High Volume of Applications Without a System to Process
GroupM is one of the largest media companies in the world. A global market leader in advertising, odds are 1 in every 3 ads you’ve seen was created by one of their agencies. Based in the UK and made up of a conglomerate of different companies, GroupM is responsible for hiring across brands, mobilizing talent and creating careers for employees within its walls.
In looking for a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS), the most important thing for GroupM’s business was to mobilize talent through one central portal. “Our previous recruitment systems and processes were not best placed to match our business requirements,“ says Jennifer Gabrielle-Chapman, Group Talent Manager for GroupM. “With a new system, we needed our hiring team to be able to leverage the ATS functionality in order to reduce the administrative parts of our roles. As we rolled out Jobvite internally, it provided better transparency for the recruiting team – we could see when candidates dropped off, predict how long it would take to fill a job, and provide more clarity as to why it’s hard to fill certain roles.”
In looking for a new ATS, Gabrielle-Chapman and her team needed help sourcing candidates for notoriously hard-to-fill roles and managing their increasingly high volume of applications.
“Our industry in the UK is very candidate-short and it is increasingly more difficult to find candidates with specific media experience. Being able to re-target talent from previous applications is crucial,” says Gabrielle-Chapman. “We are fortunate to receive significant interest in our company from candidates. Having one central system enables us to keep in contact with former candidates across our operating companies, evaluate their suitability for a variety of roles and screen hundreds of new applications a week is necessary in order to maximize our talent pool.”
Data Insights, Candidate Engagement, and Seamless Workflow
With Jobvite ATS and CRM, the GroupM recruiting team has found the greatest value in its ability to navigate the talent pool, manage application volume and discover new hiring insights through Jobvite data.
“Jobvite has allowed us to share the work we do in one place so that our team can work seamlessly together anytime, anywhere. We have the tech to support the agile working environment we need. We were able to say goodbye to having a list of names on an Excel spreadsheet! Now we’re able to work from any office, anywhere around the world using the same platform: on demand,” says Gabrielle-Chapman.
The team’s agile working environment has proved successful. With 30 full-time recruiters across EMEA, GroupM’s average time to hire is just 29 days. With such beloved brands and a great reputation in the working world, it’s no wonder the company’s talent pool is constantly growing. In order to find the perfect candidates for a role, GroupM prioritizes building a career rather than just filling a job.
“Jobvite’s ability for us to sort through, organize, and re-engage with our talent pool is vital to us. Part of why we focus on re-engaging with past candidates is because we believe our role in recruiting is about creating careers with us. We want to see where a candidate’s best fit is across different teams. Beyond filling a job, it’s a two-way street where we’re in it together with the candidates. It’s a partnership; finding the best fit for the person as well as our business” says Gabrielle-Chapman. “Just because someone didn’t get the first job they applied to, doesn’t mean they won’t have a great career here. Someone genuinely wanting to be a part of the GroupM journey is as important to us as having the right skills.”
Beyond finding the right talent, part of recruiting is continuously learning and leveraging insights from data to inform more strategic business decisions. The reporting functions in Jobvite allows for the GroupM team to have more transparency into past strategies and progress.
“I’m a huge advocate for data. You can’t hire effectively without it and both our internal clients and candidates lean on us and our data for transparency. We can craft a detailed strategy behind our hiring decisions rather than being reactive,” elaborates Gabrielle-Chapman. “With the reporting function, we can pull weekly data reports showing the activity across our operating companies, resource management within our Talent team, be ahead of the curve for seasonal peaks and troughs, placement data and hires closed off in each week – the list goes on. As we spend more time investing in building out our data systems, we’re seeing increasingly more value.”
Enabling Teams to Automate Processes and Invest in Relational Work
For GroupM, media strategy and data are at its core. The Jobvite platform enables Gabrielle-Chapman and her team to echo that same message into all functions of their work. Centrally housed content enables the team to quickly find candidates and the flexibility to scale recruiting efforts based on the individual team and role.
“There’s no way you can run a modern Talent division without a powerful ATS. Businesses require transparency, in any sector. Jobvite lets us see into every aspect of our process – from our external branding and employer brand to more concrete business metrics like time to hire,” says Gabrielle-Chapman. “Talent can be a stressful role to be in. If your team is running high volume and demanding Talent strategies all year round without the support of tech, there’s only so much the best recruiter can do without the support of an ATS. It’s essential to invest in a platform that alleviates the administrative pressure to your team. It will allow a higher team output and ultimately, a more rewarding role for your team to play in securing the best Talent for your business.”
During the cyber-attack on WPP this year, Jobvite provided GroupM with the ability to communicate with candidates despite some core systems being offline, a true embodiment of continuous candidate engagement.
“It was an unexpected curve-ball where a lot of our day to day systems such as email were not available to us. Jobvite however, was still up and running and we were able to reach candidates and keep momentum in the recruitment process. Without Jobvite, we would not have been able to have kept our Talent strategies in place and most importantly, access our recruitment data and update our candidates accordingly” shares Gabrielle-Chapman.
The value of Jobvite for GroupM transcends the day-to-day functionality. Gabrielle-Chapman sees a quality ATS as an asset in the transforming role of Talent and a set of tools for HR teams to differentiate their work as the role of automation in recruiting develops.
“The use of AI in the talent industry will continue to change our roles in the next 5 to 10 years. Jobvite understands that and automates a lot of the groundwork, such as managing data or confirming interview details. This allows our Talent team to be more client facing and focus on the aspects of our work that requires nuance and human interaction. You need a strong system, a bedrock you can rely on, in order to do that. You also need the data in place in order to progress your team forward. You can’t run a future-proof Talent program through email and Excel,” says Gabrielle-Chapman. “You need to effectively use your team and invest in their development by providing them with the right tools that make their jobs easier.”
GroupM has an Evolved picture of Recruitment Marketing
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. Similar organizations to GroupM can mature from a Integrated and Efficient Level to an Advanced Level by optimizing stakeholder experiences with a fully integrated and automated technology ecosystem.
About GroupM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management company for WPP’s media agencies including Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Essence and m/SIX, and the outcomes driven programmatic audience company, Xaxis. Responsible for more than US $108B in annual media investment by some of the world’s largest advertisers, GroupM agencies deliver an advantage to clients with unrivaled insights into media marketplaces and consumer audiences. GroupM enables its agencies and clients with trading expertise, data, technology and an array of specialty services including addressable TV, content and sports.
