- Challenge: Competition for top talent is fierce for CDW, which has to fight for candidates that 50 or so other brands in their space are going after. That meant the business needed an advanced, enterprise applicant tracking system that enables its recruiters to secure more high-quality applicants, engage passive prospects, and build relationships with those individuals to achieve their hiring goals.
- Solution: With Jobvite, CDW’s talent team gets clear visibility into all its TA efforts across the hiring funnel and can better predict recruitment cycle outcomes, based on analysis of ongoing candidate engagement efforts. The direct integration with Taleo also helps CDW streamline application workflows, identify bottlenecks in the hiring process, and provide a more consistent candidate experience.
- Results: The company’s average application completion rate rose to 83%, thanks in large part to our ATS software — specifically, the built-in recruitment marketing functionality, which helped CDW’s recruiters deliver personalized, well-timed, targeted messaging to candidates of interest. The TA team saw a 72% open rate for nurture emails as part of a recent hiring campaign.
CDW is a leading multi-brand technology solutions provider to business, government, education and healthcare organizations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
A Fortune 500 company with multinational capabilities, CDW was founded in 1984 and employs more than 8,700 coworkers with net sales of approximately $15 billion. CDW fingerprints can be found on technology in workplaces and workspaces of more than 250,000 organizations, from fresh-faced startups to international conglomerates.
With the breadth of products and services it offers, combined with the expertise of its specialists, there is no request too big or too small. CDW’s teams comprise account managers, solution architects, and tech engineers who work together to tailor solutions for their roster of customers. CDW coworkers across the globe work together to bring technology to life for their customers.
Ultimately, CDW’s competitive landscape is complex, with over 50 direct competitors. This means not only competition for customers, but also for coworker talent.
As stated in CDW’s 2017 10k, “If we lose any of our key personnel, or are unable to attract and retain the talent required for our business, our business could be disrupted and our financial performance could suffer. Our success is heavily dependent upon our ability to attract, develop, engage and retain key personnel to manage and grow our business, including our executive, management, sales, services and technical coworkers.”
Need for more robust recruitment marketing and candidate engagement platform led CDW to onboard a new TA platform
CDW has ambitious growth strategies that require targeted talent acquisition support.
The company has acute high-volume hiring needs, particularly for the entry-level Sales and Account reps, but also for corporate and operational positions. The CDW talent team knows that to compete for highly skilled and sought-after talent, they need to build strong relationships, develop robust talent pipelines, and engage passive job seekers.
In short, CDW knows that establishing meaningful relationships with passive candidates is important for the future when they are ready to explore new career options.
What’s more, CDW also recognizes the tie between the candidate experience and the consumer experience. CDW’s recruiting team is not only responsible for attracting great new talent, but also ensuring a positive candidate experience for all candidates, those hired and those not hired.
All these distinct recruiting needs and hiring goals has led CDW to realize it needed to refresh its TA tech stack to ensure its recruiters had the requisite tools to connect with qualified candidates and fill key positions in a timely manner.
Prior to 2017, CDW use a different recruitment marketing provider than Jobvite to serve as its candidate engagement platform. But, that solution fell flat. This sparked a search for a more advanced system that was simple and results-driven and integrated with Oracle Taleo.
“We wanted to ensure we provided a great candidate experience and an integrated approach that would ensure visibility into the end result and allow us to predict outcomes” said CDW Manger, TA Operations & Technology Andy Mott.
Speed of onboarding enables CDW talent team to hit the ground running with Jobvite
CDW’s Talent Acquisition team knew that they needed better, easier-to-use technology to support the evolution of their sourcing practices and that time was of the essence.
So, the company set a targeted go-live date of July 2017 with Jobvite. In short, they had aggressive hiring plans and no time to waste.
The organization’s ambitious implementation consisted of a complete overhaul of their career site, which would now be a modern, mobile-optimized career site.
Moreover, CDW would roll out several key candidate experience improvements, including faceted search, job notifications, multiple talent networks, apply workflow, direct integration with Taleo including EEO, UDFs and multiple apply workflows, and analytics to measure activity and results.
Across the career site, both active and passive candidates have the flexibility to directly apply for a current job, sign up for job alerts for a future opportunity, or join CDW’s Talent Network.
If the time is right for a candidate to apply for a job today, they are not forced to join the Talent Network first, avoiding double data entry.
By simplifying this process and making it easier for applicants, CDW has achieved application conversion rates of over 83%, far outperforming the industry average of typically 20-30%.
As a result of the highly customized and dedicated content to specific audiences, CDW was able to increase the average time spent on its career site to nearly six minutes per visitor, double the typical average of three minutes.
CDW continued to nurture and build relationships with these candidates. One strategy was email campaigns. In the Q3 2017 campaigns, CDW achieved a 72% open rate, vastly outperforming its competition for talent in the industry.
With its Taleo Enterprise integration, CDW is able to not only offer a seamless, easy candidate experience, but also track key metrics to ensure its making the desired level of progress.
