Accenture: Reengineering Recruitment

Accenture’s Delivery Centers for Technology in India have witnessed exponential growth for nearly a decade now. With the TA team in an overdrive to achieve this growth and hiring a significant number of experienced technology professionals at the lateral/mid-levels every year, Accenture transformed its TA value in order to create hyper-personalized candidate experiences.  

Accenture’s erstwhile value chain was a combination of processes that had specialized teams to source talent, conduct interest check, schedule interviews, conduct interviews, collect documents etc. Due to such separate processes, the company was putting together a large pipeline of candidates to hire from. While the hiring numbers increased yearly, candidate experience dipped owing to the transactional interactions, effort intensive processes and numerous touchpoints. The business metrics getting impacted were:

• Candidate Experience: There was a need to improve Accenture’s NPS (Net Promoter Score), which reflected candidates’ probability of recommending the company to their networks. This was also validated by different surveys, focus group discussions, and escalations and by root cause analysis conducted periodically. 
• Time to Fill: This metric represented the time taken to hire against a position. Since every step in the recruitment process involved multiple touchpoints, which were effort intensive, the time to fill metric has risen significantly.  
• Candidate Quality: With Accenture’s vision of helping its clients rotate to the new, acquiring best talent with highly differentiated skills was non–negotiable. Ensuring a pipeline of quality talent was a consistent key deliverable for the TA team.

The study involved research and was followed by detailed design workshops and process iterations with stakeholders to understand how candidate experience could be transformed, how hiring process could be accelerated and how candidate quality could be improved. 

Consequently, there were various interventions made through Analytics, Profile Matching Score or Richness Index, Renege (MSAzure), Candidate Quality Index (CQI), Candidate Self-Service Technologies and One-day hiring program or Hire-A-Thon.

With its new value chain, Accenture successfully improved business metrics it set out for:

• Time to hire reduced by 45 percent 
• Net Promoter Score improved by 22 points in the last one year
• Quality of hires improved by 16 percent
• Cost reduction by 20 percent
• Instead of hiring 1 from 15, Accenture is now hiring 1 from six candidates