Case study: How Cargill cut the time taken to fill a position by 4 days

Before 2011, Cargill, a company that provides food, agriculture, financial and industrial products and services, had a recruitment process in Singapore and its Asia Pacific offices that was decentralised and fragmented.

It was not aligned across businesses nor standardised at a global or regional level.

Cargill’s recruitment function faced significant challenges delivering well on three of its key measurements – client satisfaction, service effectiveness and cost efficiency.

The team took on the challenge to ensure:

• client satisfaction through a stronger sourcing capability.
• clarity with the recruitment structure, and local and regional connectivity.
• service effectiveness with the adoption of technology for process alignment and efficiency.
• cost efficiency with the development of candidate pools.

In 2011, a global project team comprising leads from all four regions and stakeholders from the businesses was set up. Cargill’s Singapore office, took a leading role for the APAC region.

The team developed a new global process, introduced clear governance and reporting and adopted CEB’s talent advisor model to enhance the recruiters’ ability to be strategic business partners.

A stronger candidate pool was available through an enhanced in-house sourcing capability. New roles such as talent sourcing and researchers were also identified to hone sourcing expertise.

Taleo, a key technology enabler, was also implemented. The well-planned execution exercise ensured a successful launch in Singapore and subsequent introduction to the rest of APAC in 2014.

A proper support structure with Taleo super-users, who conducted regular calls, was implemented along with a hyper-care period after the programme went live to suit all time zones.

Country specific meetings were hosted prior to in-person training to understand the current processes and identify gaps.

Clear communication reinforced the importance of the project and aligned it with the overall recruitment strategy for the smooth and seamless introduction.

To deal with the challenges such as slow internet connection in some countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia, other infrastructure teams were engaged to upgrade the network.

Within eight months, the project was a success. The teams had all the systems in place for an enhanced recruitment process.

More importantly, they used 17% less budget and the project was completed on time.

"The ability of the HR team to understand and meet their clients’ needs, strategise and devise the most effective solutions has always been critical to an organisation. There is a real war on talent out there and we need to be on our toes to identify and recruit the right people that fit the right profile, culture and skills," said Manish Verma, Cargill Asia Pacific’s HR leader.

The increased collaboration with the business, a better understanding of needs, the adoption of the best possible channels to recruit the most suited candidates, along with technology, brought about improved results.

Cargill is now able to track the key metrics of its recruitment efforts, allowing data-driven discussions at a strategic level with key stakeholders, hiring managers and business HR leaders.

At the same time, the new strategy helped improve the firm’s client satisfaction, reduce the median time taken to fill a position (from 48 days in 2013/14 to the current YTD 44 days in 2015/16) and reduce significant hiring costs.

On top of that, the new strategy also helped Cargill bag the silver award for Best Recruitment Technology as well as the gold award for Best Regional Recruitment Programme (In-House) at the Asia Recruitment Awards, Singapore.

"Through Taleo we have significantly improved our recruitment process standardisation and achieved more visibility into our hiring metrics, resulting in an increased hiring manager satisfaction score," said Tai-Kit Hua, Cargill Asia Pacific’s talent recruitment lead.

"In the future, there will be opportunities to develop an integration strategy and implementation plan on Taleo’s integration to our data management system as well as other applications. These efforts can help us provide significant long-term value to our stakeholders."

This case study is one of the three best practice cases included in the Digital Recruitment feature – other organisations include GroupM, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and Amcor.

For a step-by-step guide to implementing your very own digital recruitment programme and to have a look at the other case studies, read the full feature here.

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