How This Top Retailer Stays Ahead of Peak Hiring Waves

The Challenge

A leading international company that began as a single store is now one of APAC’s largest general merchandise retailers. How they’re maintaining that presence, of course, comes down to their people — placing critical emphasis on effective and efficient talent acquisition and management strategies for their volume and non-volume roles.

In 2018, the company’s TA team planned a career site overhaul so that they could improve the front-end candidate experience and more easily put their employer brand in front of job seekers.

The team also wanted more autonomy when it came to showcasing their open roles, employer values, culture, events, and other career information.

Instead of relying on agencies for simple career site updates, “we wanted to be able to upload and manipulate content in a snap,” said their HR Lead of Talent Acquisition.

Another major goal? To better manage internal mobility. “We had systems in place at the time, but they weren’t designed for us to see what skills employees had and what roles they might be suited for. Our tools weren’t fostering a great experience for anybody,” she said.

The Solution

At the suggestion of a previous vendor, the company’s TA team explored the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform and invested in its “one-stop shop” solution. With all the features they were looking for and more, the platform had the capabilities to achieve both their external and internal talent goals.

At the time, COVID was shaking up the industry, and the company was undergoing a major reorg affecting thousands of employees across store networks and office support. Teams were being restructured and streamlined, job titles were changing, and new roles were being created.

This perfect storm of challenges, however, presented an opportunity for the company to start their transformation into a more agile way of working using their Phenom tools in new and creative ways.

Enhanced talent mobility and employee communication
Their Phenom Talent Marketplace — intended to encourage employees to apply for open internal positions and discover professional development opportunities — was first used as a convenient way to streamline all employee re-org information into one central content hub, accessible through an employee portal.

Thanks to the Phenom CMS, the team could easily create everything they needed in-house. From engaging pages on key business areas and new team structure maps to job descriptions complete with informative videos, staff could better understand changes and visualize potential opportunities, qualification requirements, and career paths.

On the back-end, recruiters and talent managers using the Phenom CRM gained much needed visibility into employee skills, interests, and potential career moves to better source for internal jobs and offer a more dynamic employee experience.

“The flexibility of Phenom lets us experiment with different approaches to internal mobility and elevate our employees as our best source of talent,” their HR Lead of TA said. “We want to give our employees as many resources as possible to succeed with the company.”

And whether it’s inviting them to internal learning and development courses or sending them weekly tips and tricks, their Talent Marketplace — used in tandem with Phenom Campaigns — lets the team automate targeted, relevant, and timely communications for increased engagement and satisfaction.

An improved candidate experience and more efficient processes
Given its variety of high-volume and seasonal roles, the company’s focus on external hiring can never slow down either, making their Phenom Career Site essential to attracting talent with personalized job recommendations, dynamic content, and a quick apply process.

Meanwhile, campaigns provide major efficiencies when it comes to inviting early talent to events, and then nurturing and converting them with targeted seasonal drip campaigns to stay ahead of peak hiring waves.

With real-time hiring insights from Phenom Talent Analytics, the team can also confidently make more data-driven decisions for both external and internal talent.

Career site traffic and interactions with landing pages, net promoter scores, source of traffic, and campaign performance — as well as employee engagement indicators like talent marketplace sign ups, profile completions, and time on page — are all indispensable to optimization efforts as they aim to give all candidates more of what they want to prevent applicant drop-off.

The Results

With the holistic nature of the Phenom platform, the company has been able to move away from the inefficiencies of disparate systems and stay competitive in a tough market.

Now the team can push out significantly more hyperpersonalized content to external and internal talent — and both are taking notice. “We’ve added authentic, relevant images and video and have had great results despite a tough talent market,” their HR Lead of TA said, citing an 18% increase in career site visits YOY and a time-on-site increase of more than two minutes.

Phenom Campaigns was also a critical success factor in the company’s seasonal recruitment for their holiday peak. “We ran a social media campaign with a CTA sending applicants to a specifically created landing page. Overall, we saw a page view increase of 52% when compared to the month before due to this marketing push. That’s amazing,” she said.

Meanwhile, employees within the company continue to learn and love their Talent Marketplace. Nearly 8,000 of them — 75% of the workforce — have signed up, and popular pages have garnered an outstanding 12-minute on-page average with multiple return visits.

• 50%

  Hires from Career Site

• 18%

  Increase in career site visits YOY

• 126%

  Increase in time spent on career site

• 12%

  Hires from Talent Marketpace

• 8,000

  Employee sign ups (Talent Marketplace)

• 12 minute

  On-page average (Talent Marketplace)

The Future

Moving forward, the company is trialing additional Phenom products to further support their goals.

There’s more in store for internal employees, as well. The company is adding Phenom Gigs and Phenom Career Pathing to empower their people to identify their next internal career move, see the skills required to get there, and enable them to browse and apply for cross-departmental projects to get hands-on experience in new areas.

“The team has noticed that over the years, Phenom’s products and features have properly adapted to fit exactly what we need,” their HR lead of TA said. “We’ve renewed Phenom for a reason — because it’s working.”