Client Challenge
A leading global technology solutions company that employs over 4,000 Customer & Technical Support, IT & HR Shared Services, Manufacturing & Repair professionals in Manila, wanted to significantly expand their Philippines operations to support their business growth in North America.
With a large presence in Manila, they were looking to establish their expanded operations in a new location to diversify their footprint in the Philippines. The organisation selected Iloilo City, a metropolitan area 650km south of Manila with a population of 1 million, to be the location for their new operations. Building of the new centre commenced in July 2020 with a planned opening of January 2021. The centre would have a capacity for 2,000+ employees and the organisation planned to recruit 1,000+ hires in 2021.
Previously they used their in-house talent acquisition team based in Manila to support all Philippines recruitment. When considering the multiple challenges presented by the high volumes now required, alongside the limited timeframes for setting up support for a new location and the impact of COVID-19, they realised they would need additional support to successfully deliver their Iloilo high volume hiring needs.
Cielo’s Manila Delivery Centre had provided previous research support and market-mapping expertise whilst the organisation was considering Philippines locations and had impressed the Global Talent Acquisition Leader with their capabilities during a visit in early 2020. Subsequently, they approached Cielo to discuss a potential solution that could provide:
- End-to-end recruitment for their high volume hiring for their new centre in Iloilo City
- Exceptional candidate attraction, experience and engagement through a complex assessment process
- Flexible and scalable resource support locally in Iloilo City and in Manila
- Utilisation of additional technology where appropriate to supplement their existing applicant tracking system (ATS) and provide advanced reporting, forecasting and pipeline management capabilities.
The Solution
Cielo designed and implemented an innovative solution to augment the client’s existing ATS with a custom built ‘High Touch, Frequent Touch’ candidate relationship management (CRM) workflow in the Cielo TalentCloud tech platform. This CRM would help enhance candidate attraction efforts and lead the candidate through the complex assessment steps.
The Cielo TalentCloud augmentation allowed us to provide significant process automation and candidate self-service capabilities alongside a highly structured and comprehensive engagement strategy to ensure exceptional candidate experience. The Cielo TalentCloud process was designed to dovetail with the existing ATS processes to minimise duplication and to ensure structured provision of data which allowed advanced pipeline management, forecasting and daily operational dashboard reporting to be readily available.
The Cielo team consisted of local recruiters and coordinators based in Iloilo and representing our client’s brand via our We Become You® philosophy, who would move onsite once the facility was open. They were supported by specialists in Manila who would provide remote sourcing and administrative support and manage the candidate’s engagement through the complex virtual assessment process. This team structure enables incredible flexibility to meet changing demand as well as capability to meet the changing mix of virtual and face to face recruitment needs as the centre grows and COVID restrictions change.
The team utilised their extensive knowledge of the Philippines and Iloilo marketplace to create and implement a highly targeted sponsored social media and recruitment marketing plan. This dovetailed with the client’s Iloilo’s centre launch PR activities and enabled us to generate a healthy pipeline of candidates to be readily available for hiring manager interviews as soon as they were onsite locally.
The Results
Cielo designed, tested and successfully implemented the entire solution within 8 weeks of the initial discussions around the organisation’s needs. Over 1,000 applications were generated by the targeted campaign prior to launch with over 50 offers accepted in the first month itself, exceeding the targets set by the client.
The ‘High Touch, Frequent Touch’ engagement design has doubled the percentage of candidates successfully completing the assessment phase compared to the client’s earlier benchmarks, with the majority of candidates utilising the automation and self-service capabilities within Cielo TalentCloud for booking interviews.
The Iloilo Centre successfully opened in January 2021 with the induction course fill rate exceeding targets and new courses typically being filled 6 weeks in advance of their commencement. Given the success of this programme, it has been decided to accelerate the centre’s growth and significantly increase the target figures for the remainder of 2021.
