Adevinta's Recruitment Challenge

Prior to working with Starred Iker and the Adevinta team ran into the following recruitment challenges:

Consistently looking to improve and strive for better results

It is in Adevinta’s DNA to continuously improve and strive to become better, and this is no different when it comes to Candidate Experience. Iker wanted to ensure that their values were being lived through their recruitment process too, from beginning to end.

“Candidate Experience doesn’t last just until we hire them, it lasts until someone leaves the company” –Iker Hernaez Canales

‍But they needed to first gather the data at scale to understand if this was the case. Manually, this would take the team at Adevinta hours each week. They needed a solution that allowed them to measure and analyze the experience of thousands of candidates. 

“We had healthy metrics - but it was a matter of understanding where we could improve” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Candidates are customers

Adevinta owns multiple B2C brands, and as such, every candidate could also be a customer. Iker and the team therefore wanted to provide a good Candidate Experience at each stage, and clearly identify the risk areas by collecting and measuring the feedback from candidates.

“For us, when we talk to a candidate, they are also a potential customer. Each time that we talk to somebody, if we don’t treat them well or with respect, we might be damaging our brands.” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Needed a solution to automate the collection, measurement, and analysis of Candidate Experience data

When seeking a solution, it was important to the team at Adevinta that it encompassed everything. As a company that loves to innovate, they wanted to find a solution that allowed them to experiment, with the flexibility to adapt and iterate as they pleased.

In addition, they required a solution that was automated and removed the manual element of collecting feedback. In the past, Candidate Experience data collection could be a bit chaotic due to the extent to which Adevinta scaled, doing so across many different countries. 

As a big organization, integrations can sometimes be long-winded and time consuming. Adevinta wanted to avoid this, seeking a solution with a simple ATS integration with SmartRecruiters.

Needed a centralized solution that could measure locally

Adevinta scaled to become a European market leader. They experienced high levels of success through their well-known and well-respected local brands. As a result, Adevinta needed a solution where they could organize centrally but that is tailored to each brand locally. The solution needed to allow them to operate in a range of languages, with the look and feel of the different brands so candidates would receive a survey in their language in the branding of the brand they applied for.

Solution and Results

After implementation of Starred, Adevinta experienced the following improvements and effects:

Insights: Improved processes and solutions

One key advantage and value of Starred for Adevinta is how it helped to build out new processes to consistently improve processes internally. 

Adevinta continue to achieve above the benchmark with their NPS from candidates by comparing themselves to the Starred benchmark, but they are always seeking to do more for their candidates. 

“We experiment a lot, we try new things. We did an assessment around all the tools that can do the feedback element, but we realized Starred could bring the most flexibility for us.” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Some of the new processes in place to improve the hiring process further are:

1. Knowledge sharing ahead of the interview; each candidate is provided with a book about Adevinta, the company, how the interview process works and other useful information 
2. A dedicated Candidate Experience lead; this role helps to ensure that the candidate remains at the heart of the entire process 
3. Reduction in interviews: the data showed that 3 was the optimal amount of interviews for candidates 

Adevinta continues to uncover insights from their candidates, and subsequently follow-up with positive changes that bring impact. 

Data visualization; providing a clear understanding of data

“Starred brings to the table an area that could be invisible.” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Adevinta has been able to have a single-source of truth with Starred, allowing them to have one place to look and see feedback from candidates at scale. Starred allows Iker and the team to log-on, and immediately identify whether there are positive or negative trends occurring based on company entity, location, department and other filters. 

One of the many insights that Iker uncovered was that when measuring Diversity and Inclusion, they found that they were performing better than expected amongst their candidates. 

Implementation: A simple ATS integration

By working with Starred, the Adevinta team got their wish for a simple integration. Adevinta, an Enterprise company, wanted good support and consultancy from their Candidate Experience partner, which was provided throughout the process.

“Every step of the way with Starred I was happy because there was always somebody to assess any problems. We had great customer support.” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Starred’s easy integration with SmartRecruiters allowed Adevinta to easily get up and running with the product, and throughout the process our Customer Success team were on hand to help with any questions. 

“We felt like they (Customer Success) were part of the team, that they wanted to achieve the same goal. You don’t get that type of service usually”–Iker Hernaez Canales

Internal: Accountability and Praise

By measuring Candidate Experience, the team at Adevinta have been able to identify who is going above and beyond to provide an exceptional experience. As such, they have come up with some great initiatives to celebrate their team internally when it comes to Candidate Experience:

• Quarterly meetings: retrospectively look at how people are doing, assess the numbers in a positive way and see if there are any initiatives that can be scaled to the wider team
• Positive reinforcement: Positive messages of praise for recruiters to share how well they are doing with their candidates
• Christmas Celebrations: Sharing Christmas letters with recruiters with all the positive comments written about them on Starred 

They have even bigger plans for the future, to take this across the business through to hiring managers as well as the overall wider business.

A localized solution: Multiple companies, locations and languages

Adevinta are able to send multiple surveys in a range of countries and languages, across all of their brands. During the process and onboarding, they have been able to:

1. Create a range of branded surveys for each individual company 
2. Provide each company with the tools to survey in their native language

“For us it’s key to have a global perspective so we can drive things. It’s about setting it up but letting local companies run as they wish.” –Iker Hernaez Canales

Are you also experiencing these recruitment challenges? Starred helps enterprises collect automated Candidate Experience feedback throughout the entire processes.