Diverse Workplace: Articles

LOW COST, HIGH TOUCH – QUALITY RECRUITING IN EVERY ENVIRONMENT by Tara Gallone,Talent Acquisition Leader, Reebok International As the Talent Acquisition Leader at Reebok International, I am constantly faced with the challenge of attracting key talent to the organization. We define talent as high performers with high potential that are not actively looking for new opportunities. As a result, we have implemented new tools to elevate the candidate experience, adopted a multi -source recruiting strategy and have increased recruiter efficiency and productivity. But that leaves one question when it comes to attracting talent. How do we truly separate Reebok from other organizations? Where does the rubber hit the road? To keep things in the proper perspective, I often try to put myself in the shoes of a candidate. It all comes down to one fundamental fact; candidates must be treated with dignity and respect: The Golden Rule! At Reebok International, we have adopted a Customer Centric Recruitment focus. It’s going back to the basics of recruiting where each candidate is treated with a high-touch individual experience there are five pillars that we focus on. We look to identify the different stages and unique activities within each of these stages where we can make a positive impression on a candidate. We need to always remember that candidates are potential customers. We have identified these areas as perception, initial contact, screening, interviewing, offer and on-boarding. The first pillar is the perception phase, or online presence. This refers to what candidates are seeing and hearing about the organization. It includes print ad appearance, career site usability and how job postings appear to candidates. You want to be sure that your online appearance accurately represents the brand. There can be a negative impact on the company’s reputation if online job postings are poorly written and have grammatical errors. There are plenty of choices for top talent even with unemployment being as high as it is today. There exists a real opportunity to boost your online presence through effective low-cost web advertising campaigns. There are a number of tools that enable an organization to increase on-line presence. For example, we partner with a company called Entice Labs that offers a tool called TalentSeekr www.TalentSeekr.com/Intro. TalentSeekr is a one-stop shop for your web advertising needs. It takes your job descriptions and converts them in to media rich advertisements. These ads get pushed out to your target audience through a number of different web 2.0 properties. This is a game -changing approach to recruiting that allows you to build your passive talent pipelines. There are 70%-80% of candidates out there that are not reviewing your job descriptions. This is an excellent way to tap into these candidates and represent your company in a whole new light. The tool is also self-optimizing, meaning it can track in real-time which sites are performing and which ones are not, so you can shift your spend accordingly. As budgets become increasingly tighter, Talent Acquisition leaders are often challenged with showing a return on investment. TalentSeekr not only manages the campaign for you but also provides you with business metrics to show your return on investment to the executive team. As part of Reebok’s goal to enhance the candidate experience and to improve our on-line presence, the adidas Group along with Reebok launched a new interactive career site in September 2009. What we found prior to launching was that our corporate career site was confusing to applicants. It was difficult to navigate through the site and candidates were not making the connection between Reebok and the adidas Group. Our new highly interactive site is much more relevant to today’s candidate. It allows the user to interact with Benjamin Watson, Tight end for the New England Patriots, and Reebok employees. The site takes advantage of rich media and really maximizes the brand experience. It also provides candidates with an irresistible entryway to discover Reebok in a whole new light. The site improves brand image allowing us to attract and hire more candidates and our employment brand becomes as appealing as our product brand. Visit our career site at www.reebok.com; click on “Careers”. [continue to next page]

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