Polk Recruits Faster, Reaches More Top Candidates and Saves Over $150,000
R. L. Polk & Co. is the premier provider of automotive information and marketing solutions to the automotive world and its related industries—auto and commercial vehicle manufacturers and dealers, aftermarket companies, insurance companies, finance companies, media companies, advertising agencies, consulting organizations, government agencies and market research firms.
Polk collects and interprets global data and provides business expertise to assist its customers with important market issues like understanding market positioning, identifying trends, building brand loyalty and building a competitive advantage.
The privately-held, 140 year-old Polk is based in Southfield, Michigan, USA and has operations in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom.
CHALLENGE
Polk’s business of modeling data for automotive manufacturers and the industries built around them requires the firm to continuously recruit for new positions. Polk hires aggressively from sources as diverse as college campuses, competitors, other data modeling firms and technical niches. The company’s managers are heavily relied upon to drive much of the recruiting.
Polk has always been proud of its employee culture, and its value to the company’s recruitment efforts. The average tenure is 17 years, with a voluntary turnover rate of just one to two percent. Employees describe Polk’s workplace environment as being “very down to earth, with no agenda or politics.” And, “It’s a jeans and t-shirts, laid-back culture.” Polk offers benefits like a dry cleaning service, personal assistants, childcare, on-site healthy lifestyle seminars, chair massages and even “Wii-Lympics.” But with all this going for it, Polk still had hiring challenges which kept it from being as competitive as it would like to be.
Some of the more pressing problems keeping Polk from finding high-value talent for its business included:
- Reaching passive talent. Polk does a lot of workforce planning to determine which upcoming projects need what types of positions filled. The company identifies those current or future needs—such as Java developers and sales people—and aggressively starts recruiting in communities where that talent is most likely to congregate, like user groups and professional organizations.
- Getting in front of a broad talent pool as cost-effectively as possible. Polk realized it had no uniform method of tapping into all the talent available to it without having to spend a lot of capital.
- How to source talent from the very desirable Generation X and Y crowds without having to crisscross the country’s college campuses.
SOLUTION
Polk’s Manager of Talent Acquisition, Jay Marshall turned to Standout Jobs’ Recruitment Communication Platform, a turn-key, interactive career site which uses the latest web tools to communicate with potential employees by showcasing Polk’s culture and people.
After just 40 minutes Jay had a working career site which he uses to strategically augment Polk’s traditional jobs page. The platform lets Jay post a variety of topics relevant to Polk’s employment offerings, including a bulletin board where the latest wellness program offerings are listed; hiring plans; available open positions; lists of perks; health benefits; profiles of company executives; a blog and even photos.
“We looked at other offerings, but we really wanted something interactive,” said Marshall. “The tools we assessed were fine but would still have left the company with a static site, and we knew early on that static sites turn away potential talent. Standout Jobs lets us brand ourselves to candidates and reach them where they live online. It was also the easiest to use and came with the best service and tech support. The return on our minimal investment of time has been phenomenal.”
RESULTS
Polk’s Standout Jobs career site is the company’s go-to solution for solving its most vexing staffing needs. Since its launch six months ago, Marshall has made 10 critical hires using the software. The savings on recruiting fees alone has exceeded Polk’s expectations for return, but the real value became clear when Polk assessed savings on indirect costs. Time to cold call, networking and pouring over general applicant emails (many of which were from candidates that offered no value to the company’s needs) dropped or was optimized using Standout Jobs.
“Our savings on recruiters’ fees exceeds $150,000 in my estimation, but that’s not really the biggest benefit,” said Marshall. “The time I spend to source a candidate has shrunk. And, we’ve made use of video and blogs to supplement our main career portal. We use Standout Jobs to specifically target Generation X and Y candidates where they live online, and for our overall branding initiatives. That’s meant a huge savings to us in both time and money. We don’t have to attend as many college recruitment fairs and for those that we do attend, we post our career events and campus activities in advance so there’s less work to do for promotion.”
Polk’s culture embraces the saying “work smarter, not harder.” In keeping with that motif, Standout Jobs allows the company to be creative in its recruiting activities. Marshall taps into the knowledge within Polk’s staff and its corporate communications department to open up the talent pool. The platform allows him to post to a myriad of job boards across the web and provide potential candidates with a learning experience they don’t get with other companies’ static career sites. “We’re reaching further than before to find the talent Polk needs where they live online,” he says. “And, were building a pipeline of potential candidates that matches the forecasting we’ve already done.”
Marshall continued, “It’s a great tool; it’s part of our recruiting playbook. I plan on using this for a long time to come. I’ve also shared it with others in recruiting. We’re part of a dynamic but small community, relatively speaking, and we like to trade best practices. Standout Jobs is a potent new weapon for sourcing high value candidates in what has become a tight economy talent war.”
