The WonderLeon Awards

Scaling Stories: Talentsoft

What do we do? Talentsoft is the European leader in cloud-based Talent Management Software

With an average of 30% growth, recruitment of new talent is key for Talentsoft. Last year, we were in need of 200 new hires for the year…to be tackled by 3 recruiters only. Moreover, we were mostly looking for rare profiles (HRIS project managers and product owners) as well as highly coveted ones (Developers, DevOps, etc.). Our recruiting team was drowning under the amount of work and needed to find a way to cope quickly.

The Little Stories Behind the Scaling Story

One example of this situation was the dire need for Customer Care managers for our team in the Netherlands. We decided that the best way was to collaborate more closely with the hiring managers.
We split the profiles into two categories, following two different recruitment processes: the “Readyto-wear” vs “taylormade” or “haute couture”.

The ready-to-wear was designed for easier-tofill jobs, high-volume ones and internships. In this process, the manager is in charge of most of the recruitment steps: profile screening, prequalification calls, setting up the interviews… and is supported by the HR team for the most important ones (such as contract negotiation). Thus, our recruiters saved time and energy and put their sourcing skills on “taylormade processes” or “haute couture roles” for high level profiles, difficult to find.
To facilitate cooperation with the managers and to empower them, we did an easy choice : use our own product “Hello Talent”, to share talent pools and communicate. This solution had several added values:

• Our managers already knew it well and were quick to adopt it for their own needs,
• They did not need additional training thanks to its user-friendly and intuitive features,
• The mobile app allowed the managers to screen profiles and comment them from anywhere at any time. We also created a recruitment toolbox to share best practices on first contact emails, calls, etc. And we used gamification to make sure that everyone would jump on board quickly. We saw immediate results in the time allocation for the recruitment team, but also:
• Decrease in time-to-hire, a 50% decrease in time to fill ready-to-wear jobs. For our team in the Netherlands, we managed through this process to hire 5 rare profiles in less than 3 weeks (which would have taken double the time usually).
  Engaging managers in the recruiting process, which also meant a better fit for new hires. More candidates were confirmed after their trial period. By empowering our hiring managers, we optimized our recruiting resources and process, but we also obtained a better candidate experience.

4 values are key at Talentsoft to engage the international teams to imagine this solution:

CO-CREATION FIRST because involving a diverse range of people leads to innovation. We asked our international People Team to check our solution with local managers in order to adapt it.

BE BOLD because a sound solution is always better than a perfect plan. We iterated (continuously) with the international teams in order to improve the process.

TEAM CONVERSATION IS OUR CURRENCY because talking together and asking for help and ideas is the best way to get to the bottom of things quick. The success came from the changes we made after having (a lot) discussed with the People Team.

POSITIVE WORKING EXPERIENCE FOR ALL because a workplace must be inclusive and open success to everyone. We trained the managers in charge of recruitment on the “Hello Talent” tool and shared new ways of working.
Now, we can say that we are proud because our values are mirrored within our solutions. The People team is successful, setting new records, hiring the right Talentsoftees and placing them in the right places. Our own tool is adopted company wide, identifying best practices to support our HR strategy. Giving us the confidence that we can increase our recruitment capacity wherever we are implemented.

Key Learnings & Anecdotes

If you have the same issue as ours with a high volume of recruitment in a relatively short period of time, do not hesitate to involve your managers and go for the “Ready to Wear” approach.

Why? Because you’ll gain in performance and efficiency on 5 different points:

• Time-to-fill, as the manager is involved in the process, the time to fill the position will drop versus a “traditional” approach. We succeeded to hire 5 profiles in only 3 weeks.
• Time saving, you’ll be able to re-allocate your time for “top-notch” and “hard to find” profiles, where recruiters have true expertise.
• Team involvement, your managers will be part and owner of the process. And they’ll tend to add other colleagues in the loop to validate the fit with the applicant, creating a broad engagement of the team.
• Pre-onboarding & integration, this period does not start from the 1st day of an employee. The pre-onboarding starts at the first contact with your company. At the end of the recruitment process the manager himself will call the candidate. That’s the first integration step.
• Candidate experience, at the first call, the candidate talks directly to the manager, and can ask any question about the position. That’s something unique to help your employer branding and improve the candidate experience.
Have you ever tried to catch a purple squirrel with your bare hands? Note: It is a metaphor used by recruiters to identify the unrealistic expectations of a hiring manager. Now imagine catching five of them at the same time.

Well you might need very nice bait to seduce them and that’s exactly what we did with our job offer. We decided to go for an offbeat job description with humor to attract candidates. It makes us different from our competitors, and moreover it’s a prefilter for candidates who will fit our culture: two birds with one stone.

Here are some examples of what we did to capture candidates’ attention:

“Fasten your seatbelt because you made the right choice by clicking on us! We prefer to tell you right away that you can go ahead and close all your opened LinkedIn, Monster, Stepstone and Indeed tabs because we can offer you exactly what you’ve been looking for”

“You must have a Rubik’s Cube (problem solver!)”

“You must master Windows 98 (*joke*)”

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