
As flexibility becomes increasingly valued by today’s workforce, Deloitte Australia is attracting top talent by offering contract workers a tailored and seamless experience. Their Open Talent Network accomplishes this by automating candidate notifications regarding relevant new projects and making it easier to redeploy top performers. Cost savings in sourcing, faster time-to-fill, streamlined administrative tasks for hiring managers and word-of-mouth employer advertising—these are just a few of the gains Deloitte has made by using Avature´s award-winning technology for managing a contingent workforce.
“We’re future-proofing ourselves and becoming more agile as we get bigger."
Ben Ryrie, Digital Innovation Manager at Deloitte
About Deloitte
Part of a global consulting firm, Deloitte Australia has approximately 8,000 permanent employees and nearly 1,000 contractors. For the past few years, the company’s workforce has increased by 14% each year. As the company grows, it is leveraging Human Capital Management (HCM) software towards its goal of becoming more agile and technology-driven.
Challenges
Prior to implementing Avature solutions, Deloitte Australia worked extensively with external agencies to recruit contractors. Finding and delivering experienced freelance professionals was challenging to do in a short time frame. There were no centralized records, no unified onboarding and offboarding processes across Deloitte Australia’s various businesses and little visibility into data. Costs, demand and overall management of contractors were also largely unknown to the recruiting team.
Flexibility Is the Future
Ben Ryrie, Digital Innovation Manager at Deloitte Australia, emphasises that to be future-ready their HR software needed flexibility that would enable them to serve clients quickly and encourage workforce agility. The new approach also needed to be cost-efficient and easy to maintain. Since high-performing contractors in Australia are a small community, Deloitte also sought to give them a great experience and offer them high-profile, interesting work in addition to flexibility and convenience.
“It’s as much about engagement as it is about management. We’ve tried to put ourselves in the shoes of a potential contractor and make the process as simple and refined as possible."
Ben Ryrie, Digital Innovation Manager at Deloitte
Deloitte Australia found that Avature´s software offered a unique degree of flexibility without sacrificing self-service or self-administration. Avature´s Contingent Workforce Management solution was recently awarded Human Resources Executive Magazine’s 2018 Product of the Year.
Applying the Concept of Candidate + Employee Experience to the Freelancer Community
The key way Deloitte Australia leverages Avature CWM is through their Open Talent Network, a marketplace for projects catered to independent talent. Members of the network can filter to focus on particular projects or to express interest in talent communities that require a specific set of skills, including a cyber-security talent community. Potential candidates can register with the network, update their profiles over time and apply to open assignments. The community receives personalized and segmented email marketing campaigns based on skill set, job alerts and information update requests for applicants, which ensures they do not have to constantly check the website for updates.
For Deloitte Australia, Avature’s HR technology enables them to pursue desirable candidate profiles, create talent pools, manage the interview process and contract and onboard new hires. Powered by Avature, Deloitte Australia now uses centralized, workflow-driven methods and a unified process across diverse business areas. Ben Ryrie says this new approach has allowed them to become “an agency unto ourselves.” Avature’s flexibility even empowered his team to redesign the approval and onboarding processes after launch to run concurrently rather than consecutively, which led to a significant increase in efficiency.
“Avature is intuitive and flexible - pretty much anything can be changed. We’re growing fast; we’re expanding to new business areas and this requires speed and flexibility. The technology is there to make it possible."
Ben Ryrie, Digital Innovation Manager at Deloitte
Seamless Re-Engagement with Contract Workers
The results speak for themselves — Deloitte Australia has been able to retain top independent talent and its hiring managers have increased faith in the services provided by trusted contractors:
- The Open Talent Network has amassed 5,000 members without any proactive promotion.
- Since implementation, 450 contractors have been deployed and 30% of those contractors have been redeployed on 2 or more projects.
- Onboarding communications have dropped from 10 emails to 2. The onboarding process now is paperless, automated and customized to job type and location.
- A permanent hire takes approximately 50 days to complete, while a contract hire now can be completed in as little as 24 hours.
- One full-time employee manages all aspects of the contingent workforce, including the Open Talent Network.
The all-in-one Avature platform facilitates seamless processing for onboarding and offboarding, and also helps the company engage with high-value candidates in the passive job market as well. In addition to the Open Talent Network candidate portal, Deloitte Australia has two additional portals to enhance internal collaboration and efficiency. One is for hiring managers, who use their portal to submit a hiring request, approve statements of work, review candidates and provide interview feedback. The other portal is targeted at partner staffing agencies and is still being implemented.
Future Work
Once Deloitte Australia rolls out the agency portal, it will allow managed service providers to review specific positions assigned to them and to submit candidates. This will allow Deloitte Australia to track agency performance and efficiently manage agency candidates. The company also plans to grow the use of the Open Talent Network by launching a proactive marketing campaign. Given the power of Avature CWM, Ryrie refers to Deloitte Australia as becoming the “masters of our own destiny”.
Deloitte is leading the transformation of talent acquisition. According to Deloitte’s own survey, 2018 Global Human Capital Trends, only 16% of responding executives indicated they had an established set of policies for workers in the so-called “gig economy.” Yet within the last year, 50% report relying on a significant number of independent contractors, 23% on freelancers, and 13% on gig workers. By creating a tailored experience for contingent workers that also streamlines the internal contracting process, Deloitte is poised to lead the future of work.