Case study: How GroupM achieved a 93% job offer acceptance rate

Implementing a new recruitment platform is never easy, however this gold winner of the Best Recruitment Technology at the Asia Recruitment Awards, Singapore proves that when done right, the organisation can reap many benefits including improving candidate experience.

Across its portfolio, GroupM recruits up to 2,500 new hires in a single year.

Before 2014, GroupM’s regional recruitment was done traditionally with candidates sending in resumes via email, and recruiters struggling to arrange for and conduct interviews in the most time and cost-effective way.

With everything done manually, efficiency of time and resources was at its lowest. Additionally, security concerns meant cloud services could not be used, hindering communication and record keeping. This severely slowed down the recruitment process and resulted in a poor and long-winded candidate experience.

Something needed to change, and fast, for recruiters to manage the process in the most time and cost-effective way.

The solution? Jobvite. A recruiting platform designed for the social web that saw the number of job applications shooting to about 100 for every vacancy, earning GroupM Asia Pacific the gold award for Best Recruitment Technology at the Asia Recruitment Awards, Singapore.

The spark behind the idea came when GroupM’s regional recruiters, who are based in Singapore but supporting hiring efforts over 14 markets, were bogged down by a lot of manual work.

The objective of Jobvite, thus, was to automate the recruitment process by bringing in all resumes digitally, while enabling recruiters to schedule interviews through the system, and to cut down on the time spent per candidate.

The implementation also had its sights on improving the candidate experience – making sure they could access authentic, accurate and relevant information about the company and the role.

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Once Jobvite went live in Singapore, two training programmes were carried out – for hiring managers and employees.

Hiring managers were trained on how to navigate the system, while employees were taught how to set up their accounts so they could instantly share open positions on their personal social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Collaboration was key, with the HR and talent acquisition team working closely with the IT team, which provided on-the-ground back-end support, while HR worked on getting buy-in from agency leads, and ensuring employees and hiring managers attended the training sessions.

Did the implementation go according to plan? Of course not, with every change, there’s bound to be some resistance.

However, GroupM already anticipated this challenge, and intentionally staggered the implementation to minimise resistance, and help identify gaps or training needs.

Doing so, it managed to make sure each consecutive market experienced a smoother and more effective implementation.

Jobvite’s implementation saw a strong increase in hires, an increase in Facebook engagement (more than 300,000 total page likes), impressive offer-to-acceptance percentage ratios – with 93% accepting the offer and significant recruitment savings.

Today, just a handful of jobs are hired outside of Jobvite, as more employees continue to activate their Jobvite accounts, pointing to the success of this recruitment technology.

Michael Wright, head of talent acquisition for GroupM APAC, praised the efforts of his team in the achievement.

"We’ve been very smart in investing in the right processes and systems to help us further and strengthen our recruitment efforts in Asia," he said.

"But that said, I also need to recognise the efforts of our IT, HR and talent teams, who tirelessly helped roll out the systems in their individual markets – no easy feat in a region as diverse as Asia."

Key lessons learnt:

• Carry out training programmes for hiring managers and employees to train them on how to navigate the system and set up accounts.
• Collaboration is key, especially with the IT team.
• Stagger the implementation to minimise resistance and help identify gaps or training needs.

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

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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