Attracting the best new hires is fraught with a variety of challenges. It is costly and time-consuming to recruit candidates and screen hundreds of resumes and equally difficult finding the perfect candidate who fits the culture of your organization. Fortunately, the growth of artificial intelligence-based (AI) personalization technology—Forrester Research states that 89% of digital businesses are investing in personalization technology—has vastly improved how HR managers recruit candidates and make hiring decisions.
Brose, the fourth-largest family owned automotive supplier in the world with more than 25,000 employees and $6.5 billion-plus in revenue, wanted to strengthen its hiring practices with an emphasis on using technology that focused on segmentation and personalization. Three of the main goals of the program, dubbed “Relaunch Brose.com,” were to:
- Reduce the number of applicant bounces
- Raise prospect-employee conversion rates
- Increase employee retention
In addition, the company wanted to make the hiring process more efficient by creating a mobile-first, SEO-based (search engine optimization) strategy to help attract the highest quality IT professionals. The company’s existing content management system (CMS) was outdated and inefficient and made it difficult to support HR initiatives.
“We needed a technology solution that was easy to use and scalable since we were growing at a rapid rate,” explains Susanne Dumbacher-Geyer, Analyst HR Websites, Personnel Services, Brose Group. “We felt it was important to leverage AI-based personalization technology to help us improve identifying and prioritizing potential new hires early in the recruitment process. We also wanted to deliver targeted content that was tailored to each potential new hire.”
Requirements to Drive HR Campaign
Brose is a multinational organization with 64 locations in 24 countries, which meant it faced a variety of unique challenges when starting its “Relaunch Brose.com” program, including:
- Multilingual support
- Communication of information across multiple social media channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, XING, and WeChat
- Seamless integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud
These technical challenges led Brose to select a CMS that was quick and easy to deploy, offered superior integration capabilities, and was scalable to adapt as the company grew. After carefully examining multiple options, Brose selected the FirstSpirit Digital Experience Platform (DXP), based on hybrid headless CMS technology, to drive the recruitment campaign. Brose chose FirstSpirit based in part on its AI-powered personalization and analytics capabilities, as well as its enterprise class hybrid headless CMS.
At the outset of the project, Brose determined it was important to personalize content with prospects, understand online behavior of different target groups, and incorporate geolocation aspects of searches—all in a digitally safe setting addressing full privacy and compliance regulations. The HR team created goals, including hiring conversion rates, based on key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to measure the impact of the new technology and to improve its hiring practices.
“What we liked about FirstSpirit DXP was that it provided us personnel data that was based on user behavior,” notes Dumbacher-Geyer. “The AI-based personalization technology helped us by identifying and prioritizing potential new hires early in the recruitment process and allowed us to identify which content would resonate with each potential new hire.”
Content Management System Powers HR Campaign
Deploying the FirstSpirit hybrid headless CMS allows members of the HR team to operate independently in their regions and helps them leverage data to increase personalized outreach to prospects. HR managers, content editors, and administrators leverage the technology without expensive training programs or relying on IT developers. The HR team easily tailors content targeted for each potential employee based on his or her capabilities and interests.
By selecting a hybrid headless CMS that prioritizes segmentation and personalization, Brose has:
- Increased prospect-employee conversion rates by 100 percent
- Reduced time-to-hire by basing recruitment efforts on segmentation and personalization
- Implemented a mobile-first, SEO-based strategy to streamline the hiring process
Utilizing FirstSpirit DXP for their Website and other touchpoints has helped the small HR team at Brose personalize content that is tailored to each potential new hire’s interests, raised productivity in the HR department, and provided the company with new hires who are committed to becoming long-term employees.
Michael Gerard is the chief marketing officer of e-Spirit. He can be reached at Gerard@e-spirit.com
