financial services company transitions to skills-based organization with help from AI.

company uses AI and recruitment process outsourcing to help prioritize people’s inherent skills, resulting in enhanced workforce diversity and higher quality talent 

client
a leading financial services company

goals
Advancing its already successful recruitment program, the company wanted to accelerate its transition to a skills-based organization in today’s competitive talent landscape, with goals to increase workforce diversity and improve operational efficiency. 

solution
Through a partnership between its recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider, Randstad Sourceright, and AI capabilities, the company is supporting its skills-based transformation using innovative new methods to assess candidates and make faster, smarter, unbiased hiring decisions.

key results
In the two years since adopting this new approach, the company has achieved 73% screening efficiency, while reducing hiring manager review time by 18% and decreasing time to hire by three days. It also made significant improvement in regard to diversity, including a 14% increase in the diversity of its candidate slates, a 24% increase in diverse candidates advancing to the interview stage and a 31% increase in the number of women in sales roles.

the path of continuous optimization

For this leading financial services company, a strong recruiting strategy is crucial to building an optimized and highly skilled workforce that drives innovation for the company. Having leveraged a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) program for the past ten years, the company’s talent acquisition function has been running smoothly and successfully; but even the most successful recruiting operation can find areas for improvement.

Two years ago, the company’s forward-thinking leaders decided to prioritize people’s skills and competencies over experience when considering new candidates or advancing internal talent. Making the shift to become a skills-based organization would also help improve other key aspects of its talent strategy.

For instance, while the company has long prioritized workforce diversity, it sought the opportunity to further remove any underlying biases in the hiring process.

And, as the talent acquisition team must often contend with a high volume of applicants, it has always been open to considering new ideas to bring further efficiencies to the process. As part of its skills-based journey, the team wanted to find new ways to evaluate candidates on the unique skills they can bring to the organization as well.

the power of AI in recruitment

To drive the improvements it was hoping to achieve, the company engaged with Randstad Sourceright, its RPO partner of nine years, to find new solutions. The RPO team recommended implementing HiredScore, a leader in AI-driven talent solutions, to unlock new possibilities for its recruiting processes.

The shift began with new recruitment processes; the company identified the most crucial core competencies for each role and across all levels of talent. Putting together five competencies for each job type and interview guides derived from these charts, recruiters and hiring managers benefit from a concrete, unbiased method to evaluate talent. This process also ensures that hiring teams don’t focus on the years of experience a candidate has, but rather the key traits most indicative of successful performance for each role.

Further driven by the power of AI within HiredScore, this new process creates new sourcing and hiring efficiencies. For example, HiredScore analyzes job descriptions and then grades and ranks each candidate based on how well they match what was articulated in the job description.

This approach allows recruiters to evaluate applicants at speed, reducing screening time by an average of 73%, and identifying the talent with the right skills for each role. AI-powered sourcing also scans the company’s own applicant tracking system (ATS) to access a pool of candidates who have already applied and expressed interest in working for the company, while also searching Randstad Sourceright’s massive talent database of millions of candidates.

The combined solution enables the company to achieve its goal of further enhancing workforce diversity and providing an equitable hiring process. One example is removing bias by evaluating candidates in the same manner. Another example is the use of AI to help achieve greater gender parity by enhancing job descriptions. By removing language around years of experience required for the role, and instead focusing on skills, attitude and how they would operate on a job, the job descriptions are more inclusive and encourage more diverse candidates to apply.

While recruiters would typically review candidates in the order their applications were received, with the new approach, AI automatically ranks candidates based on how closely the candidate’s resume matches the predetermined set of job requirements, considering not just the words themselves, but their connotation and contextual meanings. This means recruiters see the best-fit candidates first — helping to eliminate bias and to support a skills-first approach.

In addition to new efficiencies for the recruiting team, the company’s hiring managers also benefit from a streamlined experience. Hiring managers visit a central hub to easily view and evaluate candidates, reducing the need for back and forth with the recruiting team via email.

increasing diversity, improving efficiency

Now in its second year of AI-powered RPO, the company is continually optimizing its skills-based approach to recruitment.

With the enhanced process for evaluating candidates, the company can move forward more quickly, leading to 73% screening efficiency and an 18% reduction in time spent on hiring manager review. This is a crucial benefit, as it allows hiring managers to meet with candidates faster and hire the right talent before the competition does. As a result, the company’s time to hire has decreased by an average of three days.

In addition, the company has seen a significant increase in the number of high-priority candidates — those rated the highest — who were 5.5 times more likely to receive an offer. Due to these improvements, the company has achieved an exceptional hiring manager satisfaction rate of 97%.

The company is also experiencing improvements in workforce diversity, resulting in a 14% increase in the number of diverse individuals presented in its candidate slates. The amount of diverse candidates going through the interview process has increased significantly, from 18% to 42%. In addition, the company has brought much greater gender balance to its sales roles, going from 80% male, 20% female to a more equitable 51% female, 49% male ratio.

Overall, by actively seeking new ways to incorporate the latest in AI and other advancements, the company has a future-ready approach to recruitment, ensuring it has a competitive advantage in securing the talent it needs. Most importantly, the company has a proven strategy to ensure it hires and promotes the best talent, removing as much bias as possible.