Let's Make the Hiring Drives Great Again

Most job applicants in India are no strangers to “hiring drives”. Hiring drives are similar to walk-in interviews and are mostly run along similar lines — on a designated day, a candidate can come into the office, finish all rounds of interviews and walk out with an offer on the same day.

This kind of hiring, while efficient, has its drawbacks. One of the main complaints was usually that candidates were not delighted; and that we as employers weren’t thinking about the candidate experience.

This did not sit well with my team, as putting candidates first is one of our core values at Airtel X Labs.

Airtel X Labs is the team transforming Airtel into an industry-beating digital force. So we set our goal as “Make drives great again”. And as Peter Drucker rightly said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.

The simplest and most brutal of all metrics that would tell us what we needed to know was Net Talent Promoter Score (nTPS). All candidates who attended the drive were asked a bunch of questions, the most important of which was -

On a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being highest, what’s the likelihood that you would recommend a friend or colleague to interview at Airtel X Labs?

Before we go further, a tiny bit about how nTPS s is calculated. The score, on a scale of one to 10, falls into three groups. If a candidate scores you as a 9 or a 10, they are your promoters. If they score you as a 7 or an 8, they are passive. You don’t know if they are leaning towards loving you, leaving you, or they just don’t care. And, a score of a 6 or lower means you have a detractor. To calculate the nTPS we take the percentage of promoters (9 and 10s) and subtract the percentage of detractors (6 and lower). That number is your Net Promoter Score. In our case, we called it the “Talent Promoter Score” (TPS)

Enter “Drive Experience”

After an intense brainstorming session, these were the solutions we came up with that we felt would impact the candidate experience the most.

Candidate kits

Each candidate was given a color-coded kit (color based on the role they were interviewing for) Each kit contained:

●    Description of the entire interview process as well as profiles of interviewers for each round.

●    A TPS form which they had to fill in and drop at the end of the process

●    A lunch ticket

●    Logistical information such as where to get coffee, locations of washrooms, wifi access.

●    A badge and a lanyard that gave them access around the floor.

Reception desk where candidates could collect their kits.

Team T-Shirts

Candidates who attend a drive need to focus on the interview. Therefore the team which is managing the whole process needs to be easily identifiable. This might seem like a minor thing but many a time I have seen a candidate wandering the hallways, wondering who works in Airtel X Labs and who is a candidate. (Plus: T-shirts are always welcome!!)

These days nothing is complete without a team photo!

Hiring Manager Preparation

Our drive was to be conducted on a Saturday, so on the Friday before that, we got all the hiring managers together into a conference room designated the “command center” which was to be our base of operations. The hiring managers were taken through the list of candidates coming in, updated on the assessment criteria and were familiarized with standardised assessment sheets so the interview process could move smoothly from one round to another.

Goodies

We put together a gift bag of Airtel X Labs giveaways that had mugs, that could be given to the candidates. There was only one rule. You get the goodies only after you give us feedback.

Goody goody

Office tours and quirky logistics

All candidates were taken on an office tour between interviews and shown the various facilities and team spaces.

The actual drive

The drive went off very smoothly. Here is a (blurred for confidentiality) timelapse we were able to capture

Metrics — Talent Promoter Score

We did some research into what the average nTPS out there in the market is. The closest answer we could find was that the average nTPS in 2017 was between 21 and 28

Source — https://www.inavero.com/2017-staffing-nps-benchmarks/

Another source where 28 was baseline

And drum rolllllllllllllllllllll.. Our numbers were…..

TPS: 39.6

Which is amazingly positive and almost 1.5 times than what the baseline is !!

Apart from TPS we also asked 4 other questions whose average scores are given below.

Final thoughts

Working in the trenches we usually lack the time to take a step back and examine a lot of our activities at a macro level. Measuring TPS made us realize that we have the capability to create “talent promoters” with every candidate interaction we have. For example: if we interview a 1000 people a month, how many of these are going back to their offices/homes/friends and talking positively about an interaction they had with Airtel X Labs. More importantly how many are talking negatively and dissuading people from applying to us.

I am glad to see that we are well on our way to convert most of our candidates into promoters over the next few months

Thanks to my amazing team, for running this experiment and implementing the findings :)