Osram Sylvania Case

Osram Sylvania Shines New Light on Recruiting With Automationby Ian Alexander and Stephanie J। AndersonFor more than 100 years, Sylvania has provided lighting solutions in homes, businesses, automobiles and a broad range of specialty applications. As the North American operation of the international lighting company, OSRAM GmbH, Osram Sylvania employs 11,000 people in more than 26 locations.

Manufacturing organizations succeed or fail by the effectiveness of their processes, so when the lighting company identified its recruiting process was costing them unnecessary time and money, it launched an internal study to fully define the issues and ensure it took the right steps to improve.Osram Sylvania was like many other companies in that it gathered e-mail resumes from its Web site and various job boards, then cut, pasted and forwarded them to hiring managers."Our task force found that we were spending six to 10 hours per recruiter per week on just cutting, pasting and forwarding," said Maureen Crawford Hentz, Osram Sylvania manager of talent acquisition.Further, the company did not have a standard process across its 26 remote locations throughout North America. As a government contractor, the organization is subject to Office of Federal Contract and Compliance Program's Internet Applicant guidelines that are nearly impossible to meet without some form of technology. It was clear that a talent acquisition system would need to be put in place.The task was to streamline processes and provide a common structure for all 26 company locations and incorporate external staffing vendors to effectively source and hire great employees.

The System"We spent 13 months analyzing our processes and sourcing a talent acquisition system vendor," said Crawford Hentz.The Osram Sylvania task force looked at every top-tier applicant tracking and talent acquisition system vendor on the market and narrowed it down to six finalists. Crawford Hentz said price was initially a primary driver in the selection of a system, but that Osram Sylvania learned price is not the best indicator of value. Ultimately, the team put price aside and re-evaluated the solutions from a money-is-no- object perspective; its selection remained unchanged.After going through the selection and implementation process, Crawford Hentz said she would advise other professionals with similar decisions to make that, "Above all the detailed requirements, companies need to look at the newness of the vendors' technology and the robustness of their configuration capabilities. "Beyond price and flexibility, Osram Sylvania was highly interested in implementing OFCCP compliance tracking and its integrated hourly and professional recruiting features."Having our hourly and professional recruiting systems integrated into one application was a big factor," said Crawford Hentz. "I was surprised at how many of the vendors we looked at could not provide an integrated hourly and professional hiring solution."ImplementationWorking with a SonicRecruit account manager, the system was tailored to meet Osram Sylvania's specific needs and rolled out to support single sign-on access for 40 HR generalists, as well as 3,200 hiring managers.

The implementation featured a PeopleSoft integration that allows for the status management of Osram Sylvania's 3,200 hiring managers using PeopleSoft as the master database. It also allows job codes and job data to be imported from PeopleSoft and correlated with standardized job requisition templates within the talent acquisition system.Crawford Hentz said responsiveness of the vendor's implementation and support teams was important to the success of the project."Being able to communicate preferences and changes to our account manager and get them incorporated into our implementation was extremely helpful in making the process successful," said Crawford Hentz.Let There Be LightWith roughly 80 open positions per month - a number that continues to climb - managers and recruiters are finding benefits from using an automated recruiting system.

With automated cross posting, position requisitions are automatically posted to Osram Sylvania's internal and external career sites, as well as its five top-producing job boards, and then are tracked by the system. Vigorous use of embedded URL tracking and monitoring results through the system's visual dashboard analytics, cross posting has not only saved the company time, it has increased resume flow."The number of resumes has increased dramatically, and the time we spend posting jobs has decreased exponentially, " said Crawford Hentz.To manage the increased flow of candidates, Osram Sylvania makes good use of the new system's custom candidate screening questions, which can be embedded in the application process for each job. Now when hiring managers log in to the system, candidates are ranked so the most attractive prospects rise to the top of the list.Managers use easy, predefined mail-merge templates to communicate with candidates and set up interviews, and activity is tracked and visible to recruiters and hiring managers alike. Crawford Hentz said she estimates roughly 300 managers make use of the system's features to communicate with candidates and HR, and the rest of the company's managers make less frequent or more basic use of the system.

Osram Sylvania's custom career site integrates with the look and feel of its Web site and supports hourly and professional application flows. The site also supports Osram Sylvania's employee referral program by tracking employee referrals that come in through the external Web site and the company's intranet.The new talent acquisition system allows Osram Sylvania to standardize and streamline its internal recruiting efforts, and the associated vendor management module has allowed it to more effectively work with staffing vendors. The module allows vendors to submit candidates through a special portal and track their progress in the same way internal recruiters do."The system has allowed us to require that external agencies adhere to our standards," said Crawford Hentz. "Without exception, that means working with us through the vendor portal."Osram Sylvania requires external agencies to submit their candidates through a common portal.

This reduces miscommunication and back-and-forth phone calls because now vendors and recruiters can track candidates throughout the process together. Most importantly, it eliminates duplicate candidates, so there is no question about which vendor submitted a candidate first. Within a few weeks of implementing the vendor module, Crawford Hentz said she already had identified instances of duplicate candidates submitted by staffing vendors.Proving the System's WorthOsram Slyvania's system features an analytics dashboard and built-in reporting to keep track of key statistics such as time to hire and EEO compliance. The company also has developed additional specialized reports."Our new talent acquisition system has become the exoskeleton of our entire OFCCP compliance program," said Crawford Hentz.The system also allows Osram Sylvania to monitor diversity at every stage of the hiring process.

This way, managers can identify if certain employment classes are dropping off, and if so, at what stage in the process is this happening so that they can adapt recruiting methods accordingly. Furthermore, regular diversity reports that used to take several hours now can be completed with four mouse clicks.Crawford Hentz said, initially, she had several concerns about implementing the new system, and most of these centered on the importance of service and flexibility in the success or failure of a talent acquisition system implementation. She said it pays to check references for prospective vendors.It took 13 months to source Osram Sylvania's vendor and just 90 days to implement the solution, but the time spent up-front identifying needs and vetting vendors led to a smooth and fast implementation."Case studies and references were extremely helpful for Osram Sylvania as we researched solutions," she said.The Bottom LineOsram Sylvania estimates savings of approximately $4,000 a week by eliminating its old practice of cutting, pasting and e-mailing resumes. The company's time to hire has decreased dramatically, allowing hiring managers to identify good candidates and move them through the hiring process more quickly. The quality of the candidate pool has increased through the use of prescreening questions and the ability to easily attract candidates through multiple sources and track source effectiveness.

In addition, for an environmentally conscious company such as Osram Sylvania, one major impact has been the fact that its new system allows it to eliminate thousands of pounds of wasted paper annually. This is a benefit that not only saves money and helps the environment, but also supports Osram Sylvania's Global Care sustainability program and bolsters its employment brand."Prospective employees like the fact that Osram Sylvania cares about the environment, " said Crawford Hentz. "So by using an automated talent acquisition solution to reduce paper consumption, we are following through on a core value that helps us attract and retain employees."


References:
[Author introduction] Ian Alexander is vice president for talent management software developer Cytiva/SonicRecruit . He was president of CCHKnowledgePoint, where he was instrumental in developing some of the software industry's first on-demand HR and performance management applications. Stephanie J. Anderson is chief corporate spokesperson at Osram Sylvania