Maximising Hiring & Insights with Innovation Challenges

Co-authored by Isabel Ng, B2B Marketing Guru

As we are deep in the era of digital transformation, most B2C corporations are constantly innovating their products and improving their market strategy using customer insights. In the talent acquisition aspect, they are hiring a large number of graduates in return for fresh perspectives, new skills and knowledge. 

Wouldn't it be great if there was one engagement model that could serve both graduate hiring and customer insights purposes?

There is. If there is an overlap between talent acquisition and customer insights in terms of target customers (let’s say, graduates = target customers), companies can leverage this advantage to avoid duplicate workload, improve the quality (of talents & insights) and maximize the success of both. 

How…?

Innovation Challenges may be the perfect solution.

After leading 100+ innovation challenges for enterprises of different industries and sizes, this model proved to be successful for companies like AIA, Clarins, Lego, L'Oréal, PepsiCo and more. They are optimizing the hiring process for graduate talents and drawing in useful customer insights for product development, marketing strategies, sales tactics, and customer service improvement. 

Ultimately, innovation challenges can be an efficient and effective way to meet multiple objectives at once.

To begin, let's take a closer look at how talent acquisition and product development are done traditionally.

Pros and Cons of the traditional hiring process:

The traditional hiring process typically involves a series of steps including resume screening, phone screening, interviewing, and psychometric testing. 

Pros:

1. It is well-defined and has a clear structure.
2. The consistent and step-by-step recruitment process with tests and interviews allows companies to optimize resources i.e. hiring managers have a clear process to follow.

Cons:

1. It is expensive - The process of scanning CVs and organizing interviews for candidates requires significant resources and time. The average cost of a bad hire is up to 200% of an employee’s annual salary.
2. It is time-consuming - On average, it takes organizations 42 days to recruit, interview, screen, and hire a new employee. It’s estimated to take an average of 10 hours out of a manager’s 40-hour work week to support wrong hires.
3. It doesn’t reflect the real-world applications of the job - The traditional hiring process may not adequately assess a candidate's ability to work in a team, communicate effectively, or adapt to changing circumstances. Similarly, it may not capture a candidate's creativity, problem-solving skills, or leadership potential, which are often critical for success in many roles.

Innovation challenges, in contrast, aim to more accurately reflect the real-world applications of the job and provide a more comprehensive picture of a candidate's skills, experience, and potential.

Pros and Cons of the traditional customer insights framework:

The traditional customer insights framework typically involves customer surveys and focus groups, website analytics and sales data to collect customer data. It helps analyze customer feedback from social media, online reviews, and customer service interactions.

Pros:

1. Ensure quality marketing and product insights from target focus groups - One of the most employed research methods of B2C corporations– focus groups, can provide more in-depth feedback. Large-scale organizations allow for ample resources to be devoted to the development process.
2. Consistent and reliable approach. Less variables - Established processes and protocols ensure that the product is developed in a cost-effective way, as the same process can be used for all products, reducing the need for customization.

Cons:

Time-consuming and expensive in 1) gathering marketing insights and 2) source quality solutions

1. The traditional way of developing a product following established and fixed processes and protocols can be time-consuming. The cost of conducting market research can be prohibitively high. Focus groups of a small size may not accurately represent the entire market.
2. Uncompetitive or outdated market insights - Long turnaround times in research and product development can lead to delays in product launch. Also the long development process may not be able to adapt to the ever-changing customer needs.

Innovation Challenges – a proven engagement model to achieve talent acquisition and customer insights

What is an innovation challenge?

Innovation Challenges, as defined by Startup-Challenges, are published innovation needs that help companies find relevant ideas, technologies, and innovative approaches to solving specific problems in a kind of competition outside their own organization. 

Innovation Challenges, also called "Corporate Challenges" or "Innovation Contests", are a powerful method to generate innovative ideas and new solution approaches in cooperation with other companies. Participants are asked to generate ideas for developing or improving products, services, processes or customer experiences. The organizers will stay in contact with the participants of the challenge through regular updates, needed input and feedback. The innovators with the best-fit solutions will be selected at the end to participate in the co-development, testing and launch of their ideas.

B2C corporations: Leveraging the overlap in customer base of Hiring and Selling

There is a huge benefit if your Graduate Acquisition team shares the same target audience with your product customer base, which means Candidates = Customers. Not only running an innovation challenge can effectively achieve hiring and customer insights, but it can also improve the process of both.

How?

For talent acquisition, it is possible to have a comprehensive selection process without making it “slow.” Forget about the paperwork and manual hiring process. Imagine interviewing and scanning the CVs of a few thousands of graduates at the same time and complete hiring, this is the power of innovation challenges.

As mentioned above, graduates have to submit an idea proposal in the innovation challenge. In the past, when we were talking about open innovation, it’s about sourcing ideas and solutions to internal problems. Now, with the overlapping customer base of the talents we are looking for and our product customers, we are talking about merging talent acquisition and idea sourcing into one. Who better to ask for input on marketing / product etc than the very people that are your potential customer base. 

Through hosting an innovation challenge for graduate candidates:

1. In the aspects of idea sourcing for customer insights, product development, marketing, you are interfacing directly with your customers (ICP) and getting product feedback and marketing ideas from their proposals. And receiving 100-1000 potential solutions for a new product line.

2. In the aspect of graduate talent acquisition, you can assess the graduates’ skills and creative thinking from the proposals. Oftentimes they are required to add their background on the challenge proposals, so the hiring and insights team can come together to evaluate these candidates and ideas. They can also see how the candidates work in teams, and assess their communication and collaborations.

Here’s some case studies you may be interested in

1. L'Oréal Brandstorm

Problem statement: L'Oréal Brandstorm is a sustainable innovative competition brought together students from all over the world for the past 28 years.

L'Oréal has been supporting sustainable innovation through a sustainable and responsible sourcing policy for raw materials and optimizing packaging for the past years. This challenge aimed to change consumer behaviours in plastic consumption and plastic waste.

Participants’ mission: Students from all around the world were invited to take on the challenge of creating the next L'Oréal's innovation - one with less plastic or no plastic at all.

Target participants: Graduates 

Objectives behind this challenge:

1. Hire top talents with the best ideas
2. Source solutions to the new product line

Results:

1. 48,000+ talents participated
2. 10,000+ ideas submitted

2.  Dare To Do More 2022 Graduate Program

Problem statement: Pepsico is on a mission to drive positive action for the planet and people. The brand is changing how we source our ingredients, make and sell their products, and how they inspire people through their brands.

Participants’ mission: To prepare an ESG plan that will guide the business on how to operate within planetary boundaries and inspire positive change for the planet and people.

Target participants: Graduates

Pepsico’s objectives behind this challenge:

1. Hire top talents with the best ideas
2. Source solutions for the ESG mission

Results:

• 2,900+ talents participated
• 500+ ideas submitted
• 20+ talents hired

I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to maximize hiring and product success in your own company. 

With the right strategies and a commitment to innovation, companies can utilize these innovation challenges to identify and develop the best talent and products for their organization. 

If you would like to understand more about the engagement model or share your learnings or experiments in this space, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. :D