- Challenge: The lack of a central portal in which all talent acquisition team members and hiring managers could work from and use to analyze recruiting performance and progress hindered GroupM from gaining valuable and actionable insights into their TA efforts and empower them to make data-backed changes to their hiring approach.
- Solution: Jobvite now helps GroupM’s talent team — and other hiring stakeholders — can better understand their recruitment efficiency, discover where candidates tend to drop off, learn how long it typically takes to fill open roles, and glean insights into numerous other elements of their TA strategy — all of which help drive and regularly enhance their data-driven recruiting efforts.
- Results: On the tactical side of recruiting operations, GroupM drove down its average time to hire to just 29 days using Jobvite ATS and CRM. Bigger picture, our applicant tracking system has helped Group with continuous candidate engagement and to streamline their TA workflows so they can ensure seamless hiring cycles that lead to quickly closed requisitions and strong hires.
GroupM is one of the largest media companies in the world. A global market leader in advertising, odds are one in every three ads you’ve seen was created by one of their agencies.
Based in the UK and made up of a conglomerate of different companies, GroupM is responsible for hiring across brands, mobilizing talent and creating careers for employees within its walls.
In looking for a new applicant tracking system, the most important thing for GroupM’s business was to mobilize talent through one central portal.
“Our previous recruitment systems and processes were not best placed to match our business requirements,“ says Jennifer Gabrielle-Chapman, Group Talent Manager for GroupM.
“With a new system, we needed our hiring team to be able to leverage the ATS functionality in order to reduce the administrative parts of our roles,” Jennifer continued. “As we rolled out Jobvite internally, it provided better transparency for the recruiting team.”
Specifically, Jennifer relayed how her talent acquisition team could see when candidates dropped off, predict how long it would take to fill a job, and provide more clarity to hiring managers and other stakeholders as to why it’s hard to fill certain roles using Jobvite.
In looking for a new ATS, Jennifer and her team needed help sourcing candidates for notoriously hard-to-fill roles and managing their increasingly high volume of applications.
“Our industry in the UK is very candidate-short and it is increasingly more difficult to find candidates with specific media experience,” said Jennifer. “Being able to re-target talent from previous applications is crucial. We are fortunate to receive significant interest in our company from candidates.”
All in all, Jennifer said having one central hiring system “enables us to keep in contact with former candidates across our operating companies, evaluate their suitability for a variety of roles and screen hundreds of new applications a week is necessary in order to maximize our talent pool.”
GroupM sees better candidate engagement and more seamless workflows using Jobvite
With Jobvite ATS and CRM, the GroupM team has found the greatest value in its ability to navigate the talent pool, manage application volume and discover new hiring insights through Jobvite data.
“Jobvite has allowed us to share the work we do in one place so that our team can work seamlessly together anytime, anywhere,” according to Jennifer.
“We have the tech to support the agile working environment we need,” Jennifer continued. “We were able to say goodbye to having a list of names on an Excel spreadsheet. Now we’re able to work from any office, anywhere around the world using the same platform: on demand.”
The GroupM recruiting team’s agile working environment has proved successful. With 30 full-time recruiters across EMEA, GroupM’s average time to hire is now just 29 days.
With such beloved brands and a great reputation in the working world, it’s no wonder the company’s talent pool is constantly growing. In order to find the perfect candidates for open roles company-wide, GroupM prioritizes building a career rather than just filling a job.
“Our ability to sort through, organize, and re-engage with our talent pool is vital,” said Jennifer. “Part of why we focus on re-engaging with past candidates is we believe our role in recruiting is about creating careers with us. We want to see where a candidate’s best fit is across different teams.”
Jobvite empowers GroupM’s recruiters to build strong relationships with candidates
Beyond filling a given job, Jennifer added it’s a “two-way street where we’re in it together with the candidates — a partnership — in which we find the best fit for the person as well as our business.
“Just because someone didn’t get the first job they applied to, doesn’t mean they won’t have a great career here,” Jennifer explained. “Someone genuinely wanting to be a part of the GroupM journey is as important to us as having the right skills.”
Aside from finding the right talent, part of recruiting is continuously learning and leveraging insights from data to inform more strategic business decisions. The advanced talent reporting functions in Jobvite allows for the GroupM team to have more transparency into past strategies and progress.
“I’m a huge advocate for data,” said Jennifer. “You can’t hire effectively without it and both our internal clients and candidates lean on us and our data for transparency. We can craft a detailed strategy behind our hiring decisions rather than being reactive.”
With the native talent analytics capabilities in Jobvite, Jennifer added her team can now “pull weekly data reports showing the activity across our operating companies, resource management within our talent team, be ahead of the curve for seasonal peaks and troughs, placement data and hires closed off in each week — the list goes on.”
Data centralization in Jobvite helps GroupM’s talent team be transparent about progress
For GroupM, media strategy and data are at its core.
The Jobvite platform enables Jennifer and her talent team to echo that same message into all functions of their work. Centrally housed content enables the team to quickly find candidates and the flexibility to scale recruiting efforts based on the individual team and role.
“There’s no way you can run a modern talent division without a powerful ATS,” said Jennifer. “Businesses require transparency, in any sector. Jobvite lets us see into every aspect of our process: from our external branding and employer brand to more concrete business metrics like time to hire.”
Talent can be a stressful role to be in, Jennifer admitted. But, if a TA team is running high volume and demanding talent strategies all year round without the support of their tech, there’s only so much the best recruiter can do without the support of an ATS, she noted.
“It’s essential to invest in a platform that alleviates the administrative pressure to your team,” according to Jennifer. “It will allow a higher team output and ultimately, a more rewarding role for your team to play in securing the best Talent for your business.”
During the cyber-attack on WPP in 2017, Jobvite provided GroupM with the ability to communicate with candidates despite some core systems being offline, a true embodiment of the continuous candidate engagement GroupM is committed to and that Jobvite enables for their recruiters.
“It was an unexpected curveball where a lot of our day to day systems such as email were not available to us,” said Jennifer. “Jobvite however, was still up and running, and we were able to reach candidates and keep momentum in the recruitment process.
“Without Jobvite, we would not have been able to have kept our Talent strategies in place and most importantly, access our recruitment data and update our candidates accordingly,” Jennifer added.
Jobvite acts as “bedrock” of GroupM’s talent acquisition technology stack and TA strategy
The value of Jobvite for GroupM transcends the day-to-day functionality.
Jennifer sees a quality ATS like Jobvite as an asset in the transforming role of TA and a set of tools for HR teams to differentiate their work as the role of automation in recruiting develops.
“The use of AI in the talent industry will continue to change our roles in the next 5-10 years,” said Jennifer. “Jobvite understands that and automates a lot of the groundwork, such as managing data or confirming interview details. This allows our talent team to be more client facing and focus on the aspects of our work that requires nuance and human interaction.”
Jennifer noted how any successful talent organization needs “a strong system, a bedrock you can rely on,” in order to execute, optimize, and improve their recruiting processes and hiring efforts.
And that means an applicant tracking system like Jobvite with powerful ATS functionality, advanced candidate relationship management capabilities, and out-of-the-box talent analytics.
“You need the data in place in order to progress your team forward,” said Jennifer. “You can’t run a future-proof talent program through email and Excel. You need to effectively use your team and invest in their development by providing them with the right tools that make their jobs easier.”
