For Xylos, a Belgium-based IT company, people are their business and are at the core of everything they do; after all, their goal is to bridge the gap between humans and technology.
We virtually sat down with CEO, Patrick Leysen, and Product and Employer Branding Marketer, Jeroen De Rore, to discuss Xylos’ human-centric approach and how Recruitee’s careers site builder, Careershub, can help them achieve their hiring and employer branding goals, even with tight deadlines.
Tracking recruitment in the previous system just wasn’t cutting it
The process Xylos used to track their recruitment was very manual and required a lot of effort. With time a scarce commodity, finding a solution to improve their processes and experience became imperative for the sake of both themselves as a team and candidates by delivering a faster and cleaner hiring process.
Giving the recruitment team more autonomy and making the hiring process more self-service was a major focus area, so they could focus on value-added tasks. They started looking on the market for a new solution, compared several ATSs that attracted their interest, and in the end were most convinced by Recruitee.
With the right tools in place for the recruitment team, they were able to speed up the hiring process. But they didn’t stop there.
Building closer collaboration between teams with Recruitee
Once Recruitee was in the picture, things started to move quickly. It only took 24 hours for Patrick and the Xylos HR team to familiarize themselves with the basics of Recruitee and feel comfortable with the tool.
People got a bit addicted to the tool! In this case, it’s a good sign.
Patrick Leysen, CEO
Their goal in rolling out Recruitee across multiple offices was to have one environment, one digital workspace, where the recruitment team and hiring managers could have an overview of jobs, candidates, and the entire recruitment pipeline. They could chat with each other, leave feedback and evaluations, and discuss an interview all in one centralized place.
The recruitment team has added transparency to their process and the hiring managers have an improved user experience and can work closely together to hire the best people.
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For the leadership team, having an overview of the performance and open vacancies in the essential dashboards is beneficial and enjoyable.
It’s just fun. It’s like checking the weather app, you just want to see what's the weather or what happened on the stock exchange, and in just one click, you can say: "Wow, we had 50 new candidates yesterday.”
Patrick Leysen, CEO
The data is visible in real-time; there’s no need to email or call someone for an update on the recruitment performance over a given time period.
Showing the world who Xylos is
In the span of a single month, Xylos had the ambitious goal of repositioning themselves on the market. This meant building a new careers site, using Recruitee’s CareersHub, that showcased the company’s mission, vision, values, and company culture. Because CareersHub is easy to use and integrate, Xylos has been able to get its message across.
In four weeks’ time, we went from, "Let’s move to the job site of Recruitee", to having it up and running.
Patrick Leysen, CEO
With such a user-friendly and self-service careers site builder like CareersHub, Xylos was able to reposition itself in the market and achieve the goal of emphasizing its human-centric identity. All while improving the recruitment experience and reaching its new employee target by the end of 2021.
Being able to speed up and shift gears very quickly is vital to Xylos. Not only was their careers site built quickly, but it was built well.
Today, we’re confident in our job site and are proud to link people and candidates to it. The reactions have been great.
Jeroen De Rore, Product & Employer Branding Marketer
CareersHub is so intuitive that they could easily translate an idea of how they wanted to position their brand onto the web pages.
A shiny new careers site built by a Marketer
Even as a self-proclaimed ‘non-digital native’, Jeroen was able to build Xylos’ careers site without the help of a developer. He was able to understand the tool enough to switch from their old careers site to their new one within a week’s time.
CareersHub even sparked his creativity when it came to style or page layouts. It’s a very modern tool in which you can add images, videos, quotes, or change the layout of the text in different ways or of the entire page. There’s also an extensive section library that makes designing pages even easier with building block functionality. Everything you could need to build a careers site is available in a one-stop-shop.
I was able to instantly visualize my ideas through the tool and then figure out what worked well on the spot: "a video section here, a quote from someone there, something else there..." Very efficient.
Jeroen De Rore, Product & Employer Branding Marketer
Jeroen was able to brainstorm and exchange ideas with team members to bring in new perspectives to the content and design. He has helped recruiters write or improve job descriptions and they’ve been able to collaborate and improve upon the process ever since.
The whole process was stress-free because if Jeroen wasn’t able to figure something out himself, he would head to our Help Center or reach out to our Support team to get his question answered right away.
Finding the best candidate to fill a vacancy
With a new careers site up and running and candidates rolling in, it was time to sit back and relax - just kidding! Jeroen and the team are constantly improving and iterating on the careers site and vacancies.
If a recruiter noticed that a certain vacancy wasn’t getting as much traction or response as they wanted, they were immediately able to check it out within Recruitee since everything is linked. It only takes a few seconds to look at the reports and statistics to see how many applicants there are for a specific vacancy.
The team would then come together and see if, for instance, the order of text in the vacancy wasn’t attractive enough for candidates and could easily switch it up.
The reactivity has really made the difference. It helped in certain situations to get more traction on certain vacancies.
Jeroen De Rore, Product & Employer Branding Marketer
The biggest success in launching the new careers site was that it now really expresses the identity and the story of Xylos the way they always wanted it to. It also started a conversation and sparked creativity, getting everyone in the entire Xylos organization talking about positioning.
Not only does the careers site offer a great candidate experience, but even potential customers remark: "Xylos’ careers site really tells a lot about who you are as a company," and I think that’s one of the biggest compliments that it's not only for candidates, it’s really about who we are.
Patrick Leysen, CEO
Looking towards a human-centric future
In 2022, Xylos wants to adapt its corporate website into something that is more human and less corporate.
When we were discussing which partner we should use to rebuild and redesign our corporate website, one of the responses was - "Why aren’t we just using Recruitee to make our corporate website?" I think that is exemplary of the amazing experience we have currently with Recruitee.
Patrick Leysen, CEO
Next year, Xylos wants to attract more than 30 new colleagues and Xylos will use Recruitee as an important vehicle to achieve this goal. Recruitee will help Xylos innovate and make their employer branding story stand out on a more personal level. They want to create a platform where candidates can really feel what kind of company they are and picture themselves working on the team.
Since we spend a significant chunk of time at work, Xylos wants to showcase its company culture and illustrate exactly where new colleagues will work and who they will work with. Because after all, at Xylos, they’re just people working with people, trying to help other people become more digitally fit.
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