AstraZeneca turns to StepStone to drive referrals with AZ Talent Scout scheme

The Business
AstraZeneca is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Its products, which are sold in more than 100 countries, include therapies for cancer, gastro-intestinal disease, asthma, hypertension, high cholesterol, migraine and schizophrenia. Sales in 2006 totalled $26.5 billion, with an operating profit of $8.2 billion.

It employs 66,000 people (58% in Europe, 27% in the Americas and 15% in Asia, Africa and Australasia) and has its head office in Alderley Park, Cheshire. In the niche area of pharmaceutical research and development, AstraZeneca employs over 12,000 people at 16 research and development centres in 8 countries.

The Challenge - increasing recruitment by referral StepStone's i-GRasp e-recruitment solution was implemented to give AstraZeneca complete control of its internal and external hiring process. Nonetheless, it continued to feel the heat as it sought to recruit niche talent, especially within the R&D, science, sales and finance areas of the business. At the same time, the company was concentrating its efforts on exploiting growth opportunities in Asia - a market which, given the relatively low-skilled population and increasing competition for talent, as such it needed a highly strategic approach to recruitment and retention.

Like many organisations, AstraZeneca has found that employee referrals consistently yield stronger candidates more cost-effectively than any other means of recruitment. However, research carried out by its recruitment department highlighted that its existing programme was not helping it meet this objective.

As a result, AstraZeneca's recruitment department set about developing an intelligent and sustainable approach to referrals with the aim of raising awareness of its current recruitment needs, and at the same time educating staff about its strategic talent sourcing agenda. Crucially, took the decision that all recruitment data should be captured within StepStone's solution - making it a single, global repository for all recruitment data worldwide.

Jez Chance, recruitment marketing communications manager, comments: Despite the challenges our vision was clear: to drive a recruitment culture, where the whole business, not just HR, played a more active role in talent attraction.

The Solution
In 2007, AstraZeneca created AZ Talent Scout, a dedicated employee referral programme aimed at highlighting recruitment gaps, encouraging staff to volunteer to scout for talent and increase the referral hire rate. The Talent Scout website was integrated with i-GRasp e-recruitment platform, providing the company with a clear, comprehensive database of job opportunities across the organisation.

Jez Chance explains, By refining our approach to recruitment to focus on staff referrals, we were able to reduce agency costs and better utilise existing talent within the organisation, who have proved to be great ambassadors of the AstraZeneca brand. The fact that 80% of employees are proud to work for the company is testament to our continued focus on people, and has played a key role in helping us further extend future pools of talent.

The AZ Talent Scout scheme is open to all employees. Every member of staff is given the opportunity to spread the word about current job offers, by sharing Job e-Cards with potential candidates. The Talent Scout website includes useful background about prospective roles, and a series of unique, interactive features aimed at increasing employee support and feedback to further improve the recruitment process.

Other innovative elements of the site include:

- Network for success: a section of the website that is dedicated to promoting the benefits of networking and includes interactive video content/ podcasts on the people behind AstraZeneca brand and key values of the organisation

- Subscription to an RSS news feed for up-dates on relevant vacancies

- Interactive feedback: the site includes an interactive post-it style feedback board which allows staff to pose questions, suggest ideas or make other comments on the recruitment process. Each email is personally responded to, and individuals within the company are recognised for their practical advice and fresh recruitment ideas

- Candidate tracker: As a result of employee feedback, the site includes a simple candidate tracker enabling employees to monitor their referral's progress through the recruitment process.

Aside from the developments to the AZ Talent Scout site, AstraZeneca became the first blue-chip organisation to develop an application for Facebook, to drive the visibility of external hires and harness the growing power of recommendation across social networks. The application (www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=9821859622&ref=s) enables anyone with a Facebook account to search through the vacancies on the StepStone platform. The application, or specific roles, can also be shared across social networks from around the world.

The job vacancies displayed on the Facebook application are kept constantly up-to-date by interfacing with the StepStone i-GRasp platform. I-GRasp further ensures that every candidate receives a consistent and high quality experience no matter where they are referred from. I-GRasp also saves AstraZeneca the time and resource of duplicating the same information on various different platforms.

Jez Chance adds: Social websites like Facebook are minefields for recruiters - but also provide an invaluable means for us to project our employer brand. Whilst we would never make hiring decisions on the basis of these sites' actual content, we do believe they offer a great way for AZ Talent Scouts to spread the word about AstraZeneca amongst their friends.

The Outcome
Since the introduction of AZ Talent Scout in 2007, AstraZeneca completed 18% of its external hires through the referral hire programme, seeing cost savings of 370,000 made in that year alone.

StepStone's i-GRasp solution, which paid for itself within six months of its implementation in 2004, has ensured that all roles available within AstraZeneca have been displayed and are consistent both on the Talent Scout website and AstraZeneca Facebook application, enabling the talent scouts to best inform their contacts of all opportunities within the organisation. It has also enhanced AstraZeneca's employee brand by ensuring the most consistent, simple and timely recruitment experience for every potential candidate.

Jez Chance concludes: We are very proud of what we have achieved with AZ Talent Scout. By harnessing the power of recommendation with simple eMarketing tools, our existing i-GRasp platform alongside strong visual communication and engaging content, we have created a programme that we hope will sustain its value and effectiveness for many years to come. Whether a new applicant or referral candidate is applying for a position within the company, it's important that the candidate experience remains the same, and the recruitment process is kept simple and hassle-free.