Customer Stories 
Summary
CBS Corporation – a mass media company with numerous brands – created a dedicated Talent Acquisition department in 2014 to centralize, manage and streamline its recruiting. The new department quickly discovered that CBS needed a more flexible Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in order to tailor recruiting processes to each brand’s target audience and geographical area. The company also needed an ATS to help meet complex compliance requirements while also providing a high-touch experience for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. With these challenges in mind, CBS switched to Avature ATS.
“We realized Avature ATS is not an ATS. It’s a business solution, it’s the platform for an applicant tracking system, but you can use it for so many other different opportunities within the company that are not necessarily related to recruiting."
Richard Monastersky, Senior VP of Talent Acquisition at CBS.
Recruiting Landscape
CBS is composed of 12 divisions and 25 brands that operate in every field of media and entertainment, including cable, publishing, radio, local TV, film, and interactive and socially responsible media.
With 25 TV and radio brands and over 20,000 employees, CBS is one of the largest mass media companies in the US. Despite its size and reach, CBS did not have a dedicated TA team prior to 2014, nor did it rely on recruiting agencies to help source and hire more than 3,600 new employees per year.
Challenges
Before implementing Avature, CBS’s HR department managed and executed all recruiting activities using a legacy ATS. Because of the system’s inflexibility, recruiters often conducted confidential searches for high-level positions outside of the company’s ATS.
As a nationwide broadcaster and large government contractor, CBS needs to comply with three legal authorities when sourcing and recruiting new employees:
- Sarbanes-Oxley
As one of the requirements, former auditors of CBS must undergo a one-year cooling-off period before they can accept an offer to work again for a former client. - Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
As a broadcaster, CBS is required to provide notice of each job vacancy to any organization that requests such information. - Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)
As a federal contractor, CBS must comply with OFCCP requirements. This includes, among others, documenting the legitimate reason for not selecting each applicant.
When the new TA department began its work in 2014, the team’s first challenge was to review and redefine the TA processes for each brand. Considering the vast array of brand genres, it became clear that each brand required its own recruiting process relevant to its target audience and geographical area.
The TA team also wanted to provide hiring managers with a user-friendly tool to manage their part in the recruiting process. This tool needed the flexibility to handle different processes because some hiring managers oversaw the full recruiting process from start to finish.
Solutions
Considering all of these challenges, CBS turned to Avature in order to enable the following process enhancements.
Manage confidential searches for high-level positions
Due to Avature’s record ownership and sharing capabilities, CBS is now able to place requisitions confidentially. All activity associated with these searches can be kept out of the public eye, in addition to being tracked for compliance purposes.
Comply with legal authorities
1. Sarbanes – Oxley: Streamline the internal audit process
To ensure the one-year cooling off period is adhered to, CBS uses a streamlined application process that requires candidates to stipulate whether they have been previously employed by the accounting firm that audits CBS. Candidates who answer “yes” are flagged in the system and are easily recognizable to recruiters. When one of these candidates moves forward in the recruiting process, the system automatically sends a request for them to be reviewed by the ICD (Internal Control Department), which can reject or approve them from a custom portal. Furthermore, the system prevents recruiters from extending an offer to candidates who haven’t been approved by the ICD.
2. FCC: Provide automated listing of openings to any interested parties
CBS’s job workflows in Avature are configured so that as soon as a job opens, an outreach email, which is targeted based on job location, is automatically sent to organizations that have requested to be notified. This automated process not only saves time for employees who previously completed the work manually, but it also allows CBS to monitor its outreach efforts and easily demonstrate the process to the auditors.
“We’ve freed up 150 people who used to spend hours outreaching to every organization via email,"
Richard Monastersky, Senior VP of Talent Acquisition at CBS.
3. OFCCP: Facilitate documentation of non-selection of any applicant
CBS’s recruitment processes are configured by Avature so that when a recruiter accesses a candidate’s record, the candidate is marked as “reviewed” and recruiters are required to either move the candidate forward in the process or fill in a disposition code. Candidates who are not reviewed, as well as those who don’t meet the basic qualifications for the job, are automatically dispositioned by the system. As a final compliance measure, the system prevents recruiters from closing a job if there are non-hired candidates who haven’t been properly dispositioned.
Empower hiring managers throughout the recruiting process
Avature enables a custom portal for hiring managers to request new job openings, review candidates submitted by recruiters throughout the entire process (phone screen, personal interview and offer stage), and remove non-hired candidates for OFCCP compliance purposes. Hiring managers who also act as recruiters have the extra capability to review new applicants from the portal, including their full application information and résumé, and see ICD responses for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
Results
Though metrics were not accurately tracked during legacy system days, several aspects of the recruitment process have improved since CBS and Avature forged a partnership.
- CBS is compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, FCC and OFCCP. Since the implementation of Avature, CBS has not failed a single audit.
- After only 41 days of using Avature, CBS began tracking and maintaining KPIs. Previously, the recruitment department lacked the necessary time to develop and maintain KPIs.
- With the newly-obtained ability to identify, track and retain a candidate’s information, CBS has been able to perform thorough analysis by business unit, by hiring manager and by recruiter, and dig deep into any activity – candidates received as a recommendation, candidates interviewed, and so on.
CBS now can better serve the specific recruiting needs and requirements for each one of its 25 brands.
“The people at Avature are some of the most interested, dedicated, loyal individuals who look to improve and build the company, providing the right features the right way to their clients, Avature customer service is absolutely second to none; I’ve never dealt with a customer service group that was like Avature."
Richard Monastersky, Senior VP of Talent Acquisition at CBS.
Future
CBS is currently implementing the Avature Onboarding solution, which will enable the company to eliminate paperwork during the onboarding process and engage new hires even before their first day. With an informative onboarding portal, CBS will be able to bring new hires up to speed on anything from how to get to work, to what to wear to the office, to who is on their team. In the future, CBS will also be implementing and designing a new Employee Referrals solution.