About CBRE
CBRE is the world’s largest commercial real estate company with a presence in over 100 countries. To support their ever-growing global network they run a number of forward-thinking programs to engage with top talent.
A Vision for Recruitment Automation and Analytics
With an ambitious vision to double the size of their workforce over five years, in 2013 CBRE embarked on a journey to leverage Avature ATS and CRM to bolster their recruitment processes amongst teams in APAC. Over the following years, their approach grew in complexity as they built a 360-degree platform to evolve with a constantly-changing playing field. Their boldness was rewarded as they reaped a variety of benefits, such as improved reporting and candidate engagement.
The Avature rollout was an unmitigated success, not only significantly reducing recruiting costs, but also driving a major uptick in the quality of hire. To keep pace with their growth projections, CBRE’s business leaders recognized strategic areas in which they could harness Avature advancements in analytics and automation.
The Benefits of Automating Recruitment Processes
One of CBRE’s main concerns was seeing highly skilled TA professionals overwhelmed by time-consuming tasks, leaving them too straitjacketed to focus on key initiatives. To overcome this challenge, CBRE identified numerous opportunities to use Avature to build an automated recruitment strategy:
- Email & SMS Notifications: many candidate-facing communications and 100% of internal hand-offs were automated. SMS reminders helped increase interview completion rate by 30 percent.
- Reference Checking: by removing high-admin manual steps, such as coordinating with candidates and connecting with referees, CBRE saved their recruiters seven hours a week.
- Auto-populating Application Sourcing: by using the system to automatically capture the source of each application, CBRE not only saved their recruiters time, but also improved the integrity of data.
The Power of Data Analytics in Recruitment
CBRE also empowered their TA teams with a variety of tools to garner greater insight into the vast quantities of data they have at their fingertips. With in-depth, Avature-powered dashboards recruiters can immediately ascertain key information, without the need for weekly or monthly reports, enabling them to be proactive and plan requirements ahead of time.
This kind of forensic approach also facilitates better decision making, sometimes driving savings to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. When an online job board reached out with a proposal to drive more people to their career portal, CBRE were able to use their newfound ability to zero in on data to recognize that while the volume of the projected traffic was high, the quality of candidates was subpar.
These advancements in recruitment analytics are even helping CBRE drive greater diversity within the organization. For example, one major initiative is to fill more leadership positions with women. CBRE gauged the success of these targeted campaigns by tracking demographics on the career site which highlighted a 10 percent increase in applications from women compared with the previous year. Similar analysis also helped recognize that millennials are responsible for almost half of the traffic to the CBRE career site, which allowed them to tailor the portal to better cater to this audience.
"From reducing recruiting costs to improving the quality of hire we saw some great stats from our Avature rollout. But these success factors were only possible because of the power of the reporting and analytics that came out of Avature."
Anchal Saxena - TA Operations Manager (APAC) - CBRE
Getting TA Teams To Adopt Automation and Analytics
CBRE’s digital transformation didn’t happen overnight. They initially had to overcome pushback from TA teams who were used to using more traditional ways of working.
To prevail over these pockets of resistance and drive wider adoption of Avature across APAC, CBRE kickstarted a 12-month roadmap, which took shape in a two-pronged strategy.
First they forged key relationships with senior figures in certain regions so that they might act as champions for the new platform and spearhead others to take a similar path. They also took time to speak with recruiters on the ground to better understand their reluctance to switch to Avature. One key sticking point was from teams in China who explained they prefer communicating with candidates via WeChat. This was easy enough to overcome as CBRE integrated this popular tool with Avature.
How Automation and Analytics Revamped CBRE’s TA Strategy
CBRE’s tech-inspired vision saw them harness a variety of Avature advancements in automation and analytics to drive a number of eye-catching results:
These hard-hitting numbers were echoed by feedback from TA teams on the ground, who were now better equipped to use the data available to them to make accurate, real-time decisions. Automating recruiting processes gave highly-skilled HR professionals more time to focus on activities that deliver value to the business.
The cherry on top of CBRE’s digital journey was winning silver for “Best Use of Recruitment Technology” at the 2018 Asia Recruitment Awards.
