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Case Study: Improving Recruitment Capacity at Verdia

The document describes the challenges Verdia, a fast-growing data warehousing software company, faces with recruitment. As the company grew rapidly, recruitment could not keep up. A new Head of HR, Johnnie Runner, was hired to professionalize HR and address recruitment issues. The CEO, Ted Baker, instructed Runner to develop metrics to optimize recruitment, track costs, and decrease time to hire. Currently, recruitment lacks metrics and candidates experience long waits. Managers and recruiters blame each other for delays. Runner must implement a data-driven approach and metrics to improve recruitment.

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Rajarshi Chattopadhyay
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96 views

Case Study: Improving Recruitment Capacity at Verdia

The document describes the challenges Verdia, a fast-growing data warehousing software company, faces with recruitment. As the company grew rapidly, recruitment could not keep up. A new Head of HR, Johnnie Runner, was hired to professionalize HR and address recruitment issues. The CEO, Ted Baker, instructed Runner to develop metrics to optimize recruitment, track costs, and decrease time to hire. Currently, recruitment lacks metrics and candidates experience long waits. Managers and recruiters blame each other for delays. Runner must implement a data-driven approach and metrics to improve recruitment.

Uploaded by

Rajarshi Chattopadhyay
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Case study: Improving Recruitment Capacity at Verdia

Verdia is a fast-growing scale-up company with around 400 employees. Founded only six years ago,
Verdia has experienced an incredible growth. In fact, last year the company had to hire more people
than they employed at the start of the year!

Verdia sells and implements data-warehousing software for mid- and large sized companies. It has built
a great track record for considerably speeding up data aggregation projects.

Its fast-growth brought along a number of challenges. The recruitment pipeline is clogged with new job
openings and recruitment is failing to keep up. In addition, Verdia´s latest investors is a large venture
capitalist (VC). This VC has bought out a number of existing investors and now has the largest
stakeholder in Verdia. The VC is not involved in operations but has two seats in the supervisory board.
The VC pushes the company to professionalize its operations. According to its philosophy, a mature and
professional HR function is one of the key requirements for successful growth.

To solve the hiring challenges and to professionalize HR, CEO Ted Baker appointed Johnnie Runner as
new Head of HR. Until now, operations in HR have been managed mostly by the personal assistant of
the CEO. The HR team consists of her, and two dedicated recruiters. Runner has been brought in by the
board of directors to professionalize HR. Making HR professional and data-driven are key focus points.
Runner will report to the CEO, who gave him a very clear directive: Runner’s first area of improvement
should be recruitment, as this is the company’s priority and bottleneck.

Baker's instructions to Runner are very specific:

 Develop the right HR recruitment metrics to optimize recruitment


 Keep track of recruitment cost
 Decrease recruitment time in order to hire more candidates faster

These instructions are a combination between solving the urgent recruitment pipeline problems and
maintaining the positive image of the company, while also striving for top performance.

The state of recruitment at Verdia

As HR until now has mostly focused on recruitment, this area is well-developed. Recruiters use an
Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to keep track of applicants and candidates. Because of some recent
good publicity, there have been quite some applications for various jobs and the recruiters are
struggling to sift through the different applicants fast enough.

One of the recruiters has developed the habit randomly taking half of CVs from applicant pile and
throwing them in the trash, declaring: “these ones are unlucky. And we don’t like unlucky people, do
we?” This usually results in roaring laughter in the office.

There are a number of problems in the recruitment process. Candidates complain that they have to wait
for a very long time to hear back from the company – if they hear back at all – and often have already
accepted a different job when Verdia extends their offer for hire.
Line managers are unhappy with this long time to fill vacancies. The recruiters, however, mostly blame the managers. It
takes a long time to get financial approval for new job opening and, according to the recruitment team, managers are very
slow to approve job descriptions and schedule interviews with candidates. The managers flat-out don’t agree with this
assessment and blame recruitment for being to slow in the hiring process and missing out on the top candidates. According
to one of the managers: “no wonder we’re busy if we can’t get the good people to do the work for us!”

Another reason for these problems is the amount of work. With the growth trajectory of Verdia, this will remain a problem
for the (growing number of) recruiters.

In terms of data and measurement, the recruitment team has never (pro-)actively used or tracked metrics before.
However, in the last few years, recruiters have actively used an ATS that keeps track of the most relevant recruitment
information. It records the requisition date for new vacancies, the number of applicants, number of interviews, offer
acceptance date, and start date. The system syncs with the recruiter’s calendar so the quality of data is assumed to be
quite good. Besides a brief reply to the occasional email complaint, HR doesn’t measure how candidates experience the
recruitment process.

Assignment

You are Johnnie Runner and you have a clear job: fixing the companies hiring problems by implementing data-driven HR.
Baker is very hands-on and thinks that good HRM is one of the most important challenges of the organization today. He
asks Johnnie to get up to speed and come back with a tangible plan to implement metrics in the organization.

Question 1: Purely based on Ted Baker’s strategic goals, which recruitment metrics should this company focus on? List no
more than five and explain briefly how you would calculate them. Use one of the frameworks to describe the problem and
specifying the metrics. (10 marks)

Question 2: Do you agree with Baker’s priorities – and are there any missing priorities in your opinion? Write a brief
recommendation for Baker and explain which priorities are missing. Use the same framework as used in question 1 to
show interventions. (10 marks)

Based on their initial conversation and on your input, Runner brought up two other priorities with a more long-term
focus. Baker appeared happy with these suggestions and agreed to add these two points to the role’s main
responsibility:

 Track the experience of candidates


 Create a data-driven recruitment strategy to sustain more durable, long-term growth

Question 3: Based on these strategic goals, which recruitment KPIs would you add to the dashboard and how would you
implement them? You don’t have to make the dashboard just mention what you would like to see on the dashboard, and
also who do you think will be responsible for those metrics. (5 marks)

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