Large distribution facility opens with high-volume hiring event success

Challenges

Assessing the scale

The U.S. leading medical distributor was positioned to successfully open a new facility on time and fully staffed with over 200 new employees. The company accomplished this through two hiring events, powered by programmatic advertising and delivered in partnership with Cielo.

The distributor’s new location is in remote eastern Pennsylvania and is expected to be one of its highest revenue-earning locations. Cielo’s High Volume RPO solution and dedicated team of experts helped the company meet its initial hiring goal, and created a repeatable process to support future high-volume hiring needs.

The success of the launch depended on being fully staffed with critical warehouse-related roles. Before building the strategy, Cielo completed a detailed analysis of the geographic market and existing talent pool. The company competes with large organizations in the area for the same type of talent, including well-known consumer brands. Paired with a 3.9% national unemployment rate, that made gathering and analyzing real-time labor data including talent supply, salary ranges and an average time to fill an important step in the process.

Cielo’s market analysis revealed a low talent supply, with 50% more posted jobs than active candidates in the market; 60% of the desired roles took more than 30 days to fill.

Solutions

Fresh approaches to attract top talent

Cielo recommended moving quickly to execute massive hiring events and flood the market with direct, tailored advertising to drive awareness and instant action. Using the programmatic advertising component of Cielo’s high-volume hiring solution, the team pushed geo-targeted ads to the most popular websites and social media among the target audience to drive candidate awareness and interest in the jobs and events.

Knowing that lack of engagement can lead to higher dropout rates, the team launched digital advertising with text-to-apply seven days before the event to minimize candidate dropout and maximize brand exposure.

AI and powerful algorithms optimized the distribution of the job ads to generate on average five times more candidates than standard online ads, improving the digital advertising ROI. The pre-event advertising strategy engaged over 1,200 interested candidates.

With talent in such high demand, today’s candidate has little patience for a cumbersome online experience. The medical distributor and Cielo created a quick, seamless process for capturing candidate interest and information directly from the hiring ads. With the High Volume RPO solution, candidates could click on an ad or send a text that would then allow them to complete a short assessment and self-schedule an in-person interview.

The team designed the on-site events to move pre-qualified candidates through the interview process quickly into on-site drug screens and instant contingent offers. Additionally, walk-in candidates could complete the short assessment and schedule a same-day interview. A speedy interview-to-offer process is necessary to minimize losing candidates to other opportunities. SHRM’s Talent Acquisition Benchmark Survey shows it takes an average of 13 days to conduct interviews and make a final decision. With this process, all that happened within an average of one hour.

Results

Improved candidate experience yields glowing results

According to Appcast, only 9% of applicants that start an online application finish it. The mobile-first application process used for these hiring events had just three steps from interest to apply, driving over 460 qualified candidates to schedule an interview before the events with an average application completion rate of almost 77%.

The results of improvements to the advertising process and candidate experience were impressive: 72% of candidates showed up for their scheduled interview, compared to the more typical 50% no-show rates. As validation of the quality candidates processed through the mobile application pre-screening and assessment, high show rates and supplemental walk-in traffic, the team extended 234 offers between the two events, an interview-to-offer ratio of 1.5:1, compared to the industry benchmark of 3.5:1.