TM - April 2008 - (Page 54) application by Ian Alexander and Stephanie J. Anderson Osram Sylvania Shines New Light on Recruiting With Automation For more than 100 years, Sylvania has provided lighting solutions in homes, businesses, automobiles and a broad range of specialty applications. As the North American operation of the international lighting company, OSRAM GmbH, Osram Sylvania employs 11,000 people in more than 26 locations. Manufacturing organizations succeed or fail by the effectiveness of their processes, so when the lighting company identified its recruiting process was costing them unnecessary time and money, it launched an internal study to fully define the issues and ensure it took the right steps to improve. Osram Sylvania was like many other companies in that it gathered e-mail resumes from its Web site and various job boards, then cut, pasted and forwarded them to hiring managers. “Our task force found that we were spending six to 10 hours per recruiter per week on just cutting, pasting and forwarding,” said Maureen Crawford Hentz, Osram Sylvania manager of talent acquisition. Further, the company did not have a standard process across its 26 remote locations throughout North America. As a government contractor, the organization is subject to Office of Federal Contract and Compliance Program’s Internet Applicant guidelines that are nearly impossible to meet without some form of technology. It was clear that a talent acquisition system would need to be put in place. The task was to streamline processes and provide a common structure for all 26 company locations and incorporate external staffing vendors to effectively source and hire great employees. The System “We spent 13 months analyzing our processes and sourcing a talent acquisition system vendor,” said Crawford Hentz. The Osram Sylvania task force looked at every toptier applicant tracking and talent acquisition sys- tem vendor on the market and narrowed it down to six finalists. Crawford Hentz said price was initially a primary driver in the selection of a system, but that Osram Sylvania learned price is not the best indicator of value. Ultimately, the team put price aside and re-evaluated the solutions from a money-is-no-object perspective; its selection remained unchanged. After going through the selection and implementation process, Crawford Hentz said she would advise other professionals with similar decisions to make that, “Above all the detailed requirements, companies need to look at the newness of the vendors’ technology and the robustness of their configuration capabilities.” Beyond price and flexibility, Osram Sylvania was highly interested in implementing OFCCP compliance tracking and its integrated hourly and professional recruiting features. “Having our hourly and professional recruiting systems integrated into one application was a big factor,” said Crawford Hentz. “I was surprised at how many of the vendors we looked at could not provide an integrated hourly and professional hiring solution.” Implementation Working with a SonicRecruit account manager, the system was tailored to meet Osram Sylvania’s specific needs and rolled out to support single sign-on access for 40 HR generalists, as well as 3,200 hiring managers. The implementation featured a PeopleSoft integration that allows for the status management of Osram Sylvania’s 3,200 hiring managers using PeopleSoft as the 54 April 2008 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com
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