Company
Seattle-based logistics company Expeditors does things a little differently than most Fortune 500s. Despite having over 15,000 employees globally, they also have no dedicated HR support.
Instead, Expeditors operates within an ultra-decentralized model where local department managers temporarily becoming hiring managers when required. This approach provides the managers with the autonomy and flexibility they need to fulfill staffing requirements across their 187 branches. However, it also presents troublesome organizational and administrative pain points.
Challenges
Expeditors knew these problems all too well, and they also knew their home-grown Lotus Notes database was not up to solving them. In fact, it might have been damaging their brand in regards to candidates.
In particular, the chaotic system meant there was no standardized or efficient method of communicating with potential employees, resulting in a poor candidate experience. As Morgan Wilson, Senior Manager of Training & Personal Development at Expeditors, explained:
“I am sure we did not have a great reputation
in the past among job applicants. Many who applied to Expeditors would never hear a thing. That’s changed now because SmartRecruiters allows us to be courteous, be responsive, and be professional with all of our candidates.”
Morgan WilsonSenior Manager of Training & Personal
Development
This approach could have been potentially costing Expeditors their next great candidate.
Luckily, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing one exists, the next is finding the right tools to fix it. With this in mind, Expeditors created a set of criteria which any newly adopted talent acquisition suite would need to satisfy.
Firstly, since Expeditors has no dedicated HR staff, they needed something department managers could easily pick up with only minimal training. Secondly, they needed a platform acting hiring managers could own locally. Thirdly, they wanted to recreate an excellent candidate experience, and finally, the solution needed to be able to deal with the large number of paper applications handed into Expeditors at industry shows.
Solution
Despite having no experience with SmartRecruiters prior to their search, Expeditors quickly found a partner which satisfied all their specific criteria. Here’s how:
- SmartRecruiters’ built-in communication tools, including automated responses, means candidates are no longer left in the dark about their applications. With little effort, Expeditors can keep in touch, improving the candidate experience as they go.
- All of this was achieved without any need for major organizational restructuring. In the end, Expeditors only needed to hire one administrator to handle the entire platform.
- The collaborative nature of SmartRecruiters allows for candidates to move between jobs, departments and hiring managers with ease. This way, if a candidate was unsuccessful for one position, but could work in another, this can be easily communicated and their profile reassigned.
- The easy configurability of SmartRecruiters meant the information from paper applications could be uploaded and shared with the entire hiring staff.
Results
After a short pilot period, Expeditors immediately chose SmartRecruiters as their new talent acquisition platform. It wasn’t long until they saw improvements, with Expeditors predicting to receive around 27,000 applications for 900 positions in their first year.
However, SmartRecruiters doesn’t simply provide short-term solutions to immediate needs. The data it provides can also aid long-term organizational and strategic decision-making. Expeditors, in particular, used the vast amounts of data and key metrics they received from the platform to alter their internal practices, increasing cooperation and overall efficiency.