A 20-Minute Job Application Shrunk to Less Than Five Minutes. Learn How UCB Did It (And You Can Too)

This was once the state of recruitment at UCB, the European biopharmaceutical company known for its immunology and neurology drugs: the job application took 20 minutes to complete, prompting a huge candidate drop-off rate, recalled Jonathan Berlan, UCB's Head of Talent Acquisition. As a result, there was little in the way of pipeline, which led to reactive recruitment. “So starting from scratch, every single time a job opens,” he said.

Due to the high drop-off rate, thousands of candidates stayed anonymous. They were interested enough in the company to want to work there, but became frustrated with the length of the application process. Was it possible for UCB to capture candidates’ information even though applications went unfinished?

Yes, it was (and I’ll come back to it in just a second) but other challenges awaited.

UCB had no employer brand and essentially no Talent CRM, thus, no marketing capabilities. “Recruiters would essentially post job descriptions verbatim on LinkedIn and hope that candidates would come back to what was a lousy application flow,” Berlan said. “That's a terrible starting point.”

Yet there are many recruiting teams going through those same pain points. So what’s the way forward? The answer is what inspired Berlan’s IAMPHENOM session “SAP SuccessFactors + Phenom: UCB's Ultimate Hiring Advantage.” 

Read on for the highlights!

The Power of SAP Integration

“We had to build a solution that would bring a proper experience to our candidates and make it as easy as possible,” said Berlan. Enter Phenom and its platinum partnership with leading cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) suite SAP SuccessFactors.

“Phenom was a technology I knew reasonably well at the time. 100% believe it's the best in the market. So we implemented career site, apply flow, and also two-way integration,” Berlan revealed.

The seamless Phenom and SAP Integration makes life easier for Berlan and his team by being able to use their SAP Applicant Tracking System (ATS) as a system of record with Phenom powering the white-glove AI experience for their candidates and recruiters through a Phenom Career Site, Talent CRM and a bevy of automation tools. 

With Phenom Hosted Apply, the workflow is streamlined yet comprehensive: job requisitions are still created in SAP where they're assigned to hiring managers and go through approval flows. However, when candidates interact with the career site, Phenom captures not only completed applications but also valuable leads from candidates who start but don't finish applying. In fact, incomplete applications where candidates attach resumes but don't click "apply" have become one of UCB's largest sources of candidate leads.

A key improvement? Instead of forcing candidates to create accounts before applying, the system creates accounts for them after they've applied, sending them credentials to track their application status. This small but significant change dramatically improved completion rates.

So for UCB, the candidate is still hired in SuccessFactors, but Phenom manages the entire process up until the hiring decision is made. A bidirectional integration ensures that any status changes made in either system automatically sync, eliminating discrepancies between the ATS and CRM. 

PRO TIP: Berlan was pretty outspoken about how critical this two-way integration is. “I spoke to some customers who had purchased Phenom but not the two-way integration. I'm not sure how you're supposed to make that work, because you then get a discrepancy between what's happening in your ATS and what's happening in your CRM, which is an interesting challenge. Don't do that. If you do purchase [Phenom], buy that two-way integration.”

Related: See how Sleep Number Maximizes their talent tech ecosystem

Outcomes Matter Most

What does any of this have to do with drug discovery? Everything.

Unlike other HR domains where people are much more process-driven, outcome is what matters for UCB’s ultimate stakeholders — their patients. Remember, a huge amount of traffic was originally invisible to TA. Leads couldn’t be seen. And people who hadn't completed the application flow disappeared too. The company would simply lose half its candidates.

And today? Well, the situation is a lot brighter. 

A seamless SAP Integration with UCB’s new Phenom Career Site, Talent CRM, and automation tools resulted in 75% faster job application completion times (less than five minutes). Not only that, recruiters have a much-improved experience sourcing candidates. UCB’s career site gets about a million hits a year, which then converts to about 100,000 fully completed applications. From there about 2,000 roles are filled, with 25% from internal mobility.

“With a funnel that size, there are enough good candidates coming in all the time that I always know I'm going to find winners,” Berlan said. Because of the sheer numbers and the automated yet hyper-personalized recruitment marketing capabilities UCB now has at its disposal through Phenom Talent Marketer Experience, they can engage the right people where they are. 

The TA team knows this because they can build campaigns and landing pages and put candidates through the campaigns into landing pages. UCB is building talent pools, significantly reducing the time to source. With some of the campaigns that have been run so far, it takes on average between 24 and 25 days to identify winning candidates. With a properly run campaign and the marketing that goes with it, that goes down by half to about 12 days. 

“Twelve days for a hiring manager in Europe is incredible,” Berlan said. “And we're only talking about the winners here,” he stressed. “Anybody can go out and find a candidate in five minutes and say ‘Oh, look, I've got a CV.’ I'm really only talking about people who we eventually hire.”

Finding those winners in less than two weeks is all the more remarkable considering the impact: Achieving this kind of outcome at scale means hiring the right people faster so they’re working for patients sooner. “And that's everything about what we want to do,” Berlan said.

Related: Hear directly from Jonathan Berlan and SAP’s Donald Ross

What’s Next?

With the application stream challenge solved, UCB is looking now to improve internal mobility further. On any given day there are between 300-500 open roles around the world, so the opportunities are there. But just because they exist doesn’t necessarily mean the mechanisms are in place for employees to pursue them.

“They just haven't prepared for the opportunities and the opportunities are not right for what they're prepared for,” Berlan said. “So what we're going to be doing as a next step is to build that career growth path.”

Also on the horizon? Even stronger KPIs. “At the moment we can do extraordinary things on our time to source,” said Berlan. And by considering all talent stakeholders’ experiences, “I firmly believe that we can halve our time to hire.” Every efficiency gained, after all, is a promise kept to those who need UCB most.

Want to dive deeper? Book a demo to learn more about the Phenom HRIT Experience and the seamless integrations we offer.