Leverage Sustainability Initiatives to Engage Talent
Understanding and drawing actionable insights from data are important aspects of Informa’s business operations, including talent acquisition. Sustainability is an additional focus: in 2020, Informa launched a five-year sustainability plan called FasterForward that sets out specific goals to help it become a sustainability leader in its operating markets.
At the same time, Informa wanted to upgrade its talent acquisition processes, which were fragmented across several systems. Sustainability principles infuse the company’s recruitment practices, which aim to provide an equitable and inclusive experience for candidates. “The human side is an important part of sustainability,” said Informa’s Head of Sustainability, Ben Wielgus. “We want to give people a fair chance at getting a job here with us while making sure they enjoy a simple and clear process that reduces stress levels.”
Informa realized that a single talent acquisition solution would give candidates a more consistent journey while allowing it to capture valuable data. In addition, Informa previously had limited insight into how its credentials as a sustainable business factored into the choice to apply. There was plenty of anecdotal evidence, but they wanted hard proof.
About Informa
- Industry: Events, Digital Services, and Academic Knowledge
- Region: Global
- Employees: 10,000
- Offices: 50+
- Headquarters: London, UK
- Hiring Model: Centralized
Informa is a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge group. With a mission to champion the specialist, Informa manages hundreds of brands and a range of products and services that connect businesses and professionals with the knowledge they need to learn more, know more and do more.
Head of Sustainability
Specialized Screening Questions Capture Valuable Data
Informa partnered with SmartRecruiters to drive better recruitment outcomes and capture data that would help them understand the success of their sustainability campaigns and start to engage prospective hires about the company’s initiatives from the earliest moment. Data from the results of candidate questions could provide insights into sustainability engagement and help hone the talent acquisition messaging.
In partnership with SmartRecruiters, Informa built screening questions that collected information about candidates’ interest in sustainability in addition to legally required questions. Options available in the system include free text answers, drop-down lists, and multiple choice, among others.
One of the questions Informa asked was, “To what extent did our sustainability program influence your decision to join us?” on a 1-5 scale. The results allow recruiters to understand the importance of the topic to candidates and engage with them accordingly.
Key Outcomes
Over a ten-week period, Informa discovered the following:
- 5500 applicants answered the sustainability question.
- 50% of hires said that sustainability programs greatly influenced their decision to join Informa.
- 27% of applicants did not know that Informa had a sustainability program, informing the messaging strategy.
Real-Time Data Fuels Continuous Improvement
In SmartRecruiters Report Builder, the Informa team can quickly look at data on candidate questions in aggregate. In the first six weeks, they discovered that of the candidates who’d heard of the sustainability initiative, four in five said that it had influenced their choice to apply.
Since then, Informa has received 140,000 responses, a figure Wielgus couldn’t have imagined six months ago. “Now I know that the program is of interest to talent. That gives me data I can take to leadership,” Wielgus said. He can also conduct further analysis into the 27% of applicants who had never heard of the FasterForward initiative.
Overall, data from the screening questions enables the Informa team to take consistent, wide-ranging action to improve candidate relations. “We can address the candidate experience holistically rather than relying on multiple fragmented systems that didn’t have these capabilities,” Ben said. Already the improvements have enhanced the way that Informa communicates its sustainability message, especially on its website.
Head of Sustainability
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