Bringing Employee Experience to Life: How GE Plans, Engages, and Retains with Workforce Intelligence

General Electric Company — more commonly known as GE — is not just any electric company. From creating innovative kitchen gadgets to massive turbines that power entire cities, GE operates in industries like aerospace, renewable energy, manufacturing, finance, and more.

They’re also going through a well-publicized and planned segmentation of their 140 year old business, moving to create three individual organizations that will operate independently — focusing on the healthcare, energy, and aerospace market respectively.

As a result, their corporate office is shutting down, requiring thousands of employees to search for and apply to new jobs. Sean Murphy, Head of Global Talent Acquisition Operations at GE, shared more about this process, as well as the importance they’re placing on helping these displaced employees find new roles within the company through the use of Phenom’s Intelligent Talent Experience platform.

You can watch the full webinar on demand here, or read on for the highlights.

Creating a Great Employee Experience Amid a Company-Wide Separation

Murphy’s question to his Talent Acquisition (TA) team was direct yet complex: What do we do with all the talent who will be affected by this huge separation process?

Never in the company’s history has the TA team had to move such a large number of employees in such a short period of time — so they turned to the Phenom technology they’re already using, and iterated on it to create exactly what they needed.

What did they need?

• Internal sourcing capabilities for recruiters to connect with and source talent, and find the right fit for all of these new and open jobs

• Insight into what employees wanted: What they would like to do, what subsection they would like to work for, and how this would impact their families

• Collaboration between recruiters and managers. Specifically, a way to combat managers’ fears of recruiters “poaching” their employees

The underlying goal through it all was to ensure they were bringing the human touch to their employees, rather than saying “Here’s a bunch of brand new jobs… good luck,” explained Murphy.

A Solution in the Form of an Internal Talent Community

GE is currently using products across Phenom’s full platform — including Candidate Experience, Recruiter Experience, Manager Experience, and Employee Experience tools.

After assessing their capabilities (especially those that Phenom Talent Marketplace affords), Murphy and the team built an internal talent community that their employees could sign up for and then add their skills, competencies, job preferences, experience, location, and more. By enrolling in this marketplace, employees gain tailored job recommendations quickly, rather than having to search for jobs themselves. “Our employees had our platform to talk to our recruiters, and the data they provided was then integrated into our CRM. This provided our recruiters and businesses with a precision-based sourcing strategy,” Murphy said.

Because recruiters could be more specific about why they were reaching out to employees about a particular role, the TA team saw an increase in interest and response rates from employees; employees were more apt to engage with a recruiter and apply for the role, since their correspondence was both targeted and personalized.

The Phenom CRM played a big role in how the team actualized this.

For starters, recruiters were already used to using it, so they didn’t have to learn a new tool to start engaging with employees. Murphy’s team simply leveraged the same technology they were using for external candidates, eliminating the common roadblock of user adoption.

“An employee can go to the talent community, submit the preferences they wish on a future job, their profile is coupled with their skills they’ve compiled in Workday, and all of that is presented to our recruiters in a nice tidy profile package in the CRM — which just makes sourcing more efficient,” explained Murphy.

With a unified skills profile from their ATS and CRM, employees are getting job recommendations and filling out their profiles all in one place, while recruiters are automatically getting best-fit matches based on those profiles.

Results So Far

“The results so far have exceeded our expectations in many ways,” Murphy said enthusiastically.

Here are just a few of their successes:

• Employee engagement has increased due to the easy communication channels they’ve established

• Several thousand employees have gone through the internal talent community, leading to thousands of employee interviews

• Updated employee profiles helped recruiters short-list potential candidates, and then skill-matching AI could be used to find best-fit employees for roles

“All of that, in my mind, is a huge win, because the more fluent our employees are with the tools we put in place to help them search and navigate their own career path, the more effective we all are at our jobs," said Murphy.

GE’s Future

Looking to the future, Murphy and his team are excited to implement Phenom Intelligent Sourcing. Intelligent Sourcing gives TA teams access to millions of profiles, with the ability to filter for specific needs and pull them into the CRM.

This will allow GE to maximize access to the right candidates, regardless of whether they’re in the company, in the CRM, or in the wild. “We’re keeping a pulse on where our roadmap needs to take us next, and I think intelligent sourcing is right at the top of the list,” said Murphy.

It will help arm his TA teams with better, more efficient tools to cut down on time-to-fill, find great talent, administer more accurate assessments, and more. “This can supercharge our recruiter outreach ability.”

Takeaways

Murphy shared a few takeaways from the implementation of their internal talent community:

• Leverage employee preferences as a guide to internal engagement. You don't want to just throw people into a job. You want to be thoughtful and purposeful, especially during an anxiety-ridden time.

• Promote a culture of movement to simplify change management. This is imperative because you don’t know if or when a forcing function is going to happen, so you want to make sure employees are as comfortable as possible when it does.

• Supplement data collection with data generation through a dynamic skills architecture. Employees don’t always provide as much info as you would like, which is why relying on a dynamic skills architecture is paramount.

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