Articles 
The world around us is changing radically. We are in an unprecedented era of revolution and flux, where technology is not only causing social transformation but is developing as a response to social trends. The kind of innovation required to navigate such times of change and avoid being disrupted makes finding and retaining the right people more important than ever. For this reason, HR is the cornerstone of your organization’s innovation and must be able to execute its strategy and vision to hire the best of the best and propel your company to success.
Put in general terms, 3 elements must be aligned in order to innovate:
- Vision — where you want to get to
- Strategy — the road you’re taking to get there
- Technology — the means of transportation
To execute your HR vision and your strategy, you need to choose the right technology — with an emphasis on right. All too often, an organization will choose technology that forces them to change their strategy based on the constraints of the tool. Innovation is about performing activities when and where you need to; i.e. the tech must support your vision and strategy, not lead it. The technology you choose must enable agility, end-to-end service delivery, and engagement.
With over 380,000 employees worldwide, Siemens knows better than anyone just how important choosing the right technology can be for executing an innovative HR strategy on a global scale. In our recent webinar, their VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas, Mike Brown, took the time to share how Avature has allowed their corporation to innovate as it faces constant change.
Innovation in Recruitment: Agility
In the past, HR systems were extremely rigid. If you look at a legacy ATS, for example, it’s usually a pre-built recruiting process based on what the vendor thought recruiting was at the time. However, recruiting has changed significantly in the last 15 years and continues to evolve rapidly. Today, HR Tech is about adapting to what works for you — a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Being agile means that any necessary customization can be done at your own pace, allowing you to put your ever-changing strategy into action at any point in time.
To accomplish their own HR strategy and vision, Siemens looked for an agile SaaS platform that aligned with their global HR system principles rather than link disparate systems worldwide or build their own tool.
We needed the functionality of a CRM tool, not a static place to collect applications which we may never look at again. And we needed to pipeline people in a way that allowed us to get back in touch with them and organize them in a way you could perhaps not do with an ATS. We wanted to capture all this information so we could be smarter about the market.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
With that in mind, Siemens chose Avature for its ability to fit into and improve existing recruiting processes. One such example of this agility in action was a recent recruiting event in Saudi Arabia that Siemens attended. The on-site recruiter was able to get everything quickly set up with the right permissions and enter the event with iPads in hand. As a result, 1000 women were quickly and efficiently registered for future contact. The configurability of the Avature platform allowed Siemens to respond in an agile manner and get the most out of their event, even at short notice.
End-to-End Service Delivery
It is important to keep in mind that whatever your corporate strategy entails, it will always be executed by people. HR technology needs to take into account all players and provide an optimized user experience for every stakeholder. One way to easily measure this is to draw a map of the process, identify all key stakeholders, and ensure that your strategy will support each and every one of them. In this way, a business can better understand how to optimize the process and provide relevant experiences for each person, department, and region.
The size and scale of Siemens is a constant challenge. With so many stakeholders involved in the recruiting process, it was absolutely necessary to provide a tool that brings them all together and onto the same page. From IT, to data privacy, to recruiters and hiring managers, they needed to bring these global teams not only together but functioning at a high level. A key example of this was when Siemens decided to redefine their Global Employee Referral Program. Using Avature, they were able to combine 19 employee referral programs and 2 ATSs into one single platform, making it easy for each stakeholder to collaborate and own their part in the process.
Innovation in Recruitment: Engagement
When it comes to recruiting technology, the most important factor is no longer the feature set but the degree of user engagement. The right technology fosters both engagement with passive talent as well as collaboration within talent acquisition. True engagement is much more than just sending a thank you message after meeting someone at an event. It’s leveraging the information that you collect about your candidates in a way that allows you to send very targeted communications over the short, mid and long term. But to do any of these things, a collaborative hiring environment needs to be enforced internally, and the recruiter must be engaged in the new process.
We try to put the recruiter at the center of everything we do. Recruiters are notorious for wanting to be left alone… but we have to bring them along and show them that the market is changing. We have to go and find candidates and engage them. Posting jobs and skimming through resumes no longer works for the jobs that we have. You’ve got to go out into the marketplace and find those people. And once you find them, even though you may not have an open job today, you need to engage with them, and you need to have the tool to do that. Traditional ATS systems are not set up for that — Avature is.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
Innovation is crucial for continued success as a company, and recruitment is no exception. The right technology — that is, a technology that is agile, engaging, and that ensures end-to-end service delivery — is key when implementing new, innovative strategies company-wide. Siemens is one of many companies that has partnered with Avature to transform the way they do recruiting and scale their processes globally.
It’s no longer an ATS-centric world… it’s a more dynamic and interactive job than it used to be… [Avature] is a tool that enables recruiters to actually behave and function differently than they did before, which makes them feel like they’re more technologically advanced as a digital recruiter and they’re keeping pace with the changes in the field.”
Mike Brown
VP of Talent Acquisition, Americas
