Article: Best Practices: Recruitment Reeingineering by Godrej

Talent Acquisition

Best Practices: Recruitment Reeingineering by Godrej

Godrej's LOUD has become a key recruitment channel for the company. Today. LOUD accounts for almost 50% of Gurukul, Godrej's internship program.
Best Practices: Recruitment Reeingineering by Godrej

Godrej has developed a TA strategy which weaves campus recruitment and innovation just perfectly. However, the company had first identify what they needed and then developed a concept which is completely innovative in the space of recruitment reeingineering. 

The business challenge:

Business school recruitment has always been a very important source of talent for Godrej. They have been recruiting through campus programs and have found talent from top Indian B-schools to be a great fit. Their new recruitment strategy was to up campus recruitment numbers and convert their summer interns into full time hires. Till 2011, Godrej’s recruitment process on campus involved group discussions and a standard interview process. While this format had worked well in the past, allowing the organization to observe a larger pool of applicants within a short duration, it was found to be rather limiting in approach. It had also become very predictable, as the students knew how to conduct themselves and what the possible topics could be for a discussion. The challenge was to get to know an applicant as well as possible during the hiring process. For that Godrej had to break convention and create a format, which was more engaging, hands on and allowed for a higher degree of interaction.

For Godrej, the most important consideration while hiring is a cultural fit. Our earlier campus recruitment process provided limited opportunity to evaluate potential team members. Given the rush of the hiring process, it was not possible to judge aspects like initiative, creativity and problem solving skills of the applicants. Initiating new recruits is always important. Since they did not have a robust recruitment pipeline of management trainees who had interned with them, the onboarding process was tedious and took very long.

It became evident that if they didn’t increase their intake through our campus recruitment programs and didn’t convert summer interns into full time hires, they would have to depend a lot more on lateral hires, a proposition that was both expensive and not feasible in the long run.

The chosen method: 

Organization LOUD became their alternative to hiring through a standard summer process. They asked first year students to share their big dreams with them and offered INR 1.5 lakh sponsorship to help them live out their unfulfilled dreams and gave a pre placement summer offer. Godrej decided to put a different spin on recruitment and launched Organization LOUD (Live Out Ur Dream) in 2012 to help young and talented India realise their personal dreams, which had been shelved due to career or sponsorship constraints. They made every step of LOUD as innovative and distinct as they could – the launch, application process, social media. Students could opt to tell about their dream in one or more of these formats – video clip, audio clip, photograph or picture, poem, short story or slides Before launching LOUD on campus, Godrej had experimented with a few creative formats. Godrej found simulated games, role-plays and even theatre as interesting alternatives that worked well with students. The organization also made its approach to campus recruitment much more focused. 

The impact: 

Organization LOUD has become a key recruitment channel for Godrej. Today, LOUD accounts for 40-50% of Gurukul, Godrej’s internship program. LOUD has been a runaway success on campuses. This year, Godrej received over 2,300 applications, a 500% increase from 2012. While last year, they received over 500 applications as part of the wild card process, the number rose to 950 in 2015. The last four years have been a testimony of the growing popularity of LOUD. It has generated a lot of buzz in the media circles. The program – from launch, to campus visits and the grand finale – has been covered extensively in the national and regional media. 

 

 

 

 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, HR Analytics, #TAWeek

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