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From enhancing both the candidates’ and hiring managers’ experience through technologies, to conducting an annual graduate recruitment for a continuous pipeline of next-generation talent, here’s a peak at Ericsson’s award-winning recruitment strategy.
The recent Asia Recruitment virtual awards ceremony that concluded on 24 July in Singapore crowned over 72 gold, silver, bronze and individual winners across 26 categories. Amongst all the spectacular entries, Ericsson MOAI was shortlisted by our honorary jury members as a finalist for five categories they entered including Best Graduate Recruitment Programme, Most Successful Recruitment Referral Scheme and Best Regional Recruitment Strategy, Most Innovative Recruitment Strategy - In-house, and Best Use of Recruitment Technology Tools.
Urvi Jobalia, Head of Talent Acquisition for Ericsson MOAI, tells Priya Veeriah about the firm’s approach to recruitment, which earned it three gold and two bronze accolades at this year’s awards.
Q What is your organisation's recruitment strategy, and how has it evolved in recent times? How does this agenda fit into the bigger HR priorities, and do you work closely with the CEO for this?
At Ericsson, our recruitment strategy is vital to ensure we recruit talent that supports Ericsson’s future success and our continued technology leadership. Our goal is to attract the best talent, supporting competence development and enabling a work culture that supports our people to bring out the best version of Ericsson.
Our recruitment strategy has evolved over the last 12 months with revisions including:
- Diversity and inclusion goals to address gender and generational imbalances in our employee community, i.e. through targeted social media campaigns and recruitment marketing campaigns.
- Enhancing our candidate and hiring manager experiences with technologies which assist in our selection process, such as, Revelian gamified assessments, Textio augmented writing tool and Modern Hire video interviewing platform.
- Recruiting 100 graduates annually to create a continuous pipeline of next-generation talent.
- Building our team capability and understanding of our Ericsson business, for instance through Ericsson Unboxed sessions.
- Attracting the best talent to join Ericsson is part of our HR priorities to ensure we have future-ready talent, create a superior employee experience, embrace digital transformation and strive towards simplified ways of working.
- We've created our most recent recruitment strategy with the input and feedback from a variety of business stakeholders to ensure we have considered the impact of our goals and designed a process which supports great outcomes and experiences for all.
Q What were the key business drivers behind this strategy, and how have you executed it successfully?
At Ericsson, people are at the heart of everything we do. With that intent, our recruitment strategy has been designed to attract the best talent.
Awareness - Our career pages have genuine and authentic content about life at Ericsson including employee testimonials, our commitment to diversity and inclusion, blogs, people portraits and imagery of our employees. We showcase the work our team is doing to lead the way in technology innovation and connect the world.
Attraction - This is done through our careers social media accounts to connect with talent, where our content plan directly links to our employer value proposition – be the one who did via both organic and paid content.
Application - All our adverts and candidate communication templates have been created using the augmented writing tool, Textio, to achieve gender-neutral language and remove gender or generational bias. Every candidate who applies to Ericsson will experience a seamless application process which clearly outlines what to expect in each stage of the selection process.
Selection - Our selection process includes the use of Modern Hire, a video interviewing technology which enables candidates to schedule and complete interviews via smartphones, tablets and desktops and hiring managers to access feedback 24/7.
Hire - Our hiring process also includes issuing electronic contracts using DocuSign to reduce our carbon footprint.
We are driven towards technology leadership and our recruitment strategy is no exception.
Q No execution is free from unexpected hurdles. In what shape or form did you experience challenges, and how did you overcome them?
During 2020, we have not been unaffected by the impact of COVID-19 with our employees also asked to work from home with their safety being an absolute priority. At Ericsson, we have been quick to adapt our process to an end to end virtual format.
Our biggest hurdle came in the form of onboarding where, in highly affected areas, we were unable to courier laptops due to government shutdowns or restrictions. We were able to find a creative solution by creating light systems access which allowed new employees to access onboarding training remotely using their own device until an Ericsson new starter pack could be delivered to them.
To our candidates, this made a huge difference as we were able to reduce the impact on start dates and honour employment offers even during a global pandemic.
Q On to the most important part – results! How did you measure the ROI or milestones of this initiative, and what are you most proud of?
The impact of COVID-19 initially left our business concerned with our ability to attract and convert talent with so many uncertainties about the future of work. Being an essential service provider means our services are needed now more than ever and for me; it was an honour to reassure our business my team had the technology to support them and capability to continue to hire critical talent.
What I am most proud of is the experience we have delivered for our candidates and hiring managers. Creating great experiences also means executing them well and I am thrilled to announce through our post-hire survey results, our candidates rated us an average of 3.68/5 and our hiring managers rated us on average 4.08/5.
Q To tackle the changes happening in the world of work, it is now vital for companies to step up the pace of evolving their recruitment strategy. How is your team anticipating and easing in these far-reaching changes, rather than simply dealing with the consequences?
Investing in our recruitment technology stack and refining our recruitment process continues to be a priority for us. Innovative technologies in the recruitment field are constantly evolving our talent market landscape. This inspires me and my team to challenge our ways of working and the experiences we deliver.
Our goal for the remainder of 2020 is to re-assess the speed and impact of our process without compromising the quality of offers we extend. We have already started the journey to implement new candidate and hiring manager communication technologies which will give real-time feedback about the status applications.
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