I didn’t have time to list all of the technologies we’re using at EA that affect hiring so I focused on one part of our hiring process – the candidate experience. In 2018, this was a key focus area for EA’s Talent Acquisition team and I’m excited to share an insight to some of the success we’ve seen.
To improve our candidate experience we broke it down to understand where exactly we could be better. Above you can see the candidate experience journey boiled down into five stages, I will be talking about four tools and how they have made a positive impact on this journey in each step before a candidate is hired.
ENTELO
I have been an Entelo advocate for a few years now as I’ve been using this recruiting platform since before I joined Electronic Arts. Essentially, Entelo adds marketing CRM features to a sourcing tool. It’s an aggregator that pulls a candidates total online presence into one searchable profile and this is so helpful in a bunch of ways:
- Entelo finds email addresses (don’t worry, using this feature is GDPR compliant)
- It finds people who don’t have LinkedIn profiles
- You can search other social networks that aren’t typically used for finding talent
As Entelo syncs with Outlook it means it can recognise who has read your email and replied to your email, this allows for automated follow-ups which is a recruiters dream. And Entelo allows for up to two follow-up emails which in some cases has doubled my response rate.
Entelo has also helped diversify our talent pools by allowing searches to be filtered by women, black, hispanic, asian or veteran. If we have a balanced talent pool, it should result in diverse hires.
And since I started at EA in September 2017, 23% of my hires have been candidates I discovered through Entelo.
LINKEDIN ENTERPRISE
In 2018 EA signed up for LinkedIn Enterprise, this is what I like to call “full-blown LinkedIn”. It not only allows EA to have an unlimited amount of LinkedIn Recruiter seats but also Hiring Managers and their teams have access to the LinkedIn Recruiter product. But what’s really exciting is access to LinkedIn’s Talent Insights and how that has helped us craft targeted content.
With Talent Insights we have a better understanding of who is engaging with our content and how to engage with targeted talent. Very quickly we can start creating content that increases engagement, positive brand sentiment and the click-through rate to our careers page (www.ea.com/careers). In October 2018 we received 1.2M+ impressions on our LinkedIn content and surpassed 400,000 followers.
NEW CAREERS SITE
In 2018 we launched our new careers site which is significantly superior to its predecessor in many ways.
When building the new careers site, we knew we needed to make it easier to find and apply to our jobs. We have decreased the time (and clicks) it takes to get from www.ea.com/careers to the individual application while improving the application completion rate.
We implemented a smarter search engine which will find what you searched and recommend similar positions too.
EA’s culture is now clearly visible. There’s more content from our marketing team as well as EA’s own employees and the site is easy to navigate. In my talk I highlighted the EA Vancouver careers page, it’s an excellent example of employee created content (curated by our Employment Branding team). The pictures on the site are from an employee who’s an avid photographer and the Living In Vancouver online booklet is written by Vancouver locals.
Lastly, EA we created Communities based off 12 of our most popular job families. Candidates can sign up to these Communities and will receive regular content specific for that group. For example, if you sign up to our AI / Machine Learning community you will receive updates on what EA is doing in this field as well as career opportunities when they become available.
SIDEKICK
Sidekick is an app that EA created to help candidates through the interview process. I can’t share screenshots (our VP of Talent Acquisition describes it as our “secret sauce”) but I can say that Sidekick gives candidates easy access to interview advice, their schedule, bios on their interviewers, Slack integration to provide direct contact to the Talent Acquisition team, directions to the office and content embedded from our careers page.
When creating Sidekick we laid out four goals. We wanted to develop a mobile-optimised application that:
- Helps candidates know what to expect during the interview phase, aiding in smooth processing and allowing candidates to focus on content.
- Connects with candidates in a personalised way.
- Drives candidate engagement, connection to EA culture and insight into working at EA (help answer the questions “why EA?”)
- Differentiates the EA interview process from other companies, providing competitive advantage to EA when attracting talent.
We first tested Sidekick in North America on a handful of roles and the results were incredible (see slide above).
And, of course, I ended with a shameless plug. Thanks for reading!
Joe Burridge 