How Celonis hires critical talent 2X faster using the Requisition Value Model
In this white paper, SocialTalent's Johnny Campbell speaks to Kevin Blair, VP of Talent Acquisition at Celonis, on how to maximize the value of your recruitment efforts — increasing the speed and quality of key hires by using Kevin's Requisition Value Model. By weighting recruitment efforts and budget toward the most valuable and complex positions, talent acquisition teams can ramp up hiring at scale without increasing their cost base.
Using the SocialTalent platform has been one of the keys to our success. It helped empower my TA team with all the hiring training they needed to excel at their jobs and to drive results.
When looking at a business, we know that some roles add more value than others. And some roles are also harder to recruit.
By weighting your recruitment efforts and budget to the most valuable and complex positions, you're ensuring that these important roles are hired for quickly and with quality in mind. Prioritizing in this manner then forces a company to optimize recruitment elsewhere. This results in improved metrics in your hiring endeavours across the board — all without having to increase overall investment.
In this white paper, SocialTalent's Johnny Campbell speaks to Kevin Blair, VP of Talent Acquisition at Celonis, on how to maximize the value of your recruitment efforts, increasing the speed and quality of key hires by using Kevin's Requisition Value Model.
About Kevin Blair
Kevin Blair is the VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Celonis and Co-Founder of Join Talent. Committed to using innovative and data-driven methods to improve recruitment, Kevin is a veteran of the industry having previously worked in global hiring leadership roles at IBM and Cisco.
How do you ramp up hiring at scale without increasing your cost base?
As we begin to emerge from the global pandemic and subsequent recession, many recruiting teams are finding that they are busier than ever. Some are finally seeing an uptick after months of cutting back, whereas many others have been very busy the whole time in sectors such as online gaming, consumer goods and distribution. Whatever the reason for this burst in hiring activity, many talent acquisition leaders are facing a new challenge: how do you ramp up hiring without ramping up your cost base at the same rate?
In normal times, as companies ramped up, hiring budgets would follow and leaders would start scaling out their team by adding more tools and technology to support this growth. New requisitions were being opened every day and allocated to the next available recruiter as the team ramped up sourcing and delivery to meet deadlines.
For many leaders, 2021 is different. CFOs are more cautious after presiding over huge cutbacks and efficiency drives. Having been forced to prioritize across the business in 2020, the executive team is now asking the entire business to act in the same way.
While we know that all requisitions are not created equally, do we actually apply that knowledge into how our teams recruit?
We spoke to Kevin Blair, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Celonis, the Enterprise Management System unicorn that is growing impressively right now, to understand how he allocates resources in his growing team to achieve maximum efficiency, speed and quality. He should know all about scaling on a budget having previously led a 1,500 person team at IBM and over 300 recruiters in Cisco prior to that.
The platform gave Kevin's TA team all the hiring training they needed to excel at their jobs and drive results.
Direct access to industry leaders and proven frameworks, like the Requisition Value Model, to sharpen recruitment strategy.
Methodology the team could apply directly to hire critical talent faster without increasing cost base.
Requisition Value Model
In his previous role, and currently in Celonis, Kevin developed what he calls the Requisition Value Model to help him distribute recruitment efforts.
In its essence, the model allocates more resources to requisitions that are of high business value with a high degree of hiring complexity, and less resources to lower value requisitions that are less complex to hire for.
With the exact same overall resources, you can achieve massive improvements in speed and quality for your most important reqs without sacrificing overall speed and quality across the business. In short, more from less (or, more from the same to be precise!).
- The model starts with business value: each role within an organization is not created equal — some drive significantly more value and are therefore more "important" to hire for. This is true of every business, whether food delivery, banking or deeptech, and whether it hires 100 people a year or 50,000.
The first thing you need to do is organize all of your roles into three categories: high, medium or low priority. High priority roles are often revenue generating roles, leadership roles or critical customer facing roles. Low priority roles are typically more administrative, manual or repeatable.
