Centric Consulting’s Talent Acquisition team recently won a Consulting Magazine award for updated recruiting and retention efforts.
Recently, Consulting Magazine honored Centric Consulting as a Rising Star for its Recruiting and Retention program. The recognition comes on the heels of a major initiative that the Talent Acquisition (TA) experts undertook three years ago to centralize recruiting efforts.
The Initiative involved aligning recruiters spread across Centric Consulting’s business units, operating groups, and service offerings under one centralized function. Under the new leadership of National Talent Acquisition Lead Danielle Maldonado, the TA team was able to analyze the various groups’ existing internal and external processes, technology platforms, third-party recruiting agencies, and improvement opportunities.
However, the effort was about more than streamlining.
“Centric has always experienced retention rates that were above industry standards,” Maldonado said. “But in addition to retaining employees, we also needed to focus on recruiting top talent from broader, more diverse pools.
The analysis also showed that more consistent hiring practices and recruiting programs would help the company diversify its talent pool. This approach enables our organization to actively seek out and attract candidates from underrepresented groups, further contributing to diversity initiatives. As more people with different experiences and fresh perspectives enter the company, we create more opportunities for unmatched experiences.
How is TA doing it? Maldonado points to three key initiatives that continue to have a tremendous impact: a new recruiting metrics dashboard, enhancements to the employee referral bonus program, and an unmatched candidate experience survey.
Let’s take a look at each.
Recruiting Metrics Dashboard
TA worked with Centric’s IT department to build a custom recruiting metrics dashboard. The dashboard uses data from their applicant tracking system to provide visibility into key metrics like speed to hire, how much time candidates spend in each stage of the recruiting process, funnel quality, productivity, and cost per hire.
The team has also implemented guidelines and best practices that use this data to ensure even greater speed by decreasing the number of interviews and enabling more timely feedback. As a result, Centric has nearly cut its overall time-to-fill in half.
Enhanced 2023 Employee Referral Bonus Program
Recognizing that current employees are a great source of new candidates, the TA team assigned an internal TA team member to facilitate and manage the Referral Program in 2023. They are responsible for engaging with each candidate referral while maintaining an employee feedback loop that updates referring employees on their referrals’ status.
In addition, TA used monthly employee communications to share open opportunities and provide referral bonus reminders for referring employees. The team also partnered with the company’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to further widen the net and increase the diversity of the applicant pool. Monthly KPIs then track progress on diversity referral goals.
So far, the enhanced referral program has grown the number of additional referrals by 430 between 2022 and year-end 2023, a 40 percent increase. Significantly, 64 percent of those referrals were diverse hires.
Unmatched Candidate Experience Survey
Finally, TA wanted to capture each applicant’s experience. They created an automated survey, delivered via an applicant tracking system, that goes to all candidates who have interviewed with Centric. The survey questions capture meaningful and measurable feedback about the recruiting experience while identifying improvement opportunities.
To date, TA has an average of 4.64 out of 5 on the candidate experience survey results, with a 17 percent increased completion rate. TA has now implemented more than a dozen other process improvements and best practices across the team, enabling Centric to become more agile and scalable as the organization continues to grow.
For example, TA recently added The Centric Talent Network to the Careers page of the website. More than a job notification tool, the Talent Network introduces potential new employees to company culture, news, and more through targeted communications.
“While it’s great for our TA team to be recognized for their progress, we must remain focused on creating unmatched experiences for everyone who applies at Centric and for our current employees,” said Centric CEO Larry English. “We will continue to evaluate and evolve things like our recruiting metrics and other talent programs with a focus on making hiring practices more consistent and equitable. We’re lucky to have the resources and energy to commit to this important work. In today’s tight hiring market, it will set us apart from our competitors.”
