Recruiting Firm HCI Sources its Own People with Standout Jobs
HCI (Hogan Consulting Inc.) is a recruiting and retention firm based in Omaha, Nebraska. The company is just a year old but has already grown to open a second office in Sandusky, Ohio. HCI has dedicated itself to helping its clients make better use of talent and technology. To do that, HCI developed a stellar recruiting and staffing team; incubated a talent consulting function; assists clients with technology planning and implementation; offers custom training and integration and prides itself on “practicing what they preach” in bringing innovation to the recruiting industry.
Challenge
Although HCI’s core business is sourcing talent for its clients, the company hadn’t implemented a solid recruiting strategy of its own. Competing for good people in the upper Midwest is difficult when prospects are constantly drawn to the more traditional technical capitals on the West and East coasts. HCI’s lack of a formalized process for attracting candidates left the family-owned business constantly short-handed during a critical period of rapid growth.
“We used all the traditional routes,” said Maren Hogan, managing partner, HCI. “The quality of the candidates coming through the job boards alone was all over the map. Many didn’t have the technology experience we needed. You would think a recruiting firm would do a better job of sourcing its own talent, but we didn’t have a really well-developed process for employer branding and vetting candidates.”
Additionally, HCI lacked a way to brand itself as a strong, established yet cutting edge company in what is traditionally not known as a tech-savvy part of the country. Creating this image was critical to the success of the firm, as competition is tough enough in a down market and HCI is a small player amongst much larger, national competitors.
Solution
HCI wanted to brand itself better to prospective employees, establish collaborative internal processes for moving those candidates through the selection process and portray itself as a larger, more established entity. They turned to Standout Jobs, a leading provider of web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts and its employment branding and job marketing platform for help.
“Standout Jobs is a ‘quick start for employer branding,’” said Hogan. “We were able to get a fully-functional and professional employment portal up in just a few minutes, with no technical knowledge needed. It does a great job of portraying the company’s culture and has attracted much higher quality candidates than we were previously able to find.”
Hogan’s well read blog “Big O Recruiting” is a staple of the site, as are the company perks and the “Five Reasons to Work at HCI,” all of which help the company attract high-value candidates looking to find a company with a culture and values similar to their own. Internally, HCI’s executive team use Standout Jobs’ collaborative features to discuss and rate candidates as they come through the site.
Results
Since starting with the Standout Jobs employment site, HCI has posted four positions resulting in three great hires. The fourth position was later absorbed into another, resulting in a 100 percent successful hire rate using the Standout Jobs site thus far. Further, Hogan and her partners now have a formalized process for vetting candidates.
We didn’t use any of the paid job boards, but we did use Standout Jobs to automatically post our positions to the free ones. Candidates who clicked our ad were brought directly to the Standout Jobs portal, where they entered the process and we could work with each other internally on determining whether or not they were a great fit.
Hogan notes the candidates coming through the Standout Jobs portal present themselves differently from those coming from other sources. “It’s really obvious that they want to learn more about HCI’s business. They’re better versed, more web savvy, more apt to do the things necessary to brand themselves better to us after seeing the professional level of the HCI site. When our offers are given, people are more likely to accept. Standout Jobs has helped us achieve an overall more polished brand and that makes a difference in the mind of the candidate when weighing offers.”
Using the Standout Jobs recruitment communication platform has made HCI more competitive in its market, more likely to be the employer a high-value candidate chooses when they have multiple options, and provides the firm with a formalized solution for internally vetting candidates while saving valuable resources.