However, it's important to point out that one company's low priority role could be another's high priority. This has to be done on a company-by-company basis. An increasing number of large organizations have begun formerly splitting out critical roles from non-critical roles.
In fact, the International Standards Organization recently published the first ever global standard on HR reporting, entitled ISO 30414 — "Human resource management - guidelines for internal and external human capital reporting" in which it recommends that organizations, large and small, publish metrics across employee engagement, learning and development, diversity and inclusion and talent acquisition not just for the whole organization, but also for what it calls "critical roles."
Having done this several times, Kevin has some key recommendations on how you approach this.
It is essential that the business defines what is critical, not talent acquisition. Ideally you start with the most senior leader in the organization, the CEO or Managing Partner or equivalent. At the highest level they will clearly be able to tell you if, for example, sales is more critical than operations or if engineering is more critical than sales.
If you just asked each leader about their own team, every single leader would tell you that their team is the most critical.
Once you have clarity over which parts of the organization are most vital, you can move on to discussing with each functional head which roles within their team are most critical. This gives you a broad overview of critical functions and critical roles within each function. From here we can start segmenting roles along the axis of "business value."
While Kevin recommends you group everything into one of three buckets: high, medium and low value, he adds a note of caution in terms of messaging. "Never use language like "medium and low value" internally as nobody wants to describe a colleague's role as "low value." In the past I've used descriptions like "standard, configured and custom" to ensure everyone buys in."
Typically the business will rank around 40% of all roles as critical or "high value."
It would be tempting to stop here and allocate your resources appropriately, but you are only half done at this point.
- The second axis that Kevin looks at is "hiring complexity." In short, if a role is critical but "easy" to hire for, it doesn't deserve an oversized share of your resources. Why? Well, it's "easy" to hire for, so why waste the resources? But what defines whether something is easy or complex?
Although Kevin firmly believes that the business should define the criticality or importance of roles, it's the job of talent acquisition to define complexity.
On this, Kevin recommends you look at three core facets of complexity: market scarcity, your employer brand and the hiring process.
- Market scarcity: this is fairly obvious; if the demand for a skill or set of experience is high and availability of that talent or skill is low, then the role will be more complex to hire for.
- Your employer brand: whilst there may be a high degree of scarcity for blockchain developers, for example, a crypto currency company will find it relatively easy to hire these skills as most blockchain developers will prefer to work for a crypto currency. However, traditional banks will find it much harder to attract that talent. You therefore need to factor in how hard or easy it is for YOUR company to attract talent with the skills you are looking for. Remember, you can't just say that your employer brand is strong therefore everything will be less complex. Most organizations with a strong employer brand find it easier to hire for the roles they are most well-known for, but this will not represent 100% of the roles they hire for. Big 4 accounting firms may find it easier than others to attract accountants but difficult to attract software engineers.
- Hiring process: this is a function of how confident you are that your hiring process for screening and assessing a certain skill or role is predictable. If you feel, for example, that your process for screening and hiring sales people is excellent, measured by high offer rate and high success rate, then the complexity will be less. If you have, conversely, never hired a lawyer before, then expect complexity in the process.
Additionally, your ability to be competitive in the marketplace from a compensation standpoint will affect the level of complexity. The more competitive you can be with offers and compensation, the less complexity you can expect.
Having applied the lens of hiring complexity to the critical roles assigned by the business, it is likely that you will be left with approximately 20% of all roles that are both high priority AND high to medium complexity.
These are the roles that really, by definition, move the needle in your organization.
- If you are to start out-performing in talent acquisition, you will be best served putting your efforts into these roles first.
It is likely that you will identify up to half of all roles as medium priority and complexity (medium business value with medium to high complexity) whereas for the lowest priority roles, it doesn't matter what the hiring complexity is, the business value just isn't high enough to justify allocating too many scarce resources. Therefore, we do not have to review low priority roles through the lens of hiring complexity.