Aspect Reduces Sourcing Costs and Prioritises Inclusivity

An outdated ATS held up by manual workflows

For over a decade, Aspect (Autism Spectrum Australia) had depended on legacy recruiting software to hire across its four areas of impact: Education, Adult Community Services (ACS), Therapy, and Fundraising. As demand for Aspect’s services grew throughout Australia, the not-for-profit organisation realised it had outgrown the limited capabilities of its old applicant tracking system (ATS).

With thousands of Autistic children and adults depending on Aspect to hire the best teachers, therapists, and fundraisers to staff its programs, the not-for-profit went all-in on a solution upgrade. The new ATS needed to be easy for any hiring manager across the organisation’s 72 locations to use — and robust enough to satisfy the talent acquisition and executive teams in the central office. Last, but not least, it was important to Aspect that it could become self-sufficient with the updated solution after implementation.

Evolving the model of recruitment

Aspect used a change champions approach for its implementation of SmartRecruiters, bringing together members from each business unit to ensure key stakeholders were involved pre-decision right through launch. Once SmartRecruiters was live, each change champion was responsible for helping to train relevant Aspect employees on SmartRecruiters, taking ownership of the rollout for their respective teams.

“The core project team was made up of members from across our People, Culture and Safety team, and the change champions group, which allowed us to get a diversity of perspectives,” said David Dunne, Senior Manager, Workforce Services & Systems at Aspect. “Part of what we wanted to do alongside implementing SmartRecruiters was evolve the model of recruitment. We were looking for ways to streamline, improve and simplify processes as we went, to ensure we optimise the process as well as the technology.” This included building an Australian-first integration between SmartRecruiters and Aspect’s payroll and HR platform, Australian-based platform Aurion.

“The intuitive design and ease of use has improved the hiring experience for our managers,” said Rachael Fox, People Services Team Leader at Aspect. “SmartRecruiters has significantly streamlined our recruitment processes, enabling hiring managers to efficiently handle each step from job approvals to onboarding.”

Freedom from ‘busy work’

“Having all communication between the hiring team, and with the applicant, within the system saves our Talent Sourcing team time. Instead of making phone calls and sending emails to check the status of an application, it’s all contained in one place. This allows for better collaboration between the hiring team and a seamless experience for the applicant.” said Rachael.

Sourcing sophistication

Sourcing analytics enabled Aspect to track trends throughout the year, seeing a steady decline in the requirement to leverage agencies and paid advertising, alongside a steady increase in hiring through organic channels such as the Aspect website and referral program. “We’re getting more effective return on investment, which is critical in a Not-For-Profit environment,” said David. “Quality of hire is also up.”

Data-driven insights

Prior to implementing SmartRecruiters, Aspect had limited visibility into key recruitment metrics. Now, insights are flowing in that are helping the organisation make decisions with confidence.

“Before, our access to data was limited to Excel spreadsheets that required manual effort in order to make them useful. Now, we can easily access recruitment data and identify what’s working and what isn’t,” said Rachael.

Inclusive candidate experience

Aspect doesn’t just help Autistic Australians learn new skills and get the community support they need, it also hires them. With SmartRecruiters, the not-for-profit looks forward to Winston’s conversational AI to improve communications with neurodivergent talent. “From a disability inclusion lens, it’s a good experience to have a chatbot feature,” said Rachael.

Streamlined recruiting paves the way for innovation

Since rolling out SmartRecruiters organisation-wide, Aspect has seen enthusiasm for the solution grow as hiring managers experience just how easy it is to engage high-turnover talent with text recruiting, distribute job descriptions more effectively in a few clicks, use AI tools to speed up candidate screening, and more.

“We’re no longer missing out on top candidates due to delays and difficulties in coordinating timely responses,” said Rachael. “Our talent sourcing team have a lot more time to do proactive sourcing, which we struggled to do before. Candidates are having a better experience, too, because of the increased visibility of what stage they are at in the recruitment process. That’s crucial when recruiting for high-effort roles, such as therapists and teachers.”

Aspect’s better candidate experience extends past the offer letter, covering new hire onboarding as well. Gone are the days when candidates had to fill in paperwork by hand and send it to the payroll team to input the information manually. Thanks to the integration with Aurion, that data now flows seamlessly between the platforms, helping to mitigate risk and save 35-40 minutes per candidate.

“The top line benefit of using SmartRecruiters is having a partner who’s constantly thinking about customer pain points and how to solve them,” added David. “As we evolve as an organisation, we need to set new goalposts. Looking ahead, Winston is exciting for us because it offers the opportunity to automate a lot of the process still sitting with hiring managers. That’s the future.”