With their former recruiting technology, Bazaarvoice was missing an integration with their Workday HCM. The project seemed daunting, which led them to abandon the idea altogether. Without the integration, however, it was challenging for the People and Talent team to navigate the enormous overlap between workforce planning, recruiting, onboarding, and talent management. “We continuously re-evaluated the Workday integration year-over-year, but it wasn’t until scoping the Lever implementation that it appeared to be feasible,” says Bazaarvoice Head of Global Talent Acquisition Graham Pionkowski. In contrast, the team learned that Lever’s Workday integration would be straightforward. Lever’s team was knowledgeable about the necessary steps, and the technical requirements were well-documented.
As a result, it only took about three weeks to implement the first phase of the Workday integration. “Now, we can leverage Workday to manage all requisitions in alignment with our workforce plan, while performing recruitment activities through Lever’s best-in-breed TA solution,” says Graham. “This integrated systems approach is a win-win for us – we’re able to realize the best of both platforms.” In the second phase of the integration, they plan to fully integrate their HR technology stack. “In the end, we’ll be able to ensure alignment to holistic workforce objectives, minimize administrative burden, enhance full-cycle reporting, and more,” he explains.
In their former ATS, the recruiting team also struggled to engage the organization in hiring activities. Even after countless hours of training, interviewers remained reluctant to log in and participate. On a mission to create a culture with an “always recruiting” mindset, the recruiting team sought out an intuitive solution that hiring managers, interviewers and referrers would eagerly leverage. In Lever, they found exactly that. Today, every Bazaarvoice team member can easily contribute to the recruiting process within Lever. The numbers prove it: to date, they have been able to increase company-wide adoption over their former ATS by an estimated 40 percent.
From the very beginning, Lever’s customer success team made it easy to roll out Lever’s solution. “Immediately, both myself
and Phil (our Lever Implementation Lead) made a commitment to a communication plan between project teams,” he explains.“We took the necessary time to calibrate on a project plan that was attainable and achieved Bazaarvoice’s goals and go-live date.” Then, to make sure their recruiters never missed a beat, Phil set out to create a series of training sessions for their global team.
Through working closely with the Lever team, Bazaarvoice was also able to build a “Hiring Toolkit”. This served as a one-stop source for all things related to recruitment, and was their means to deliver bite-size learnings to hiring teams based on the goals they wanted to accomplish. Graham remembers how these short videos and how-tos drove huge success throughout their change management process. “And it’s important to emphasize that Lever is designed to be highly intuitive – so once recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers logged in, they could find their way around easily regardless,” says Graham.
Bazaarvoice team wasn’t just looking for changes in their own hiring experience, however – they wanted candidates to enjoy a more intuitive recruiting process as well. “We needed a job search and online application that reflected the tech savviness of our target talent pools, making it easy for them to express interest and engage with us,” says Graham. Using Lever, they’ve been able to make their application as mobile and user-friendly as possible. “Now, candidates can express interest in a role in less than 60 seconds without having to painfully create a username and password,” he notes.
Bazaarvoice is leveraging several Lever features to deliver a better experience to candidates. Using Lever Nurture, for example, the recruiting team can manage warm talent leads and then keep them engaged throughout their journey. Ultimately, this drastic improvement in both candidate experience and company-wide engagement has increased the team’s overall hiring efficiency, allowing them to decrease time to fill by 30 percent so far.
