CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
How Korn Ferry helped Fonterra to reshape the candidate experience by improving its recruitment process
Putting candidates at the center of the recruitment process helped this global dairy company provide an excellent candidate experience
The challenge
Every candidate is also a consumer
For the last 17 years, Fonterra has been partnering with Korn Ferry in New Zealand. The recruitment process they have developed together is highly automated. This is due not only to the large number of applications it has to accommodate (around 80,000 in a busy year) but also because of the need to mitigate risk. Food quality and health and safety are critical for Fonterra, so candidate selection must always be consistent and robust.
The challenge is that, within this centralized and technology-enhanced recruitment process, Fonterra must also be able to deliver candidate experiences that have a personalized, human touch.
Why is it so important for Fonterra to deliver high-quality candidate experiences? Because almost everyone in New Zealand has a relationship with the company, whether as customers or employees, through friends or family members or because they are in communities where Fonterra factories or depots are based. This means that every candidate is more than simply a candidate; they are also a Fonterra consumer or stakeholder. And, as a result, any poor recruitment experience will have a negative impact not just on Fonterra’s employer brand but on the consumer brand as well.
Partnering with Korn Ferry
Using different approaches for differing audience needs
The solution
“Fonterra was able to gain candidate-focused insights into how the recruitment process needed to be improved, and what actions could be taken to improve it.”
There was a big pitch on the table in New York, and they were determined to win it. After a successful 2-hour opportunity coaching session, having a sales methodology came into focus for them. They wanted to test it to see if it could streamline and focus their pitching process. The team started working on employing our sales methodology to this pitch. They spent 90 days working on the presentation, compiling data, and planning their approach. It paid off. They won the business, and a new focus on the value of sales process and strategy was born.
Having seen the triumph of the New York pitch, the organization was keen to press on and pilot our sales methodology in two markets. The success of those pilots was enough for the initiative to be rolled out throughout the US sales force.
Focus on candidate care has delivered real business impact
The results
Introducing the high-tech, high-touch Nimble solution has enabled Fonterra’s recruitment team to speed up the recruitment process and let candidates know quicker if they have been successful or not – an improvement that has prompted positive feedback. Assessment centers are now being filled in half the time, and hiring managers can make selection decisions faster.
The recruitment team has benefited significantly too. Automation is saving them considerable time at the initial screening stage because they no longer have to sift through all the details of each application. This enables them to devote more time to managing business relationships. They also have greater insight into the available talent, as each candidate is fully screened and assessed against pre-defined requirements and through targeted situational judgement tests.
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The world's largest exporter of dairy products
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Assessment centers are now being filled in half the time
The return on investment
Background
Deployment of our sales methodology as part of an end-to-end sales transformation delivered a
increase in top-line
revenues and a win rate increase to over
Of course, a high-quality experience means different things to different people. So Fonterra takes a segmented rather than a one-size-fits all approach. When moving candidate groups through the process, the talent acquisition team assesses the specific needs and expectations of different role types and considers how the process can be adapted to make it as engaging as possible for them. So for entry level volume hiring, the company uses Nimble, Korn Ferry’s fully integrated technology solution, which allows candidates to go through screening and selection steps at their own pace. But for professional candidates, the process is more formal in nature, involving telephone interviews and assessments delivered through the Korn Ferry assessment platform.
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Fonterra Cooperative Group is the world's largest exporter of dairy products. Headquartered in New Zealand, where 17,000 of its 22,000 employees are based, the company figures prominently in national life and is a major contributor to the country’s GDP.
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Assessment centers are now being filled in half the time
half the time
The return on investment
Partnering with Korn Ferry
Assessment centres are now being filled in
"The firm's customer support underwent a remarkable transformation."
It’s also important to remember that what defines a high-quality experience is not set in stone. The Fonterra team is continuously looking for ways to make the process more engaging for all audience segments. One recent initiative involved analyzing the recruitment process across all their different workflows, looking at each stage from the candidate’s perspective to identify key pain points. The team then consulted recently placed employees to test whether the pain points they had identified were significant issues for candidates or not.
