Technology revolutionises recruitment

Coles Myer revitalises employer brand

Shortlist, December 5th 2005

By using new technology which appeals to a highly-mobile generation, Coles Myer has revolutionised the way it communicates to candidates and leveraged its recruitment process to improve its employer brand.

Speaking at the recent Australian Association of Graduate Employers conference, Coles Myer national recruitment strategy manager, Josephine Thomson said the move to an online recruitment process was a critical part of the company's ongoing HR strategy.

Coles has a recruitment team of 83 to manage the hiring process for more than 63,000 roles per year, and the core aim for a new recruitment process was "high-quality, low-touch," she said.

As a result, Coles adopted a "best of breed" approach, which essentially meant it could select a smorgasbord of products (such as applicant tracking, voice recognition, and online induction) rather than implement a fully integrated platform from one provider.

It uses Page Up for its recruitment processes, OneTest for online assessments, an automated speech recognition provider and another provider for its online induction programs. These are then integrated in-house in a seamless product which the candidates experiences as one platform.

Launched in June 2003, Coles now runs all its recruitment online, from senior management roles through to entry-level retail positions. The system was originally expected to receive 300,000 applications per year, but has since managed 600,000 applications per year.

Over the past 30 months, the company has hired 150,000 people, Thomson said. Previously, Coles would recruit about 2,000 staff per month, but this figure has increased to between 6,000 and 10,000.

Under its umbrella, Coles Myer has 22 brands, 2,200 stores, and employs about 165,000 staff.

30,000 new hires in four months

There was initially "great fear internally" about the changes, Thomson said, but a new platform was needed to "improve process, capability, speed to market and time to hire".

Coles now has a two week turnaround for all applications, and it is quite satisfied with this level of performance, Thomson said.

Commenting on the results so far, Thomson said moving its recruitment online is "achieving the ideal balance between cost efficiency, speed of process and validity of outcome".

For FY2005, Coles made 65,000 hires with about half (30,000) recruited between August and November this year.

Use technology to build progressive employer brand

Previously, Coles lacked a consistent recruitment methodology and there was "no fairness in our process", Thomson said.

"So we wanted to use technology to improve the candidate experience and change the perception of Coles as an employer - and it worked."

Before moving online, the company received up to 5000 paper-based applications per week, and it had nine different recruitment processes. There was no applicant tracking system or communication to candidates on their progress.

Applications could sit on a desk for weeks, and then if it didn���?s���?z�t land on the desk of the person in charge of hiring for a specific position, it would most probably be lost, she said.

"Candidates could submit an application and never receive a response," she said.

Coles also administered up to 300,000 different assessments annually for new employees (such as technical cash register operations) which were all marked manually.

Automated system and SMS technology works wonders

Coles now has an automated screening and ranking system, and offers candidates self-scheduling of their job interviews.

"SMS has been the real linchpin for us," she said, as it delivers an immediate response and is far quicker than email.

On average, Coles sends out 50,000 SMS/emails per month, and about 1000 jobseekers self-schedule interviews per day.

"The focus is to increase SMS and reduce emails," she said, as SMS is more action-orientated than email. The recruitment team has also devolved the process of making job offers to the line managers.

It has an automated system for generating new employment contracts, and hiring managers (there are 50,000 throughout the company) can make online requisitions with applicant details available through electronic transfers.

Inductions for new employees are also delivered online, which involves six-hours of paid work. If they fail more than three times, the induction can be completed in-store.

For executive recruitment, Thomson said Coles makes about 1,500 requisitions per year. She said while the online recruitment principle remains the same, it is "more high-touch" due to the nature of the roles.

Retail as viable career option

Thomson stressed the need for the retail industry to counter the unfavourable perceptions of retail as "career of last resort", citing a recent survey from the Australian Centre for Retail Studies, which showed that only 9% of students in a retail-related course intended to work in retail.

By being online, we thought we could move from an image as a "daggy supermarket" to a "very coordinated, groovy place to work," she said.

Coles is now promoting the "social environment" of retail, for example, as a place where young people can meet new friends and has also increased its focus on ���?s���?orecruiting staff with heightened skills" in customer services and sales, said Thomson.

Thomson said that Coles intends to integrate the hiring process into its HR systems in the near future, and is also looking at its succession planning processes.