BORDERLESS RECRUITMENT WITH DIGITAL

GE Conquers Global Recruiting and Revolutionizes Candidate

Experience through Innovation

Improving lives with innovation is the core value of GE. A multinational conglomerate, GE operates in over 160 countries worldwide and employs more than 300,000. One of the largest firms on the Fortune 500, GE operates across a number of sectors, including Energy, Capital Finance, Healthcare, Technology, Infrastructure, Industrial and Consumer. From energy management to aviation, GE is “building the world” by providing capital, expertise and infrastructure for a global economy.

“GE is one of the few truly global and diverse companies,” explains Shahbaz Alibaig, Recruitment Technology Manager – Talent Acquisition for GE’s Global HR Operations. “The complexity within the organization is huge. One size and one solution do not fit all areas of our business,” comments Alibaig.

Alibaig and his team strive to deliver world-class processes and technologies to support GE’s workforce on a global scale. Alibaig is responsible for identifying and strategizing recruiting platform strategies for GE. “I have two things top of mind: how can we make the recruitment process more efficient and how can we improve the candidate experience.”

Despite the complexity and diversity within GE’s businesses, Alibaig and his team are tasked with having readily available solutions for the vast variety of workforce challenges.

“I have to have a toolkit ready when the situation, opportunity or problem presents itself,” Alibaig explains.

“In general, we have used a traditional recruiting process at GE. We knew, however, that a typical phone screen was too time consuming and took up too many resources. In some of our businesses, we had a dedicated resource just to conduct phone screens. The time and cost were too high and we knew we wanted to innovate this process,” said Alibaig.

Alibaig continued, “We were also having challenges with multiple site visits for candidates. They were coming back and forth for onsite interviews on five or more occasions. It took too much time. Scheduling the interviews took up to 90 days or more if there were multiple interviewers involved. Many of them worked remotely so coordinating everyone getting in one place was drastically impacting interview cycle time.” The challenges also varied by location. “At one of our main US locations,

we have an onsite RPO provider onsite. They would set up a conference room dedicated to interviews. It took a lot of coordination and resources,” added Alibaig.

Recruiting globally was also a challenging process with an intricate geographical structure. “Let’s say you have a human resource manager responsible for the job in North America. The candidate is in the Middle East and the recruiter is in Europe. It’s extremely complicated to bring everyone together,” said Alibaig.

Recruiting Challenges Prior to Going Digital

TIME CONSUMING PHONE SCREENS

TRAVEL COORDINATION IMPACTING CYCLE TIMES

COORDINATION AND RESOURCES WITH RPO PROVIDERS

SCHEDULING INTERVIEWS TAKING 90+ DAYS

“We were attracted to digital recruiting initially as a way of reducing the travel cost we were spending on candidate travel by utilizing the live interview functionality. This is probably why many organizations consider this technology, but we’ve learned that there are so many more benefits to digital recruiting,” Alibaig comments.

Even with an initial focus on the live interview solution, Alibaig and his team quickly saw the potential with on demand interviews. The

ability to have pre-recorded questions sent to candidates to complete on their own time was compelling for high volume recruiting. By providing a video response, recruiters could quickly gauge their top candidates.

“Initially, we had an interest in on demand interviews for our leadership program for college recruits. We’ve since learned, however, that on demand is beneficial in almost all job segments, not just college recruiting. We are using on

Selection of a Digital Recruiting Solution

demand for finance, IT, call center, intern and even senior leadership hires.”

“Change management is not easy. Like many innovative technology breakthroughs – from text messaging to social networking, digital recruiting can be disruptive and initially met with resistance before quickly going

mainstream. To present the talent acquisition team with a new tool, it

has to be easy and intuitive. It’s my responsibility to

present a solution that is easy to demonstrate and use,

particularly to the hiring managers. HireVue was a clear choice with its ease

of use. We knew it would be a good fit for the hiring team,” comments Alibaig.

“Like many innovative technology breakthroughs – from

text messaging to social networking, digital recruiting can be disruptive and initially

met with resistance before quickly going

mainstream.”

GE is using HireVue in nearly 30 countries and that number continues to climb.

Going Global

One of the biggest successes GE has seen since going digital is with their global recruiting efforts.

“Now with digital recruiting, we truly have borderless recruiting. There are no limits to where our businesses can source and screen talent. If you work in the UK, you don’t have to limit yourself to UK candidates out of convenience,” comments Alibaig.

Anna Olech, an Internal Recruiter based in Poland has substantially increased her candidate reach beyond her borders.

“With HireVue, I was able to recruit globally to staff locally in Warsaw. We were looking for experienced engineers that just weren’t available in Poland. HireVue was a great, easy to use tool for us to interview candidates from India, Spain, Malaysia, and Mexico. Using HireVue was the only way we could have made this possible,” Olech explains.

SUCCESS METRICS & FEEDBACK

With GE’s hundreds of thousands of employees, 12 businesses and dozens of recruiting teams, the success they’ve seen with digital recruiting has been widespread across the globe among several recruiting teams.

“We’ve seen a significant reduction in phone screens and drastically reduced cycle times. I had a hiring manager tell me that with HireVue, she saved 80 hours of work for one requisition. In this particular instance, she had 40 phone screens she had to conduct, but instead, she opted to send them all an on demand interview instead. She loved the entire process, the ease, and the time savings and had over 90% of the candidates complete the interview. She initially thought the on demand interviews would give her enough information to decide who to move on to the next step, but actually found she could

make a final hiring decision based off of that interview,” said Alibaig.

A Senior Recruitment Consultant, recruits for high level offshore positions for GE Oil and Gas and Power and Water and has found a reduction in screening time by up to 50%.

“These are hard to fill positions, especially with candidates at job sites for weeks at a time. With HireVue, I was able to easily connect with and interview talent even while they were on a job site. I’ve reduced my screening time from 30 days to 15-20 days,” she explains, “It’s such a modern way to recruit and a huge time saver!”

50%

Candidate and Hiring Team Feedback

The use of digital recruiting has reinforced candidate’s perception of GE as a technology-led company.

“Our candidate feedback is extremely positive, and is reflected in our high Net Promoter Scores. Our NPS score is consistently in the 50’s and 60’s,” explains Alibaig, “Candidates can see that we aren’t a dinosaur and we have an innovative, engaging process.”

“As far as the hiring teams, their feedback has been positive from the start. This is a huge deal because technology is something we used to consistently get negative feedback on. Now the hiring managers are expecting this to be a part of their screening process,” said Alibaig.

HIRING TEAMS REPORT 35 – 50% REDUCTION IN SCREENING TIME

AND INCREASE IN QUALITY OF HIRE

Bringing People Together

“Bringing people together through innovation is at the foundation of GE as a company. By using digital recruiting, we’ve now brought our internal team together in a way we haven’t seen before. This technology lets recruiters share information across boundaries and businesses. It’s created an enormous sense of community internally,” concludes Alibaig.

From A to Z, the recruiting process is easier, faster, and more effective — turbocharged.

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