Dive Brief:

• Cisco has turned to a completely new strategy for making a positive impression on candidates, Janine Milne reports for Diginomica, with its launch of a new digital portal. The company's digitized recruitment platform is designed to improve the hiring experience potential employees have and attract and retain more interested candidates. 
• Cisco’s global head of talent acquisition, Kevin Blair said that once an individual makes the choice to apply for work, they will have access to a digital candidate portal that supports them through their interview and any subsequent onboarding steps. Blair refers to this as the 'journey map'. The platform is designed so candidates can see where they are in the hiring process and express any concerns they may have. The platform is fully interactive. 
• The design of this new initiative makes it possible to gather more information about candidates, learn what keeps them engaged in the hiring process, discover when a candidate is checking out, and ensure that all new hires have everything they need by their first day on the job. So far, Cisco claims a 95% success rate (up from 75%) in getting laptops to new hires. Currently, the company gets around 800,000 or more applicants per year, and hires around 14,000 employees annually. 

Dive Insight:

It's one thing to get candidates to fill out applications; it's another to keep them interested and engaged throughout the hiring journey until they are (potentially) offered a job. Cisco's system appears to solve many of those challenges by harnessing technology to proactively manage its candidate pipeline.

Making the hiring process more personal can be challenging for companies, but Cisco's platform addresses this by providing a guided resource for each candidate. This could be the next evolution of applicant tracking systems if Cisco's claims can be replicated by other employers.

Cisco's approach is also a nice case of increased recruitment automation. Recruiters must think like candidates, who are growing more impatient and need frequent feedback. Providing continual feedback to every candidate throughout the full hiring process is incredibly time-consuming, particularly for large employers. The other benefit of Cisco's new approach is the tremendous amount of data gathered from interactions with candidates. The wealth of knowledge employers could access about who applies for jobs, the experience they have with company hiring practices, how that tracks with hiring rates and other employment information could provide critical insight for employers.