Waste Management is a North American waste management, comprehensive waste and environmental services company.

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?

Recently we have implemented several initiatives to improve candidate experience, including expanding our internal careers team to allow candidates to get assistance, starting with the application and running through the hiring process. Our careers team has improved its response times, so we are resolving candidate issues faster, allowing candidates to feel engaged and valued.

In addition, we have further implemented the use of Montage-automated video and voice recorded interviews. This has improved the process because we no longer require candidates to schedule and travel for an inperson interview for an initial screening. These automated interviews allow more flexibility for candidates to decide when is an optimal time to interview, as well as streamlining the process for our internal stakeholders by reducing the coordination of calendar availability for initial screens.

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 want Waste Management to be an employer of choice and to provide white-glove experience throughout the hiring journey, which begins at the candidate level. Data showed that our candidates were spending 45 minutes or more on average simply applying, and we lost many candidates during the process, leading to many incomplete applications.

We constantly re-engage with business partners and other departments to ensure we provide a white-glove experience, not only to actual candidates but to passive and potential candidates and internal stakeholders as well.

In 2019, we are maintaining a level of excellence that began in 2018 with the new apply form, minimizing the amount of time that a candidate would need to spend in applying for a job.

We strongly believe this is an indication that we value the candidate experience, because we originally took a 45-minute apply form and transformed it into a 5-minute application.

3. How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization? How did you demonstrate the importance of candidate experience?

Waste Management has embraced a commitment of “Success with Integrity,” doing the right thing the right way. Talent has embraced that commitment and is dedicated to doing the right things the right way in our organization as well. We have expanded our careers team, which shows a commitment to our candidates. We are also constantly re-engaging with our business partners and other departments to ensure that we provide a white-glove experience, not only to our actual candidates but also to passive and potential candidates and internal stakeholders.

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 recruiter and hiring manager behaviors?

In addition to the annual Talent Board survey, we monitor our analytics for our careers team to ensure that they are actively resolving candidate questions and concerns. Our careers team ensures that we meet the service level agreement so that we are constantly engaged with candidates.

The recruiting process is calculated in various ways —we look at time to offer monthly to see how quickly candidates are being spoken to and how quickly requisitions are being closed.

The recruiting process is calculated in various ways — we look at time to offer monthly to see how quickly candidates are being spoken to and how quickly requisitions are being closed.

We also send weekly reports to management to ensure that there are no candidates that are stuck in the recruiting process that should have been dispositioned or should be moving forward in the process. And we send weekly activity reports, where our team members provide updates on what is occurring on each req and what is occurring on each candidate within the req.

To demonstrate financial impact, there is a cost associated with each job open. With the cost we also recommend that the hiring manager consistently provide interview feedback to provide higher ROI.