Customer Stories 
Summary
Well known as a consumer electronics and lighting company, but lacking exposure as a healthcare provider, Philips sought a way to transform their brand and communicate their full employer brand to potential candidates, all while building their talent pipelines with highly qualified talent from non-traditional competitors. After choosing Avature CRM to support their talent initiatives, Philips experienced vast improvements across their recruitment strategy — including talent pool growth of 225%, significantly increased email open and click-through rates, and candidate conversion rates far above the industry standard.
Avature has really helped us recognize the most value we can get for our recruiting efforts. My team last year had over 30,000 applicants for Philips sales jobs and we hired roughly 1000. (…) Avature kept us from losing touch with them and kept us from having to go start the search all over again. It also allows us to talk to our customers about what the pipeline looks like for their region.”
Alan Blevins, Director of Talent Acquisition.
Customer Overview:
A global provider of consumer electronics, lighting solutions, and healthcare, Philips is ranked as #90 of Forbes’ World’s Most Valuable Brands (2017), generating €21.4 billion in revenue every year and employing more than 105,000 people.
Challenges:
Previous to implementing Avature CRM, Philips faced several challenges, mainly around recruitment marketing and branding as well as talent engagement. In terms of branding, Philips was well known to potential talent as a consumer electronic and lighting company, but not as a healthcare provider. Their use of a reactive sourcing model combined with targeting talent from traditional competitors failed to provide sufficient pipeline, with high numbers of unqualified leads and low engagement overall. In addition, they had no existing recruitment marketing metrics to give insight into conversion rates, candidate engagement levels, and successful campaigns.
Before we had Avature, I felt like we weren’t getting the value for the dollars we spent in recruitment marketing. We would attract candidates to Philips, maybe not have an opening for them at the moment and then lose touch with them.”
Alan Blevins, Director of Talent Acquisition.
Solutions:
To meet these challenges, Philips developed a High-Value-Target (HVT) company initiative, which focused on 4 key areas:
1. Attract top talent leveraging the employer brand via various recruitment marketing activities.
2. Use analytics to make data driven decisions.
3. Source top talent by identifying “High-Value Target” (HVT) companies, in which employers cultivate specific, rare skills.
4. Follow up with candidates sourced through the HVT initiative.
Avature supported the HVT initiative and Philip’s HR strategy as a whole with the following actionables:
- Reposition the customer as an employer of choice in the healthcare industry for top prospects.
With Avature talent community portals and branded email campaigns, Philips can tailor custom communications to bolster the different hiring initiatives in their corporate brand. - Enable sourcers to effectively identify the best-in-class talent from target, non-traditional companies to increase talent pool size.
Sourcers can easily add notes and forms to company records within Avature to track and build competitive intelligence on HVT companies. Using Avature lists and pipeline records, Philips can more effectively segment databases and build talent pools with leads from these same HVT organizations. - Proactively engage with identified top talent to grow the relationship with qualified leads and increase the number of engaged candidates.
Via Avature sourcing and engagement workflow automation, sourcers can reduce the time spent on manual candidate qualification and lead nurturing throughout the candidate lifecycle. - Achieve insight into talent sources, candidate life cycle, and recruitment marketing return on investment (ROI).
With Avature built-in reporting metrics, Philips can easily track talent pool size and growth, engagement level, and email campaign metrics
Results
Philips experienced vast improvements across their recruitment strategy, from branding and recruitment marketing to talent pool conversion rates. Today, Philip’s email open and click-through rates are almost twice as high as the industry average. The organization sourced over 2300 candidates for their top pipelines in the last year, with the Healthcare (Quality & Regulation) talent pool growing by 225%.
In terms of meeting recruiting goals from High-Value-Target (HVT) companies, Philips engaged with more than 1100 prospects from their top 10 competitors in 2016, exceeding their HVT hire targets by 10 percentage points and recording 159% average growth rates across all regions and key segments of their HVT pipelines. This resulted in Philips outperforming their own benchmark of HVT talent as a share of their total talent pool by 18 percentage points on average worldwide in 2016.
The talent pool quality has also seen improvement, with 78% of all candidates being presented to the hiring manager, and 56% being subsequently interviewed. Of these interviewed candidates, 17% receive an offer, and 13% are hired — conversion rates that are far above industry standard.
One of the really nice things about working with Avature is the team. My experience with some vendors in the past is that they tend to disengage once you sign the contract. Avature is very willing to reach out and help us customize things such as landing pages. They’ll provide training and they really want to understand what we’re trying to get out of the tool and they spend time to try and help us achieve that goal. In addition, they’ll point out other things that the tool can do that we may not have been aware of and they’ll make suggestions to help us achieve our ultimate goal.”
Alan Blevins, Director of Talent Acquisition.
Future
Following the implementation of their new talent initiatives, Philips concluded several learnings which could be applied in the future. For one, having organization leadership on board with new initiatives is crucial when it comes to their execution. This is aided further when leadership acts as advocates. Secondly, including hiring goals in the performance process results in greater effectiveness, and should be adopted across the board for all recruiters. Third, encouraging employees to share campaign content on social media results in greater engagement and ultimately higher conversions. And fourth, easy-to-use technology allows for more efficient adoption in the future. With these learnings in mind, Philips plans on further combining their sourcing, recruitment marketing, and engagement strategies via Avature to boost the size and quality of their talent pools.