- Challenge: A well-known retailer with a physical presence at locations nationwide needed a new talent acquisition solution in which all recruiters across the company’s TA team could use for their distinct recruiting needs, including the execution of targeted email campaigns to passive candidates in their talent network and potential applicants.
- Solution: Jobvite not only helped the large-scale retailer bolster its talent pool with thousands of active and passive candidates, but — thanks to our native CRM and recruitment marketing functionality — also enabled the company’s recruiting staff to carry out specialized hiring initiatives, including a one-day campaign that led to greater employer brand awareness and a sizable number of applications from qualified prospects
- Results: Within months of investing in Jobvite, the retailer was able to hire more than 90,000 new employees. And the one-day hiring event from 2017 ended up being a big driver of passive candidates added to the company’s talent pool and active job seekers applying for open roles, both in person and via the targeted, accompanying email campaigns.
One of the largest U.S.-based apparel and home retailers employs 97,000-plus associates in roughly 870 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and has revenues of $12.5 billion annually.
Offering private, exclusive and national brands, the department store chain depends on its associates to support its mission of helping connect customers to affordable, stylish merchandise.
The company began working with Jobvite in 2006 to manage nearly four million candidates in its database. Our enterprise applicant tracking system combines internal and external candidate sources into a single, easily searchable interface, and provides modern recruitment marketing tools to organize and campaign candidates for current and future positions.
Each year, the large national retailer has more than 21 million career site visitors and posts an average of 24,000 unique jobs. The company now uses our ATS software to manage its high-volume hiring — which helped it sign 94,000 employees in the months after onboarding.
National retailers takes high-volume hiring efforts to next level with Jobvite’s ATS software
One of the most effective recruitment marketing tools the organization leveraged in Jobvite was sending targeted email campaigns to engage candidates.
With the ability to automate campaigns with branded, mobile friendly emails — and then track effectiveness from open rates to click through rates to hire — Jobvite makes it easy to send emails based on talent pipeline membership.
Using targeted and mass campaigns for its high-volume hiring, the retailer routinely achieved outstanding results on its email campaigns, with open and click rates of 37% and 6%, respectively.
However, one of the biggest challenges in the organization was ensuring consistent adoption of the platform across the entire recruiter user base. And, to do that, the retailer determined it had to demonstrate additional value of the solution to all users.
The company’s talent team team recognized that leveraging email campaigns had been a vital part of a regional hiring event in 2016. In fact, in one of its local markets, the event had resulted in hiring more than 300 associates in just one day.
That’s where an ‘Aha!’ moment turned into action.
With the idea to strategically expand from a regional hiring day to a national hiring day across stores and locations, Jobvite partnered closely with the organization to prove our CRM could support a nationwide hiring event in 2017 — and meet the demand of its seasonal workforce.
The goal was to deliver high-quality candidates from an expanded talent pool—and ultimately convert a large number of qualified candidates into applicants.
With significant coordination required, our staff helped the retailer use multiple targeted campaigns using our CRM functionality to support its planned one-day hiring event and expand its reach for broader access to talent — a joint efforts that produced strong results for the brand.
Retailer executes highly effective national hiring event with help from Jobvite CRM
The one-day national hiring event was planned in October 2017 and leveraged the power of Jobvite CRM to manage the entire event.
With a strategic, well-coordinated approach, the hiring day featured many candidate communication channels, including emails, social posts, internal communications, and in-store signage.
Jobvite supported the hiring event for the national retailer to deliver outstanding results.
By extending its reach to broader channels of talent, the company received 31,000 applications from email campaigns and 75,000 applications pre- and post-event from multiple integrated campaigns.
They also used highly visible placement of hiring tables with clear, well-designed signs on storefronts and throughout stores, making it easy for talent to find and interact with hiring managers.
The historical application rate increased by more than three-fold and the one-day national hiring event resulted in the retailer making 18,000 job offers with only a 1% fail rate on background checks. Never before had the organization hired so many people in just one day.
“We had not hired that many people in one day in our history,” one of the company’s talent acquisition leaders explained. “We attribute this to the strategic use of email campaigns utilizing our existing talent database. This will be an annual event going forward.”
By tapping into its existing talent database with a sophisticated approach to national hiring, the retailer demonstrated the greater value of the CRM to users across the org. It also showcased how email campaigns could take hiring to the next level and achieve outstanding results business-wide.
In fact, candidate quality far surpassed expectations, with one associate commenting that “the quality of the candidates was the best we have ever seen.
And even in a difficult retail environment, the company experienced first-hand how attracting quality talent can make a big impact on the bottom line. Specifically, the retailer achieved a 3.4% comparable sales bump for the nine-week period ending December 30 over the same time in 2016.
Capitalizing on success and expanding talent network ongoing endeavors for retailer
Since the tremendous success of the national hiring day in 2017, the Jobvite team has continued working with the national retailer to expand its talent network and support its high-volume hiring needs. By leveraging our advanced CRM and recruitment marketing capabilities, passive job seekers can opt in to talent networks if they are not ready to apply for open positions.
Now recognizing the power of its proprietary talent database to meet all its hiring needs, the retailer has run multiple email campaigns to talent segments previously not engaged before.
Email campaigns focused on supply chain management and staffing warehouse have encouraged passive candidates to join specific talent networks and stay informed of new positions that open up and general company news and updates. This has given the company additional sources to find new talent and ensure it can fill future demand with its talent pipelines.
By proactively building relationships and expanding its talent networks, the large retailer has demonstrated tremendous gains in utilizing its recruitment marketing platform from Jobvite.
And the retailer will continue to capitalize on the momentum it has achieved in recent years to find and attract top talent for the future — all with the help of our enterprise recruiting software.
