With the Pharmacy sector having strong quality standards, acquiring appropriate talent became an imperative for Cadila Healthcare. But being able to give candidates a good experience during their recruitment process became equally important for the company.  By creating a holistic and fair induction process, Cadila won the TA League Award for providing a strong candidate experience.  

Business challenge

Today's burgeoning healthcare industry also faces a high churn rate. For Cadila Healthcare, a company facing steep expansion trajectory and diverse talent pool, the business imperative of institutionalizing a robust and scientific set of HR processes and systems that the business could sustain, especially in the procurement of the right talent has been critical. In order to get in candidates who proved to be the right fit for the company, Cadila Healthcare needed to create a strong and robust talent acquisition process. The other major challenges faced by the company had been removing biases that often plagued hiring purposes, matching global standards and creating sustainable recruitment systems. Although the prime focus within Cadila was to create standardized practices, there has been a significant demand to also establish a system that was flexible to accommodate and find the right talent in the diverse talent pool, especially when the company had 55 percent of the employees below the age of 30 years.

Solution

Cadila aimed to align their HR processes to the vision of becoming a research-driven organization by 2020 and adopted scientific assessment methodologies, contoured in recruitment stages. To do so, Cadila Healthcare incorporated the use of assessment centers in their recruitment processes with a split in the kind of assessments used on the basis of the level of hiring. For levels DGM and above, the company hired people on the basis of in-person assessment centers by Hay Group, and to recruit candidates below positions below DGM, it was done through online assessment centers in collaboration with Mettl.

Assessment centers helped in setting up of various filters to sift through the candidates and assist the company in streamlining the talent pipeline and creating strong candidate experience from entry level to the executive level hiring. Through a partnership with various consulting organizations and institutions, Cadila has been able to filter candidates according to their domain knowledge, cognitive abilities and behavioural assessments as the first and second levels of filters. The outcome of this process was that only the candidates who passed through such filter tests were called for an interview, all this without tampering with the recruitment SLA. In order to remove interview biases and create a fair candidate experience, the interviewers underwent training with DDI to establish unbiased interviewing frameworks and hone their skills to execute it. Field force line managers were empowered and given rights to send assessment links instantly and can generate reports on a real-time basis. In the cases of manufacturing walk-in in a day, where in 1500 candidates come for an interview and it is being taken care perfectly. 

Impact

The new approach helped Cadila Healthcare in improving the quality of hires, aligning recruitment SLAs with business and filling new positions by gauging organization fit, job-fit and location fit. This, in turn, helped Cadila drive productivity due to an increase in the quality of hires and achievement of business targets. The selection of candidates for the position of DGM and above done through assessment centers by Hay Group was a major departure from how the company looked at hiring for that position. Out of the 29 senior employees who were assessed for the position, 19 people have been promoted. This has been a major change management in a process which was earlier governed by tenure/performance rather than factoring in competencies and potential. By building a fair and transparent measure of assessment and recruiting employees, Cadila has been able to create a positive candidate experience. The HR team also shared the assessment reports with people who were not selected, in order to maintain a regular communication channel with them.  Meanwhile, during onboarding reporting manager shares, 90 days plan along with the assessment centre report and interviewers’ comment. It helped them maintain a strong relationship with their candidates.

(The TA League Awards 2016 saw more than 200 applications, out of which 5 won across five different categories. A four-month process, it consisted a total 15 applications from companies across industries being shortlisted, out of which 3 in each of the 5 categories were shortlisted by a 6-member Jury. The shortlisted 15 finalists in the five categories presented their company’s Best Practices as a case for selection to the jury on the eve of the Awards ceremony, followed by the Q&A session. After intense deliberation and debate, the jury members finally decided on the winners within each category. Here we present a brief snapshot of Cadila, the company which won TA League Award for having the best recruitment model in reaching out to a diverse talent pipeline.)