Through this combination of process mapping and participant feedback, Fonterra was able to gain candidate-focused insights into how the recruitment process needed to be improved, and what actions could be taken to improve it. Where it was not possible to take action, the solution was to communicate more clearly with candidates, so they would know in advance about approaching pain points and would understand why those pain points had to be there. Candidate feedback proved useful again in shaping the nature and content of these communications, which included booklets and videos.
We worked with the organization to develop an executive dashboard. This focused on specific metrics: sales conversion rate, cross-sell rate, and sales of non-core offerings (i.e., accessories, fixed telephone lines, etc.). In addition, the dashboard provided store, area, state, and corporate views of benchmarked past performance, before training, and performance post-training metrics.
Reshaping the candidate experience with candidate insights
“One of the things that Korn Ferry did was to introduce Net Promotor Score for all candidates and hiring managers. A survey is now delivered at the end of every recruitment process, giving us real-time feedback into the candidate experience. It’s a really important gauge for the team, and the feedback goes straight into our continuous improvement program so that we are honing the candidate and hiring manager experience all the time.”
Juliet Casey, Talent Acquisition Manager, explains
The need to provide a high-quality candidate experience was also behind Fonterra’s recent decision to start using Korn Ferry’s high-volume hiring tool, Nimble. One obvious benefit of using an automated hiring tool is that the technology helps to speed things up. Fonterra’s process must incorporate rigorous and time-consuming background checks, so anything that can be done to shorten it is a definite plus.
But the reason Fonterra chose Nimble over other similar solutions was that it isn’t purely about moving candidates through the process more quickly. It also provides a high level of engagement and enables Fonterra to customize the experience, so that candidates get a real sense of the organization and culture at each stage of the recruitment process. In Casey’s view, candidates see the process as symbolic of the organization. It is therefore critical that their experience is open, engaging and honest as well as fast.
“More and more candidates have an expectation that they are active participants in the process… they want to drive it rather than have it driven by us. They want to be able to do their application sitting on a bus or walking on a road. And that’s why the first question we ask is: what does it look like on somebody’s phone?”
It is yet another example of how the candidate is the heart of Fonterra’s recruitment process.
A high tech tool allows a high level of candidate engagement
“More and more candidates have an expectation that they are active participants in the process… they want to drive it rather than have it driven by us.”
THEY CONTINUALLY RESHAPE THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE AROUND CANDIDATE INSIGHTS
It’s also important to remember that what defines a high-quality experience is not set in stone. The Fonterra team is continuously looking for ways to make the process more engaging for all audience segments. One recent initiative involved analyzing the recruitment process across all their different workflows, looking at each stage from the candidate’s perspective to identify key pain points. The team then consulted recently placed employees to test whether the pain points they had identified were significant issues for candidates or not.
Through this combination of process mapping and participant feedback, Fonterra was able to gain candidate-focused insights into how the recruitment process needed to be improved, and what actions could be taken to improve it. Where it was not possible to take action, the solution was to communicate more clearly with candidates, so they would know in advance about approaching pain points and would understand why those pain points had to be there. Candidate feedback proved useful again in shaping the nature and content of these communications, which included booklets and videos.
Juliet Casey, Talent Acquisition Manager, explains:
“One of the things that Korn Ferry did was to introduce Net Promotor Score for all candidates and hiring managers. A survey is now delivered at the end of every recruitment process, giving us real-time feedback into the candidate experience. It’s a really important gauge for the team, and the feedback goes straight into our continuous improvement program so that we are honing the candidate and hiring manager experience all the time.”
It’s also important to remember that what defines a high-quality experience is not set in stone. The Fonterra team is continuously looking for ways to make the process more engaging for all audience segments. One recent initiative involved analyzing the recruitment process across all their different workflows, looking at each stage from the candidate’s perspective to identify key pain points. The team then consulted recently placed employees to test whether the pain points they had identified were significant issues for candidates or not.
Through this combination of process mapping and participant feedback, Fonterra was able to gain candidate-focused insights into how the recruitment process needed to be improved, and what actions could be taken to improve it. Where it was not possible to take action, the solution was to communicate more clearly with candidates, so they would know in advance about approaching pain points and would understand why those pain points had to be there. Candidate feedback proved useful again in shaping the nature and content of these communications, which included booklets and videos.
THEY CONTINUALLY RESHAPE THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE AROUND CANDIDATE INSIGHTS
