In today's candidate-driven market, who isn't trying to hire the best candidates, faster? You may be missing out on your best sourcing tool - your own employees! Just take it from CM.com.
CM.com is a global leader SaaS company that has developed software for conversational commerce-enabling businesses to deliver a superior customer experience. Their platform empowers marketing, sales, and customer support to automate engagement with customers leading to higher sales, and an increase in customers and customer happiness.
Founded in Breda, Netherlands in 1999, CM.com has grown to over 1000 employees from 23 countries and is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange (CMCOM).
We sat down with Albert-Jan Pool, Tech Recruiter, Ireen Dekker, Corporate Recruiter, and Michael de Graaff, Lead Recruiter at CM.com to get a better understanding of their recruitment struggles, and their successes with Recruitee.
Outgrowing previous hiring processes
Prior to September 2021, CM.com was hiring in a simple manner. They used HROffice to manage their inbox of candidates, and sourced on LinkedIn.
When they started to feel some growing pains, they searched for a system that could manage their hiring and they had a long list of requirements. When CM.com discovered Recruitee, their list was met.
We needed to have one place where we could store all candidate data. That was not possible with our old recruitment system. We couldn’t work efficiently and a lot of extra manual tasks were taking valuable time from the recruiters. It was time for a change. With a lack of visibility of money spent on recruitment with our previous system, it was a cost-reducing and time-saving decision. Choosing Recruitee was a no-brainer.
Ireen Dekker, Corporate Recruiter
There was no long phasing-out process and implementing Recruitee was easy. They started from scratch and built a comprehensive recruitment process in real-time.
Recruitee is so flexible which helps with adapting, changing, and creating the best recruitment process for us.
Ireen Dekker, Corporate Recruiter
Collaborating on hiring and meeting company goals
CM.com’s day one goal when implementing an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Recruitee was to centralize applications and automate their hiring process. This meant eliminating time-consuming, manual tasks, and alignment issues which were almost immediately solved with Recruitee’s automation and collaborative hiring features.
It didn’t take long for the CM.com team to learn that the transparency in the hiring process makes hiring a lot more efficient. Not only in the time spent interviewing, evaluating, and communicating with the team but in the end result: the quality of candidates hired.
Giving responsibility for the recruitment processes back to the organization, made recruitment itself much more visible. Our hiring process is more structured and effective because users have access to all the necessary candidate information.
Michael de Graaff, Lead Recruiter
CM.com was adamant about bringing more team members into the hiring process, making everyone a part of it. And it was so easy to set up with Recruitee’s hiring roles.
Getting everyone involved in hiring
Today, a team of 7 recruiters is actively working in Recruitee on a daily basis with between 50 and 100 hiring managers active on a weekly basis. The remainder of the organization is involved in an evaluation panel when asked to join an interview. Everyone at CM.com also has the opportunity to refer candidates through their own account in the company-wide referral portal.
Recruitee is focused on bringing other stakeholders and peers into the hiring process. This hiring collaboration, in combination with added transparency, is a huge benefit for CM.com, helping them reach their hiring goals, together.
Being a fast-scaling company, it is typically difficult to track which roles are needed. Now, within Recruitee, there is a much better overview in terms of hiring planning. At the beginning of the year, the team can look at what they want from recruitment by December 31st.
Referrals yield a 45% conversation rate
CM.com typically sees 20+ hires per month. To keep up this pace, a referral program was a necessity.
It’s no secret that referrals lead to a reduction in time to hire because you can source higher-quality candidates, faster. It’s also proven that referrals increase employee retention because they are proven to stay longer in a role or at a company.
We noticed that we have a high conversion on referrals, and we immediately said we need to use this much more!
Albert-Jan Pool, Tech Recruiter
Since the beginning of 2022, CM.com noticed that 45% of referrals were hired - a very impressive conversion rate!
When starting to build their referral program with ReferralsHub, CM.com chose to launch with the basics, including how and where to refer. Every employee was invited to the referral portal which was CM.com-branded and after 9 months, half of the organization had created an account to be able to refer someone. They even offered a sweet incentive of €1,000 for a successfully hired referral.
With a referral program in place, it gives employees a sense of responsibility, being able to contribute to building their teams.
Everybody puts on their recruitment hat and gets involved in hiring.
Albert-Jan Pool, Tech Recruiter
The next steps for CM.com’s referral program are to continue building internal awareness, getting more people involved in sourcing, improving processes, running campaigns, adding fun new rewards, and making sure the entire program is flexible to suit everyone’s needs.
Impressive results from collaborative hiring
CM.com has already seen some impressive results during the first half of 2022, including:
- 5,000+ unique candidates
- 1,600 evaluations
- 891 candidates interviewed
- 404 CM.com users in Recruitee
- 20 referrals, 9 of which were hired
The team is adamant that without Recruitee, these successes wouldn’t have been possible.
Incorporating collaborative hiring was a number one priority for CM.com and they have really embraced it. Building stronger cross-team collaboration and accountability makes for more effective and transparent hiring. The recruitment processes are more data-driven as well, because it’s just so easy, all within one system.
With Recruitee, CM.com now gets a better overview and greater insight into how well they are doing. Whether it's how teams are working, how interviewers are performing, disqualifying reasons, tracking the best performing sources, using Recruitee has led to better (candidate) experience and hiring process improvements.
The future of hiring at CM.com looks even more collaborative.
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