Significantly Reducing Time-to-Hire at GE Energy

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, GE Energy provides a diverse portfolio of product and service solutions and deep industry expertise to help its customers solve their challenges locally. With more than 100,000 employees in more than 100 countries, GE serves the energy sector with technologies in such areas as natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear energy; wind, solar, biogas and water processing; energy management; and grid modernization. It also offers integrated solutions to serve energy and water-intensive industries such as mining, metals, marine, petrochemical, food & beverage and unconventional fuels.

THE CHALLENGE
As a global company operating in a range of niche sectors, GE Energy needed to source and engage with passive candidates in order to feed future demand for staff. At the same time, it wanted to further build its employer brand by delivering the best candidate experience. However, GE was finding that, as the company was growing tremendously over a very short period of time, it was unable to hire staff fast enough to ensure that critical roles were filled quickly. Consequently, the organization needed a partner it could trust to flex and scale quickly in order to address the changing business needs.

While building a substantial talent pool for sustainable business growth was vital, there was also a need to understand and increase the sourcing channels for passive candidates. In order to build the business case for bringing in a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider, the team at Cielo identified several key success indicators:

• Introducing an approach that would focus on quality over quantity of hires to ensure the business has the top talent for future growth. This would be particularly important when identifying and engaging with passive candidates with ideal skills.
• As the business was expanding rapidly, GE was keen to mitigate the risk of inadequate talent pools through access to market intelligence ahead of a move into new sectors or geographies.
• In order to provide a clear return on the company’s investment, it was key that a reduction in time to and cost per hire were clear

THE SOLUTION
Cielo was brought on board to manage recruitment at GE Energy, enhance the employer branding profile on and offline, develop a strategic workforce plan and build a passive pipeline for the future fuelled by talent communities. These talent communities were also important for external benchmarking of internal talent pipelines and overall succession planning. In order to build these communities, Cielo implemented a three-phase approach:

• Phase One: Research. Before introducing any RPO strategy the first stage focused on identifying the critical roles, highlighting where any gaps were, and understanding what type of talent was needed and where it was located.
• Phase Two: Engagement. Following identification of these talent pools, segmented communities with similar skills and interests were formed. Targeted communications were then rolled out to each group, with two-way conversations encouraged to create community engagement.
• Phase Three: Conversion. By the final stage, GE Energy had a community that was regularly conversing through multiple, integrated communications channels. It was in a position to tap into its talent pools to fill current and future critical
  roles quickly.

During each of these stages a consistent employer branding message was, and continues to be, used through targeted communications channels, including social media. In order to improve the quality of hires, a recruitment academy was launched to ensure HR and hiring managers were trained on hiring excellence.

THE RESULTS
Through the development of these talent communities and market intelligence, GE Energy now has a clearer indication as to where candidates are coming from. Employer branding activity has created a clear, positive message that is reaching both active and passive candidates on and offline. The social media channels used to communicate with the talent pools have also seen a massive increase:

• Facebook – from 854 ‘Likes’ to 5,034
• Twitter – from 1,466 followers to 2,776
• YouTube – 15 videos focused on careers at GE Energy with 56,221 views
• LinkedIn – 70,358 people following the GE Energy company page; 5,640 members in the GE Energy Europe Careers group

Success – GE Energy rated as the 9th best company in Europe using social media for recruitment by HR Top 100.

Time-to-hire has also improved and, in some instances, is down to 43 days, a key success factor for hard-to-fill roles.