Driving Productivity and Efficiency in CDW’s Talent Acquisition Practices with Innovative Technology and Data-driven Recruiting
CDW is a leading multi-brand technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. A Fortune 500 company with multinational capabilities, CDW was founded in 1984 and employs more than 8,700 coworkers with net sales of approximately $15 billion. CDW fingerprints can be found on technology in workplaces and workspaces of more than 250,000 organizations, from fresh-faced startups to international conglomerates. With the breadth of products and services it offers, combined with the expertise of its specialists, there is no request too big or too small. CDW’s teams comprise account managers, solution architects, and technology engineers who work together to tailor solutions for their roster of customers. CDW coworkers across the globe work together to bring technology to life for their customers. CDW’s competitive landscape is complex, with over 50 direct competitors. This means not only competition for customers, but also for coworker talent.
As stated in CDW’s 2017 10k, ‘If we lose any of our key personnel, or are unable to attract and retain the talent required for our business, our business could be disrupted and our financial per-formance could suffer. Our success is heavily dependent upon our ability to attract, develop, engage and retain key personnel to manage and grow our business, including our executive, management, sales, services and technical coworkers.‘ CDW prides itself on being an attractive workplace, having garnered awards as one of Forbes 2017 America’s Best Employers, ComputerWorld’s 100 Best Places to Work in IT, and Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work and Interview.
CDW are the People Who Get IT
People Who Get IT Talent Acquisition Environment and Challenges
CDW has ambitious growth strategies that require targeted talent acquisition support. CDW has acute high-volume recruiting needs, particularly for the entry-level sales position of Account Representative, but also does significant hiring for both corporate and operational positions. The Talent Acquisition team knows that to compete for highly skilled and sought-after talent, they need to build strong relationships, build robust talent pipelines, and engage passive job seekers. CDW knows that establishing meaningful relationships with passive candidates is important for the future when they are ready to explore new career options.
The company also recognizes the tie between the candidate experience and the consumer experience. As the Talent Board found, ‘41% of candidates who had a negative experience say they will take their alliance, product purchases and relationships to another company,’ and ‘64% of candidates who had a positive experience with an employer (the majority of whom weren’t hired), will increase their relationship with the company.’ So CDW’sTalent Acquisition team is not only responsible for attracting great new talent, but also ensuring a positive candidate experience for all candidates, those hired and those not hired.
The Talent Acquisition department has teams of recruiters who support the various functional areas including sales, services and corporate. A strategic program team, including Recruitment Marketing, supports the wider Talent Acquisition team with recruiting solutions and services.
Prior to 2017, CDW was using a different recruitment marketing provider to serve as its candidate engagement platform. Recognizing that its technology footprint needed to match the sophistication of its recruitment marketing practices. CDW needed a recruitment marketing platform that was simple, results-driven and would integrate with its Oracle Taleo ATS. ‘We wanted to ensure we provided a great candidate experience and an integrated approach that would ensure visibility into the end result and allow us to predict outcomes’ says Andy Mott, Manager – TA Operations and Technology.
CDW had ambitious goals when it embarked on its implementation of Talemetry Recruitment Marketing including:
- Improve source and activity tracking and analytics
- Modernize the candidate experience with a simplified, optimized mobile application
- Build deeper proprietary talent pools
- Better utilize and leverage Taleo data for recruitment marketing and remarketing
- Support events and targeted recruitment marketing more efficiently
- Simplify and automate job distribution
- Open and track new channels to market for jobs
- Reduce time-to-fill
- Improve quality of candidates
- Simplify the technical platform
Speed of Talemetry Delivery
CDW’s Talent Acquisition team knew that they needed better, easier-to-use technology to support the evolution of their sourcing practices and that time was of the essence. CDW set a targeted go-live date of July 2017 with the Talemetry Career Sites, Appy, CRM, and Job Brodcast solutions. They had aggressive hiring plans and no time to waste. Their ambitious implementation consisted of a complete overhaul of their career site, which would now be a modern, mobile optimized career site. They would roll out several key candidate experience improvements, including faceted search, job notifications, multiple talent networks, apply workflow, direct integration with Taleo including EEO, UDFs and multiple apply workflows, and analytics to measure their activity and results.
Proven Results
Throughout the career site, both active and passive candidates have the flexibility to directly apply for a current job, sign up for job alerts for a future opportunity, or join CDW’s Talent Network. If the time is right for a candidate to apply for a job today, they are not forced to join the Talent Network first, avoiding double data entry. By simplifying this process and making it easier for applicants, CDW has been able to achieve application conversion rates of over 83%, far outperforming the industry average of typically 20-30%.
As a result of the highly customized and dedicated content to specific audiences, CDW was able to increase the average time spent on its career site to nearly six minutes per visitor, double the typical average of three minutes.
CDW continued to nurture and build relationships with these candidates. One strategy was email campaigns. In the Q3 2017 campaigns, CDW achieved a 72% open rate, vastly outperforming its competition for talent in the industry.
Being fully integrated with Taleo Enterprise, CDW is able to not only offer a seamless, easy candidate experience, but also track the metrics of candidates to measure the full impact as candidates.
CDW Used Updated CWS to Evolve Candidate Experience
Jobvite’s EVOLVE Talent Acquisition Framework helps TA teams deliver world-class results. From initial assessment to specific action plans, EVOLVE empowers TA leaders to identify and prioritize areas for improvement so that no effort is wasted. Teams, processes, technologies, and strategies are optimized over time, and organizations emerge stronger, more efficient, and better able to adapt to the needs of the ever-evolving talent marketplace.
The EVOLVE framework offers four levels of talent acquisition maturity. Companies like CDW can level up to a Level 3 from a Level 2 by optimizing processes and technologies.
