High profile brewing company DB Breweries operates four breweries and 14 sales and administration offices around New Zealand and employs over 500 people.

The company is notable for its successful sales and marketing campaigns that have brought about significant growth in key beer brands such as Tui, Heineken and Monteith’s.

The satirical Tui “Yeah right” family of advertisements have been particular favourites of DB fans, often targeting controversial current events and appearing on prominent billboards throughout the country.

Job seekers may have noticed this amusing Tui newspaper advertisement during 2004 that cheekily stated “We’ll keep your CV on file. Yeah right.”

The advertisement was part of an employment branding exercise by DB to drive job seekers to its newly implemented online recruitment website.

March 2005

A new model for recruitment
In early 2004, DB undertook a review of its recruitment function and developed a new recruiting strategy, with key drivers being to lower overall cost and reduce the administration time required of hiring managers.

The new strategy has a place for both niche recruitment agencies and an e-recruitment tool designed to act as DB’s ‘electronic recruiting agency’. DB recognises that niche agencies are still an important part of their recruiting mix, and focuses on developing close relationships with providers of specialist talent.

The desire by DB to move away from generalist agencies and manage as much recruitment as possible in-house reflects a growing trend among New Zealand companies, as HR departments continue to feel pressure to cut costs and capitalise on the strength or ‘pull’ of their employment brands.

After a capability review of e-recruitment solutions was conducted, StaffCV was chosen by DB as fit for purpose, largely due to its flexible and open approach. Recruitment Consultant Kelly Townsend was brought on board in June 2004 to implement the StaffCV e-recruitment solution and provide a recruiting centre of expertise for DB hiring managers.

Keeping CVs on file?
The fine print in DB’s “We’ll keep your CV on file” advert reads “No seriously, we will. Let us know what type of role you’re looking for and we WILL contact you when a job comes up that’s a match”.

When you submit your CV to DB, you can be assured that it won’t be ‘filed’ in the bin, or left to age like a fine wine in a filing cabinet or bottom drawer. While information from paper-based CVs can still be manually entered into the new system, the majority of applications are entered directly by candidates via the recruitment website, and captured in a relational database for future searching and matching to open vacancies.

Talent Pools on the new recruitment website www.jobs.db.co.nz have been used by over 40 percent of DB job seekers to express speculative interest in future roles within areas of the business, such as Brewery, Marketing, Sales and Supply Chain. The philosophy, says Townsend, is “to never turn away talent that has expressed an interest in working for our brand, and to create a simple process for accepting unsolicited CVs”.

StaffCV Marketing Manager Gayleen Robinson explains the rationale for using Talent Pools: “the most frustrating message a candidate can read on a recruitment website is “sorry, we have no job openings, but please keep checking this page”. That is precisely your moment to capture their interest, and you can be assured that an active job seeker won’t be motivated to return”.

StaffCV’s unique Career Passport technology allows job seekers to register with DB once, and return to update their details or apply for any number of jobs in the future. Its biggest advantage is that it allows job seekers to automatically populate their key CV data into the DB site if they have already created a Career Passport on another StaffCV-powered website.

Talent Pools act like jobs, in that they can have detailed questionnaires associated with them, to capture valuable information about a person’s skills and experience in a particular area – often information that is not easily gleaned from a CV. This information can be quickly and easily searched using the StaffCV tools, and suitable applicants can be asked to apply for vacancies as they arise using an email invitational process.

The key difference between an invitational process and the dated job-alert function is that a two-way mutual interest match is made. Only pre-qualified, quality job seekers that have already expressed their interest in working for the company in a particular type of role will receive invitations.

It’s about time
The new StaffCV solution has given DB hiring managers more choice in the way they recruit. Previously, they had two choices when recruiting: manage all the work themselves, at an estimated 8 to 14 hours per job filled, or alternatively, enlist an agency at a cost of around 15 percent of a successful candidate’s salary and 8 hours of their own time.

Hiring managers can use StaffCV’s internet-based console to interact directly with the system, and view live data as candidates apply. They now spend on average just one hour reviewing candidates and sorting them into categories or shortlists.

The time savings achieved by some twenty hiring managers are estimated to be over 40 hours per month – that’s 12 whole working weeks every year! There are other obvious efficiencies such as the reduction of paper and the elimination of double-handling and duplication of CVs between people involved in recruiting.

One South Island hiring manager regarded his first long-list provided via the StaffCV solution as “the best he had ever had, either from direct or agency sourcing”. Rather than spend hours sorting through CVs that arrived via post and email, he could “simply login and make a choice”.

A successful formula
DB hiring managers were previously involved in the end-to-end process of recruiting; from writing and placing job advertisements right through to screening and communicating with applicants, preparing contracts and making induction arrangements.

The move to an online system complemented by an in-house centre of recruiting expertise has been a successful formula. The administration of the system, Townsend estimates, requires half a day per week. This involves posting jobs to the website, providing long-lists and shortlists to hiring managers where requested and communicating with applicants.

Diversity
The StaffCV system is being used to recruit for jobs across the whole company, both within head office and at sales offices and breweries. Townsend explains “we were initially targeting salaried jobs for this technology, but have realised that a growing number of our workforce, both in the office and in the brewery are now online”. A recent night-shift operator role advertised in the local South Auckland press offered both postal and online options for applying. An encouraging 75 percent of responses came via the online recruitment system.

Feedback has been excellent, with candidates reporting the system to be “really easy” to use. The use of email communication is also seen as a very effective mechanism for providing quick responses to candidates.

Final word
“Our new platform and HR support structure allows hiring managers to get on with their jobs, and gives DB the ability to open the door to prospective employees by letting the recruitment website act as our own electronic recruiting agency” – Kelly Townsend, DB Breweries.

For more information about this case study contact
Gayleen Robinson
09 921 3130
sales@staffcv.com
www.staffcv.com