BASF
Headquartered in Florham Park, N.J., BASF Corporation is the North American affiliate of BASF SE, Ludwigshafen, Germany, with a portfolio organized into six segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions.
1. What changes have you made to your candidate experience recently? What
improvements are you most proud of? How do you know that your changes are making a difference?
We have implemented new tools (Indeed and Glassdoor) to decrease the amount of time that the candidate spends through the process. Also, we enhanced job descriptions with a job ads format to make it more interesting to candidates. By implementing this, we get more reach and more clicks, filling the candidate funnel.
We are proud to improve the face-to-face experience. Since we implemented the hiring event, candidates are meeting face to face in the first contact. Proper candidate experience brings proper talent to the organization. Also, getting the business to understand the value of the candidate’s experience and working together to improve it.
We know these changes are making a difference by looking at our pipeline: It is filled, and candidates are moving through the funnel more steps than they did before. More candidates are applying to our job openings.
2. Why did you decide to make changes to how candidates were being treated? What data or evidence prompted you to make a change?
We noticed the top of the funnel was not full, and there was a falloff in the middle of it (interest and candidates applying). CandE data and surveys implemented by the company revealed improvements needed.
In response, we implemented new tools and did market research by region to have better keywords to reach candidate interest. This helps us to improve our job ads to make them more searchable and affordable for candidates. Implementing this, as well as changing the assessment process, moved candidates from the middle of the funnel.
3. How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader
organization? How did you demonstrate the importance of candidate experience?
We showed the teams the importance of process optimization by providing results, like more hires in a short time to support them.
We demonstrated the importance of candidate experience by implementing new products that brought new and more qualified candidates and moved the candidates through the pipeline.
4. How do you measure candidate experience? How do you report on your recruiting process? How do you use that data to demonstrate financial impact as well as manage hiring manager behaviors?
We measured candidate experience with different tools such as: CandE Award data, internal surveys and candidate comments on public forums such as Glassdoor.
We have recently determined there is a correlation between the kind of candidate experience received and the experience of the employee as they enter the organization. Given this trend, we have recently started to take a look at first-year employee engagement.
We have implemented biweekly Talent Attraction Forum calls with the broader HR community to keep them aligned with industry trends and candidate behaviors that can influence the recruiting process. During these calls, we align with data and best practices in comparison to our overall candidate commentary. During these calls, we report on topics such as market analysis, candidate care data, open req reports, barriers to entry, best practice, cost to hire and ROI.
As we begin to shift our strategy to include more talent marketing, we can calculate key areas of impact. Our new approach has led us to identify a decrease in agency spend overall. Hiring events we have used have significantly lowered our cost to hire as well as decreased our time to fill on many of our manufacturing positions.
During meetings with our hiring managers, we now present market data and other candidate behavior insights. In addition, we are beginning to advise with supporting campaign analytics from previous use cases. We have found, with a consultative approach supported by budget optimization opportunities, candidate reach and expected apply data, our hiring teams have been more inclined to try new methods and certainly more focused on how these methods positively affect our candidate experience.
