Intel is working on a flurry of online recruiting activity, with the biggest being a new technology for its recruiters to manage college recruits, a new mobile application for all job candidates, as well as changes to its Facebook pages.
First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”
Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”
Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.
Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job.
Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.
The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.
Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”
Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.
New Mobile App for Candidates
The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.
It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”
Facebook and Other Social Media
When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.
One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”
Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.
Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries — UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.
The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.
It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.
Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.
Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”
Still Cracking the Code
Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.
You have your Tiffany Peerys who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.