A global leader in long steel production with over 40,000 employees, entered into a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) partnership with Cielo to improve its overall talent acquisition strategy. One critical piece of the company’s strategy, aimed at overcoming the industry’s increased talent shortages, was its University Recruiting program. This program allows the company to engage with emerging talent and promote themselves as an employer of choice. Both the company and Cielo saw the opportunity to refresh the program to successfully compete for the next generation of leaders.
A new approach
Prior to the RPO partnership, this steel production leader’s University Recruiting events were decentralized, with each mill responsible for its own strategy, including event registration and management, resume review and offer extensions. This resulted in an inconsistent hiring process that put the bulk of the workload on business leaders. The talent acquisition team saw room for improvement and took comprehensive steps to centralize the process and provide more support to the mills while improving the candidate experience and overall results.
Impactful technology
The team streamlined communication with each university, providing a holistic picture of existing partnerships. Next, the team focused on implementing a technology system that could improve the on-site event experience for students while providing better visibility to hiring leaders through improved reporting capabilities. By using SkyRecruit, Cielo’s exclusive technology platform, the company eliminated the need for paper records of student attendance and printed resumes. Instead, all resumes and notes were captured at events via iPads. The steel producer also gained access to a single source of truth to view the ROI data from each event, allowing the team to determine which university hiring events overperformed in terms of offer extensions and accepts. Consultative conversations with leadership then discussed underperforming events and led to recommendations for narrowing the focus to save leadership time and money, without losing out on top talent.
The results
Since partnering with Cielo, the company has seen impressive developments across its University Recruiting program:
- Reduced amount of annual job fairs attended from 25 to 7 without decreasing the total number of new graduate hires
- Decreased time-to-fill by 40 days
- Delivered a 17% reduction in new graduate requisition aging
