Attracting new talent with AI ?

Hermes are one of the largest UK courier specialists, delivering more than 400 million parcels every year. With an increasing number of yearly deliveries to make, this means recruiting a significant volume of delivery drivers.?

Competition for couriers in 2020 was like nothing we’ve ever seen. The volume of home-deliveries has gone through the roof as the high street closed and the economy moved to remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we know, couriers are more in demand than ever before, and this has encouraged an enormous amount of competition for the best talent with new delivery companies entering the market.?This increase in competition sent cost per applications skyrocketing and we realised that we needed a new approach to help Hermes stand out and recruit the 15,000 couriers needed across their peak campaign (October – December).

Luckily, we’d been hard at work through lockdown developing a solution that involved our digital expertise and some seriously smart tech.?

Strategy

Hermes pre-existing channel strategy was heavily reliant on active candidates by only promoting their roles on a small number of job boards. After extensive due diligence, testing and scoping, we commissioned an AI driven programmatic job board product to rapidly diversify the number of channels used by Hermes.

Through the software, we have access to dozens of channels in order to deliver the campaign to candidates wherever they’re searching for roles. No longer dependent on committing budget upfront to a specific publisher and hoping that the candidates were active on those specific channels, the programmatic software finds candidates at the best possible price on any of the channels that we’re advertising on. This meant that Hermes could reduce their reliance on a small number of contracted job boards, allowing them to minimise risk, maximise their return on investment and to take a more targeted approach to advertising.

With agreements in place with a number of channels that allowed us to commit an unspecified budget through the campaign, this allowed Hermes to break the habit of using only annually contracted job boards and spend in smaller increments on far more channels in order to find the best talent.

Development

We commissioned the programmatic software for our digital team to use and make their own. To combine the best of machine learning AI software with our existing digital capabilities and skills.

We instigated agreements with a significant number of channels with a view to integrating them into the software. We already had our tracking software installed on Hermes site and this allowed us to measure and track performance on the programmatic activity as a whole and on specific channels.

We then utilised an XML feed from the client’s ATS to input vacancies into the platform. The software was then able to index all roles so that we could sponsor them.

By integrating in this way, it allowed the software to learn about the performance of the roles organically, helping the algorithm to inform the decisions and tactics used for sponsoring roles.

We targeted historically tough and struggling locations and categorised them as either red or green locations – red having no available round cover, so the upmost priority, and green being low on numbers and needing a boost. We set target caps for all locations based on the priority level – once the target was hit the software turned sponsorship off automatically, without the need for any human intervention.

Budget was allocated across all available channels. This gave us the widest possible audience to target, with the software allocating budget according to success and best chance of return. Our digital team monitored and adjusted budget levels, reporting back in real-time when a target cap was reached so that we could adjust the strategy when required.

We reported on performance to the client with a custom weekly dashboard highlighting applications in total and by location, outlining top line figures such as CPA and conversion rate.

Results

The results from the AI programmatic software were staggering. In the 3-month peak period for Hermes between October and December, we achieved a?huge 45% increase in hires vs 2019?with only a marginal increase in budget. During the same period, Hermes also achieved a?25% reduction in cost-per-hire?which is a true testament to the increased targeting functionality offered by the programmatic software.

Most impressively, this was all achieved during a time where the market saw a steep rise in competition and this approach allowed Hermes to stand out above the rest.