Winning Secrets: Aryan Solutions' tips for providing a great candidate experience

Vikram Shervani, Founder and CEO of Aryan Solutions reveals the company’s winning secrets that led to a gold trophy for the Best Candidate Experience - Solution Provider category at the Asia Recruitment Awards Singapore virtual ceremony.

The region’s most coveted and highly anticipated Asia Recruitment Awards 2020 concluded on 24 July with over 250 participants logging in virtually across Singapore. Gold, silver, bronze and individual winners were awarded across 26 categories.

In this exclusive piece, Vikram shares 6 elements of his winning strategy and the need for the human touch in the digitalisation process.

Q What is your organisation’s recruitment strategy, and how has it evolved in recent times?

We were never a brand focussed organisation but now we have developed a clear employer brand, which differentiates us from the competition and tells candidates as to why they should work with us. Most of our hiring came from referrals.

Our earlier job posting was about the skills and job scope but now our job postings are organised and professional and reflect the brand, values and culture of us and our clients for whom we hire professionals.

We had difficulty hiring millennials but with our presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. we are now able to attract and hire millennials for various projects.

We used to keep our data on excel, local drives and had difficulty tracking it. Over the last few years, we have built our own Applicant Tracking System – evo.ai - that helps us in full recruitment cycle and keep data safe and give us good analytics about what is going on.

We treat our candidates like our best customers and vice versa.

Q How does this agenda fit into the bigger HR priorities, and do you work closely with the CEO for this?

This agenda has fit very well into bigger HR priorities. Candidates hired are staying in the job for the long term, so the client has less attrition and thus saves a lot of cost on new hiring. We have also been working closely with the CEO level specially for the FinTech or other start-ups.

Q Share with us your winning recruitment strategy! What were the key business drivers behind this strategy, and how have you executed it successfully?

Our winning recruitment strategy is:

1. Investing in branding.
2. Having a long-term association with candidates whom we place. Some of them also became our future clients.
3. As a company, we always associate with clients who have long term projects and clear plans to hire and grow in the region. Whereas, we stay away from companies who believe in 'hire and fire' policy.
4. Open, transparent communication with our candidates and clients.
5. We work with candidates who are interested in career opportunity, learning, growth path, stability and long-term association with our clients etc.
6. We quality check roles with the hiring managers and make sure that their expectations are reasonable. We also guide them on topics such as the market and competition to help them attract and retain employees.

The key business drivers were:

1. Saving cost on hiring.
2. Lowering the attrition rate.
3. Increasing long term association with clients.
4. Repetitive business from the same client based on our performance.

We were able to execute it successfully. Some of our placed candidates are still working with our clients for so long, averaging at three years.

We had repetitive business from clients and our association with some clients have lasted for eight years and is still ongoing.

Q No execution is free from unexpected hurdles. In what shape or form did you experience challenges, and how did you overcome them?

Changing the mindset of EA team was very difficult as they looked at everything as a transaction or fees. They didn’t believe in long term association with the client, candidate or adhere to changes with the times.

We had to tell our team to look at some successful companies in a similar business and understand why they were so successful. This helped them to change their mindset and work as per the mission & vision of the company.

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?

We normally look at ROI over a period of one year on any client we work with.

For pre-placement, we look at how many CVs are sent, the number of interviews, number of offers, number of candidates signing the contract and starting the role offered.

For post-placement, we look how many of our candidates stayed for more than two years in the job, how many provide referrals, repetitive business from client and % of clients who are happy with our services.

Q It would be too simplistic to believe that digitalisation is the only game-changer when it comes to recruitment. What are some of the other key factors to take into consideration, going forward?

Digitalisation is and will play an important role in recruitment. For example, people used to spend hours and hours writing emails. But now, with automated templates, you can modify an existing email to suit your needs and this saves a lot of time, thus increasing productivity. It has also helped to automate follow up with the clients.

Digitalisation also has helped candidates to be aware of the stages they are in the process for the roles thus keeping them engaged.

We should not forget that we are in a business where human interaction is the primary key. Our business runs on trust, ethics and care. The human touch should always remain along with digitalisation. Only then we can “Deliver Excellence”.

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